Well, I had a very productive week of reading. Not only did I finish Among Schoolchildren, but I breezed through a short novel by John Grisham, Bleachers as well.
Among Schoolchildren had a satisfying ending, in that Mrs. Zajac's students survived the school year mostly better off than when they started. Along the way a few of her students left school because their parents moved for one reason or another. She was particularly unhappy about the departure of her favorite student, Judith, who went back to Puerto Rico. Judith was the smartest pupil in Chris's class and the one she had come to rely on for a kind of moral support when the other students disappointed her.
Clarence, her most disruptive student, also left, but it was because he was finally placed in a special class where he was getting the help he needed. He stopped in to see her at the end of the year to say hello and she seemed satisfied that she did the right thing by getting him reassigned.
For most of the book, I was struck by how different teaching was back then. Teachers seemed to have fewer requirements to include this or that topic in their lessons, and they seemed to be freer to create their own approaches to learning, and even to hug and otherwise express affection for their students. Plus there was only one set of standardized tests per year, and Chris didn't seem to spend all her time getting her students ready for them.
The kids seemed different too--no distracting cell phones and i-pods to screen out the teacher's voice. They had enough to distract them from their studies as it was with all the social drama going on in most of their young lives.
Of course, this was only one man's take on one teacher's class, so it contains only those things Tracy Kidder chose to reveal to us about this woman and her world. But as with any history, we have no choice but to trust what we are getting as relatively truthful, as long as we remember that it's only one side of the story. It would be interesting to talk now with some of the people in this story, to see if they saw things the way Tracy Kidder did back then.
I enjoyed reading this book, and I would definitely recommend it for the insight it gives into the day-to-day work of teaching.
John Grisham's book, Bleachers, is about high school football and its effect on the people who play it, coach it, and watch it. The story seems to be set in Texas, or some other state that takes high school football very seriously. The plot centers on Neely Crenshaw, a former high school quarterback who has come back to his hometown (for the first time in 15 years) to attend the funeral of his coach, with whom he had a love-hate relationship. It's a typical "reunion" plot--think The Big Chill only with football players.
It was interesting, but not as suspenseful as I've come to expect from a John Grisham novel. And it seemed to be lacking closure, somehow. I had the impression that the ending was rushed, like maybe he'd promised it for a certain date and was overdue to his publisher. I enjoyed it, though. It was a fast read, light and easy to understand.
My next book will be another that I've put off reading for quite some time: And Their Children After Them : The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South, by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, who were both reporters for The Sacramento Bee. This book is a work of history, but also sociology. Published in 1990, it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction that year.
The book's authors focus on the people whose lives were chronicled in 1936 by James Agee and Walker Evans, two photographers who were commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to tell the story of the Depression's effect on rural life in the South. The photoessay they produced was the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Maharidge and Williamson, in And Their Children After Them, go back to the families that Agee and Evans visited and find out what happened to the people and their way of life.
I think it's going to be a very interesting book. I've already started reading it and it seems very well written, as I would expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
I'll let you know how it goes in my next post!
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