Teacher Book

Former Teacher Writes Book about What it's Really Like to Teach in Chicago

Second City Teachers is a news blog dedicated to investigating the crimes committed against teachers, especially from the ruling class that is hell bent on destroying public education in the name of privatization, Race to the Top standardized testing mania, closing public schools and opening up fraudulent charter schools that do no better, if not worse.

There are teachers who are also authors and they are writing intriguing books. We would like to highlight those books on this website. We highlighted Greg Michie who wrote the fantastic book Holler if You Hear Me about 20 years ago that detailed what it is like to teach middle school students armed with idealistic dreams to educate the working poor. My colleague Carol Etheridge wrote a wonderful fantasy book  called The Girl Who Howled at the Moon.

The next book we would like to highlight comes from my good friend Peter Nerad who worked as a high school teacher on the Northwest Side until he became a casualty like so many others who jumped into this noble profession to make a difference until the administration decided to ax his services based on a silly evaluation.

We highlighted Peter's story on this site several years ago when he was fired for trying to save a student's life, by grabbing the kid so he wouldn't run out into a busy street during a fire alarm drill. A teacher/ informer dutifully reported to the principal that Peter had aggressively handled the kid and substitute teachers have practically no rights. A substitute teacher fired - another feather in the cap for an education reform administrator looking to move up the ranks.

I found out that Peter wrote a book called Teaching the Invisibles about six years ago that really captures what it is like to teach in an inner city school. I have not read a book that really grasped our profession like Peter.

Peter Nerad knows how to write. He was an ad writer in his prior profession, and a playwright who wrote, produced, directed and starred in a fantastic play about two old Civil War veterans suffering from the effects of PTSD, a disorder than can effect teachers as well as soldiers who experienced traumatic events.

We decided that it would be best to provide our reading public free access to this book so that they can read and feel the day to day insanity, the joy and tribulations, the lessons that go well, while the student antics and their stories, all written from the teacher's perspective of what it is really like to teach today.

Teaching the Invisibles, available on Kindle on Amazon, is a fun, cynical, funny, heart-warming as well as eye-opening and oh my God, yes that is how we feel, well written tale of teaching in a Chicago public high school. The inside jacket reads:

"Teaching in an inner city school, or for that matter just walking around in one, is to suddenly find yourself at the Rape of Nanking. And even the wittiest of gallows humor won’t prevent your depression at the end of the day. 

"In 'Teaching the Invisibles,' a former ad man turned English teacher, loaded with happy stories and horror stories, catches on to the school reform ruse. A corporate scam that would make a conman wonder how he ever missed it. All it takes is another shitty charter school, a new and improved standardized test, or some other cure-all, and they've got a revenue stream flowing. (Funny how the suburban schools never need any competition or fixing.) And as our teacher gets the boot as a bad apple, he knows poverty kids won't learn a damn thing until their social problems get fixed. And the price tag for that will make Wall Street's bailout look like lunch money."

I thought these two reviews well summed up the book:

Al wrote: 

This was a breezy memoir. The writer goes off on tangents that are interesting. This looks like a free book, with lots of editing errors (and some homonymic spelling errors too). I can't tell if he is bitter that he lost his job after three years and ended up substitute teaching for some more. But his portrayals of students and teachers and staff are definitely zingers.

High school teacher wrote:

This book could have been written about my school hundreds of miles from Chicago! Seeker describes the ins and outs of the public school that is heartwarming yet sad. While there are hundreds of teachers who aren't doing their jobs, I believe there are more who are committed and dedicated like Seeker. There is hope for public education.

We begin with the Introduction which though written almost seven years ago, is as true today at it was then regarding the precarious state of our public education: 

Introduction

Or why bother reading this memoir and invective of what goes on in 

non-suburban schools

 

Hey, intros go in the beginning of the book, you freakin’…

Wow. I didn’t know you guys were so rule-bound.  Please be assured this intro placement is not a mistake. It’s a pedagogical device for what may be a more helpful reading method.

I’ve found that reading intros in fiction is best done after reading the book. You won’t know enough about the novel to know what the editor or commentator is talking about.

In nonfiction however, the intro contains important background information, as well as the author’s main argument and approach to the material. As to whether this rule contains an element of truth, The Buddha, when asked if he was teaching THE TRUTH, replied, “Try it out in your own life, if it works it’s true.” Then he said, “Jesus, do whatever you want, it’s not like I’m getting paid for this.”

 

 

Before beginning I had to decide if there was indeed a message that needed to be told.  After all, in the last several years education has been big time news. Even Hollywood has taken up the torch with movies like “Freedom Writers,” “Stand and Deliver,” and “Waiting for Superman”, the documentary on how charter school admission is run by lottery.

But notice that the messages of these films are about how to improve education. Now there are fewer and fewer sweet stories about a Mr. Chips, or a film like “To Sir with Love,” where a young engineer teaching temporarily decides he will stay and help improve the lives of lower-class Cockney kids. Or the classic, “Blackboard Jungle,” about how a high school teacher tackles gang members head on and saves the day. The difference with these fifty-year-old stories is that while the teachers in them are accomplishing great things, they’re not an indictment on the whole system.

Now, I’m not saying that a movie shouldn’t have a point of view. I’m pointing out how education, in fiction and the media, has gone from teachers as heroes and inspired guiding lights, to “Man, that one teacher is good. If we could get rid of all the shitty ones we wouldn’t have an education problem.” Well, that would take some work seeing how there are 7.2 million teachers in the country. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)  

As far as hard news goes, education has a daily section in the New York Times and is often front page news in New York, Chicago and L.A.  Like when Chicago Mayor Daley in Chicago announced he wasn’t seeking another term and his Superintendent of Schools quit in the middle of the year. The hell with finishing his new initiatives and consistency for the teachers and students. Business is business. Something education has turned into and won’t be going back from for a long time.

When New York’s Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, appointed his new board superintendent, she was a high-powered publishing executive, no education experience whatsoever. She was visiting an Hispanic school district in need of more schools for their rising student population. At the parent meeting–and I’m not making this up–she asked, “Haven’t you people ever heard of birth control?” She lasted six months.

Recently in Newsweek, they assessed the results of the sheer billions pumped into public schools by Gates and the other philanthropists only to find out that scores inched up a percentage point, exactly the outcome after the last instructional reforms of the 60s and 70s. In fairness though, there are of course initiatives and new curriculums that work, but they’re usually from education professors that have spent years in research. Not everyone is a teacher, we just think we are.

Even more disturbing, when the US and China had an educational exchange, the Chinese laughed and pointed out that the rote, fill-and-drill and test we’re doing is exactly what they’re leaving, because that method leads to a lack of original and creative thinking, a mental ball and chain for their economic progress, and they know it.

Every generation seems to have its “educational crisis.” This new one seems to be, “Gee, what’s going to happen with a thirty percent national high school dropout rate in years to come?”  Maybe this is why we have charter schools and standardized tests and formatted course plans. And why Corporate America is infiltrating the schools with profit making schemes.* Lots of dough to be made and all guaranteed by public funding.

I also get the feeling it’s just another way we like to solve things on the cheap. If we had to address the root cause, that one in five children is being raised in the kind of chaotic poverty that prevents learning, it would be a bill we’re not willing to pay. 

*One company peddling standardized tests got busted for bribing education district purchasing agents with trips for seminars to London and Switzerland. The school buyers insisted the excursions were necessary, useful, and in no way influenced their procurement decisions. Guess the testing company was only trying to help the schools out.

State legislatures have been lobbied for, and have enacted, new on-line schooling by private companies. And the GED test has recently gone from a government program that’s been around for years to one that is now partially privatized. A matter of time, one would think, until it’s all privatized.

Wow, one in five kids in poverty is trying to learn in school every day? Sounds like an Orwellian dystopia

Pretty much. There isn’t an education problem in America, there’s an educating-the-poor problem in America. That’s what this book is about. Digging into what the real problems are and what the state and federal governments should be trying to fix. 

You’re about to get an insider’s perspective, and perhaps therefore a wider perspective, on why one in three high school students drop out. And when you’re one of the 20% of poor children, the problems don’t have to be very big. An ear ache, a mere ear ache, can keep a child out of school for over a week because his or her family can’t afford a doctor or antibiotics.

But large numbers of kids missing a week out of class because of an ear ache is a dry fact. This book’s aim is to fill in the emotional reality behind those facts. It’s a tale of what it’s like to teach kids that go to schools with metal detectors that catch small razor blades hidden away for self-protection hidden in backpacks, with security guards on every floor, and two assigned policemen with their own office in the buildings. Schools that need six squad cars to prevent violence when the students are let out. That have racial and gang fights that force teachers and students to go on lockdown, and of course have nowhere near enough learning going on. All being run by teaching staffs, which instead of being supported and assisted, are instead antagonistically supervised and threatened with replacement.

They’re the schools attended by the kids we never see. The Invisibles. And this is their chance to be heard.

In a way it’s a little unbelievable we don’t know more about their lives. After all, most of us live next to a large city. And yet we don’t. And when you do, I suspect you’ll react the same way I did when I first began teaching: “I had no idea this was going on.”