I am pleased to announce the most recent book, Adventures in the Teaching Trade, will be available in the next few weeks. We’ve just received the proof copies, which turned out better than we hoped. With luck, readers will find a memoir of a teacher afflicted with a sense of humor and life-long resistance to authority entertaining.
Every book project is unique. I wrote The Farming Game in a month. Of course, I was a bit shorter in the tooth in those days. I began work on Adventures in the Teaching Trade once the 11-year-long Sand Hills book project was completed and launched. I found relating school stories about doofy administrators and unique, funny students to be not only self-entertaining but a smooth, stress-free process. Four months later, the manuscript was almost ready to wrap. Then COVID hit the fan. Although our stubborn rural area resisted panic, public schools locked out students. Online instruction proved clunky and difficult to access. Too many teachers did not participate, leaving students with blank screens or ancient cartoon videos until the next fall.
Meanwhile, public school lockouts in distant geographies stretched and stretched, some lasting two entire school years, long after schools in China and Europe and most of the United States had fully reopened. Pediatricians and child psychologists began identifying the malign effects of lockouts not only on student learning but on student mental health. Parents who questioned school lockouts found public schools to be unresponsive. Parents who monitored their students’ online classes found traditional academic subjects and standards had too often been replaced by racist, misogynistic, anti-meritocratic propaganda. Parents who voiced concerns to school administrators and school boards found themselves labeled as domestic terrorists, threatened with loss of employment, and, in some cases, custody of their children.
What in blazes was going on? When and why did parents become the enemy? Why were test scores in math and reading plunging, then plunging further? After all, the last time I graced a classroom, most students were reading and doing math at grade level or above. What had changed? Who was responsible? Had teachers somehow lost the ability to teach students to read? To do math? Down the rabbit hole I went. Four years later, I was still digging—and not without results. Plenty of parents and curious reporters examined the unprecedented phenomenon of schools deliberately producing ignorant students and reported their findings. I soaked up their work and may have achieved a general understanding of the strange goings on in American public education. However, after four years of research, I was left with gobs of information, but with nothing easily wedged into a memoir of a far different era. I concluded the entire COVID/subversion of public education topic deserved a dedicated volume or multi-volume treatment. Scores of talented reporters and authors are already on the case.
Although the viruses causing the current public school discombobulation were active in the late 1960s when I began my teaching career (as noted in the book), they did not prevent students from acquiring language and math skills or learning about history or government or how to dissect a clam. Teachers and students and parents generally agreed on what public schools were supposed to be teaching, as had been the case for the previous 200 years. In retrospect, students and parents and teachers expected to agree on what public schools were supposed to be teaching for the next 200 years. But that was before 21st-century bad guys armed with billions in progressive foundation and taxpayer dollars and questionable motives set about turning public education on its head.
Adventures in the Teaching Trade describes an era in public education when schools had not reached perfection, but managed to teach useful things without assaulting their students with mean-spirited propaganda. An era that appears golden in the rearview mirror.
