900 shows a year: A look at teaching from a teacher's side of the desk

by Stuart B. Palonsky

Book Overview

Included are selections on: Welcome to Oldham High. First Day, First Impressions. The Grind. Faculty and Staff. Teachers and Students. Power, Politics, and Athletics. Summary and Conclusions.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039434118X
• ISBN13: 9780394341187
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.

Customer Reviews

When you don't get tenure ...

Though this book is now out of print, I'm glad it's still available through various vendors. Though it was first published twenty-six years ago, it still provides a vivid description of what it is to be a high school teacher in a predominately upper middle class school. Oddly, the author took the teaching job that provided the material for the book after being denied tenure as a university faculty member. A happy misfortune, really, since it led him to write a first-rate ethnography that was critically appreciated, sold well, and provided many of us and our students with a much-need, first-hand, vividly detailed look inside a contemporary classroom and the school that contains it. I thought it especially useful that the author made unmistakably clear just how difficult it is to come up with material for class after class after class. His account very effectively gives the lie to the misguided notion that teachers have curricula inside their heads, with coherntly organized material to be presented in a pre-determined sequence, without great gaps to be filled in a catch-as-catch-can fashion. Instead, in high school social studies classes, it seems likely that the curriculum is invented as you go along, meaning that one of the teacher's most valuable tools is a copying machine, permitting the distribution of new-found material to fill the time that teachers are supposed to be purposefully engaged in well-informed instruction. The book also makes clear that teachers' stamina is frequently tested. Though this is not a theme that is explicitly developed in 900 Shows a Year, a full day of teaching, starting early in the morning, with little or no preparation time, is often followed by after-school coaching duties and evening meetings with parents. For those of us who need eight hours sleep every night, high school teaching is definitely a poor choice of professions. After reading 900 Shows a Year, the question foremost in my mind was "how do they stay motivated." The pay is not great, students are largely indifferent, the pace is hectic, the work day is never really over, and real accomplishments are hard to measure. Furthermore, every social ill imaginable is blamed on inadequate schooling, calling into question teachers' competence. If ever there was an occupation sure to give rise to burn out, this is it. This is a good book. It merits a revision now that No Child Left Behind and Obama's proposed intensification of that test-centered nonsense had made things even tougher for teachers.