Rating: 
Summary: Great cover, and a great book.
Review: "Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity" caught my eye when I walked into a bookstore and saw its bright yellow cover with an old-fashioned schoolgirl-turned-sideways, almost staring out at me. And then I read the title. My son is a student in one of New York's many "magnet schools" that have long and fancy names, names that are ultimately meaningless. When I read the dust jacket and discovered that it's a first-person account of one particular teacher's experience in such a school, I sat down at a table and began reading it. I'm not usually one to buy hardcovers, but I made an exception, this time. It became my subway reading, after I took my son to school, and then when coming home in the evening from work. I smiled to myself with every page, tickled at the author's excellent humor, directed more at herself and at her reactions to her situation of being a soul lost in the chaos of an urban middle school, than at any of the students placed in her charge. Even so, I felt close to her and to her students, and even to some of the author's fellow teachers. It's not mean-spirited, but it does show some bitterness and longing for something much, much better. The author's preface is the only weakness of the book, at least from my perspective. It reads awkwardly and seems rather forced, as if her editor might have suggested too strongly that one was needed, and it's really something best skimmed over or ignored, altogether. This book is not a scholarly study, nor does Gold present it as one. Instead, it's a personal narrative of a woman who had taught thousands of adult students in urban community colleges, but had her socks knocked off by the very different milieu of hormone-rich adolescents who have no choice but to be in school from morning until mid-afternoon. The author does not wear kid gloves in talking about herself, nor does she wear them in talking about her students, other teachers, or the school's hapless principal. "Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive School" is not going to inspire anyone to teach in New York City's public schools, but that's clearly not why it was written, nor why it was published. It does not offer solutions, because that's doubtlessly not its reason for being, either. But if you want a good, heartfelt story of a smart human being, describing their experience of feeling like a duck out of water, very much like a reader might encounter in the bittersweet (sometimes just plain bitter) stories of David Sedaris, this book is for you. I've noticed that another online bookseller categorizes "Brief Intervals" as an education title, and that's unfortunate because doing so might lead to expectations that aren't valid. Lest it disappoint anyone looking for a scholarly tome on the problems of public education, let me forewarn potential readers that Gold's book is good for a look into her own soul, but not into databases or cited sources.
Rating:
Summary: a great variation on a "being there" book
Review: "Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity" provides a few hours of sweet and funny insight into the life of someone at loose ends while trying carry out a very tough job. The author doesn't pretend to be a hero or a know-it-all. She admits to failing in her gig as a long-term substitute teacher to a few dozen difficult teenagers at a school that labels itself as "progressive." Gold is wizardly in her use of words, offering extended and compelling accounts of what's going on inside her head--at school, at home, and even on the subway. She writes not only as a teacher, but also as a woman, as an American struggling to make a living in the early 21st century, and as an intellectual artist who's striving to find a comfortable, rewarding place for herself in this world. I urge you to pick up this book and read it, not for answers but for entertainment and as a window into the life of one particular human being, at a particular place in time in America.
Rating:
Summary: wickedly funny, fiercely true
Review: A friend of mine gave me this book, knowing that I was always on the look out for something really smart,really funny,and most of all, really well-written. "You'll love this," she said, pressing it into my eager little hands, and she was right. Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity is the story of the author's four-month stint teaching English at a "progressive" New York City high school, but before you read another word, you should know this is neither a corny idealistic-teacher-whips-kids-into-noble-shape book or a sociological expose about what's-wrong-with-schools-today. Instead, Brief Intervals is a black comedy about the difference between idealism and reality and life inside an institution---in this case, an institution that should feel both weird and recognizable to us all---high school. In case you've ever forgotten what it feels like to be really young---say fourteen---this book will remind you.Gold, a poet, has a brilliant ear and brilliant eye, and almost nothing escapes her. Her portraits of the high school bully, the popular kids, the class clown and the class victim, are unforgettable. So are the sympathetic portrayals of the teachers, a multi-cultural bunch who really are trying their best. But it is Gold herself, with her failures, her doubts, her longings, and her flashbacks to her own schooldays, that makes this book a provocative and original delight.
Rating: 
Summary: Ruins the field
Review: Despite No Child Left Behind guidelines that recognize only quantitative research, the fact that a major publisher picks up a book like "brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity" demonstrates the public's need to understand life inside progressive schools. Unfortunately for those of us interested in qualitative research, Ms. Gold is guilty of ruining the field--making it even harder for us to practice such valuable research tools as narrative inquiry, autobiographical narrative and autoethnography. Ms. Gold has violated the core principles that distinguish autobiographical research from solipsism--ethical practice and rigorous methodology. Ms. Gold never bothered to obtain informed consent to study her participants, a practice that violates the most basic tenet of ethical research practices. The need for informed consent is stressed to every graduate student who takes a qualitative research course. Participating in qualitative research demands the same degree of informed consent as participation in medical research. Benefits as well as real risks are involved to which participants have every right to know. In the field of qualitative research Ms. Gold is considered a "participant observer." She is conducting research in her backyard. This is a privileged perch and privilege comes with responsibilities. A participant observer must be a good participant as well as a good observer. Otherwise the participant never truly enters into the field and thereby taints impressions that are crucial parts of the data. It seems that Ms. Gold emphasized the observer role and made lightly of being a participant. For example, Leon, the school's principal, spends a considerable amount of time tutoring her--even to the extent of selecting a novel for her students to read. Ms. Gold chooses to ignore his suggestions and continues her unsuccessful practices. It appears she spent exceedingly more time at home polishing her field notes than planning her lessons. Dishonest as a participant, how can she be unbiased as an observer? Since qualitative research accepts subjective impressions as important data, qualitative researchers have the responsibility of carefully checking their biases. Ms. Gold and her publishers decided to very thinly veil the identity of the site of her research and her participants. Was her goal from the onset one of publicly humiliating her participants? Is the book about her or the school? If it's about the school, why reveal her sexual fantasies about some of her students? If it's about her, why not leave the obviously dedicated and idealistic people to go on with their work in peace? Qualitative research demands "triangulation" in which a researcher's impressions is checked against other sources. This is absent in Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity. Absent from the book are hard data--graduation rates, college acceptance lists, test scores, school report cards, and comparisons with other schools. Also absent are interviews with participants. Their voices emerge only through Ms. Gold's memories. Compare Ms. Gold's piece to Samual Freedman's "Small Victories." Freedman gains insider perspective through obtaining consent, speaking to many people, and backing up his impressions with data--even taking a trip to rural China to understand the background of some students he is studying. Ms. Gold's work can perhaps be considered creative non-fiction but not worthwile research or journalism.
Rating:
Summary: Boring self-absorption
Review: Elizabeth Gold's book made me laugh so hard with intense recognition of my own experience on every page. I couldn't put it down for two days (very rare for me).
I was a similar overeducated idealistic substitute teacher, who in the middle of the year, was placed in charge of an urban Oakland CA eighth grade ESL classroom (the previous teacher had had a nervous breakdown in the middle of class and left abruptly, leaving her students wondering where she had gone). Ms. Gold's description of the difficulty of managing such a classroom with no classroom management skills, no consequences for the student misbehavior, no support from senior administration, insufficient books/materials for her students, no curriculum, etc, etc were painfully similar and accurate to my experience. The teacher I had replaced was a "Teach for America" teacher, the best and brightest of college grads who have been placed in urban schools with 6 weeks of teacher training.
Teaching in an urban school is one of the hardest jobs there is, and it takes professional, emotional, and material support to make it happen successfully. I've gone on to get my teaching credential and to realize how many more years it is going to take to become a master teacher. Elizabeth Gold is a brilliant writer and observer of urban education and its shortcomings and contradictions, and her insights of her four months teaching more than make up for her four months of inadequate "teaching" (which includes managing her classroom which she obviously couldn't manage at all).
Rating:
Summary: A tale so true for idealistic untrained teachers
Review: Elizabeth Gold's book made me laugh so hard with intense recognition of my own experience on every page. I couldn't put it down for two days (very rare for me).
I was a similar overeducated idealistic substitute teacher, who in the middle of the year, was placed in charge of an urban Oakland CA eighth grade ESL classroom (the previous teacher had had a nervous breakdown in the middle of class and left abruptly, leaving her students wondering where she had gone). Ms. Gold's description of the difficulty of managing such a classroom with no classroom management skills, no consequences for the student misbehavior, no support from senior administration, insufficient books/materials for her students, no curriculum, etc, etc were painfully similar and accurate to my experience. The teacher I had replaced was a "Teach for America" teacher, the best and brightest of college grads who have been placed in urban schools with 6 weeks of teacher training.
Teaching in an urban school is one of the hardest jobs there is, and it takes professional, emotional, and material support to make it happen successfully. I've gone on to get my teaching credential and to realize how many more years it is going to take to become a master teacher. Elizabeth Gold is a brilliant writer and observer of urban education and its shortcomings and contradictions, and her insights of her four months teaching more than make up for her four months of inadequate "teaching" (which includes managing her classroom which she obviously couldn't manage at all).
Rating:
Summary: Boring self-absorption
Review: I had to stop reading this book two-thirds of the way through, because I lost patience with the tedious self-absorption of the author. (And I almost never leave a book unfinished!) The dust cover bears plugs for the book that claim it makes you laugh "hard", and one of them compares the author to Nicolai Gogol and David Sedaris. These are wildly exaggerated, invalid comparisons that must have been written by buddies of the author. Gogol can still have people rolling on the floor after more than 100 years. Sedaris is similarly witty. Both of these authors achieve this because they are able to get outside their own heads and observe enough to provide us with vivid observation of life situations. Gold's characters are more or less one-dimensional -- despite the time she puts into describing them. It's not a lack of detail that's the problem, but the fact that Gold never gets outside her own head and personal emotional life enough to show us theirs. Her attempts to convey the probable interior lives of some of her students smack more of projection than of observation. This would be a very valuable book if it were truly meant to inform the reader about the school it claims to be about, but it's really just the author's own vanity piece. She uses the school and the students as props in her own interior drama. The book is very unlikely to tell anyone anything they didn't already know about city schools, progressive education or kids. The author doesn't even seem to try. When she spent about three useless, unenlightening, unentertaining pages trying to analyze why she'd always had the hots for firemen, I knew I was going to put the book down early. It never got any better.
Rating: 
Summary: A self-absorbed "Up the Down Staircase" spinoff
Review: I have a keen interest in learning more about the state of education in this country. However, this book was a great disappointment. The author cannot seem to decide whether she is rewriting "Up the Down Staircase" or writing a stream-of-consciousness novel. Perhaps this is because she is unable to do either very well. After getting a few pages into this book, I found myself skipping ahead to see if it got any better. On the contrary, the author became increasingly self-absorbed. There are no new or useful insights here into the state of public education.
Rating:
Summary: A Miscategorized Memoir
Review: I love a great memoir and I have been combing the shelves for one for months: devils wearing Prada, people climbing Everest, etc etc and I can say for sure they've got NOTHING on Elizabeth Gold. My hat is off to her, not only because she did what many of us underemployed New Yorkers have thought we SHOULD do, that is, teaching in the NYC public school system: she took the experience and wrote a HEARTBREAKING and HILARIOUS memoir about it. One of my favorite passages is when she's lost total control of the class (VERY early on) and she thinks she's seen it all, until 2 students are about to begin necking ARDENTLY, right before her very eyes, (page 43): "Please, please, I pray, don't let them kiss, I don't want to tell them to unglue those lips, and Tongues, Buster, Are Not For Sharing, but the other part of me is thinking, why not kiss? Who am I to interfere with young love, if that's what it is? Why don't I push a couple of desks together in the back and throw a sheet over them, light some mood candles (though they really don't need mood candles), toss over a pack of cigarettes for after, why don't I make myself useful?" I was doubled over laughing and when I wiped my eyes I thought "wait a minute: these are my fellow New Yorkers in these schools. These are supposed to be the Leaders of Tomorrow! Boy, are we in trouble". Gold leaves us forewarned: what's going on in the inner city schools is terrifying. It seems like the problem is far too complex for quick-fix solutions. These kids are angry (as Elizabeth hilariously testifies), and they have good reason to be. They have nothing to say but "I Hate Elizabeth" when she tries to teach them Romeo and Juliet, but ask them about Amadou Diallo and they have plenty of opinions. The book is funny, but it leaves you thinking about racism and inequities in education.
Rating: 
Summary: finally! a terrific memoir!
Review: I love a great memoir and I have been combing the shelves for one for months: devils wearing Prada, people climbing Everest, etc etc and I can say for sure they've got NOTHING on Elizabeth Gold. My hat is off to her, not only because she did what many of us underemployed New Yorkers have thought we SHOULD do, that is, teaching in the NYC public school system: she took the experience and wrote a HEARTBREAKING and HILARIOUS memoir about it. One of my favorite passages is when she's lost total control of the class (VERY early on) and she thinks she's seen it all, until 2 students are about to begin necking ARDENTLY, right before her very eyes, (page 43): "Please, please, I pray, don't let them kiss, I don't want to tell them to unglue those lips, and Tongues, Buster, Are Not For Sharing, but the other part of me is thinking, why not kiss? Who am I to interfere with young love, if that's what it is? Why don't I push a couple of desks together in the back and throw a sheet over them, light some mood candles (though they really don't need mood candles), toss over a pack of cigarettes for after, why don't I make myself useful?" I was doubled over laughing and when I wiped my eyes I thought "wait a minute: these are my fellow New Yorkers in these schools. These are supposed to be the Leaders of Tomorrow! Boy, are we in trouble". Gold leaves us forewarned: what's going on in the inner city schools is terrifying. It seems like the problem is far too complex for quick-fix solutions. These kids are angry (as Elizabeth hilariously testifies), and they have good reason to be. They have nothing to say but "I Hate Elizabeth" when she tries to teach them Romeo and Juliet, but ask them about Amadou Diallo and they have plenty of opinions. The book is funny, but it leaves you thinking about racism and inequities in education.
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