Rating: 
Summary: A Miscategorized Memoir
Review: This memoir of one writer's experience teaching in Queens, NY is not, as the book is marketed, about education. Instead, it is about a new teacher's experience within the New York City education system, and about her students and fellow teachers. As that, it works. With wit and candor, the memoir details the writer's encounters with a system on the verge of spiraling out of control.
Rating:
Summary: Teaching: Amateurs Need Not Apply!
Review: While waiting for her "big break" into the literary world as a poet, author Elizabeth Gold took a position as a high school teacher in one of New York City's Magnet High Schools. Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity is a journal of Ms. Gold's experience as an urban schoolteacher and some of her own personal reflections on the experience.Sadly, this is not a happy story of children eager to learn, or of a woman particularly prepared to teach, or one who was especially passionate about young people's education. Elizabeth Gold is a talented prose writer and she tells her story of her experience attempting to be a teacher at New York City's School of the New Millennium with skill and a good deal of humor. It's here my compliments to Ms. Gold have to stop. Though I admit that the author provided some comic relief throughout this sad tale, most of it was at the object of the kids at this school and I guess that's where I draw the line in being too willing to find Brief Intervals much more than tragic and pathetic. Elizabeth Gold should be the poster girl for the failure of the grand experiment New York City and a number other areas have lately entertained that too easily dismisses the importance of teacher education and proceeds to license individuals who have a college degree and a clean criminal background check, to serve as teachers. Elizabeth Gold took advantage of an opportunity that was available to her when she needed a job. It wasn't her fault that she was hired. By the alternate standards being utilized, she was met the requirements. Urban high schools are challenging places. New York City's schools are among the toughest. New York has more than an acceptable number of failures and that needs to change! Yet, let's give credit where credit is due! New York City also has many successful schools; places where kids feel safe; where they are held to high expectations of academic achievement; where appropriate behavior and pride in scholastic pursuit is evident throughout the hallways and in the classrooms. And, when one finds those schools - not always in the best neighborhoods; in fact, often enough in very challenged areas just like Jackson Heights in Queens -- one will find committed, well trained teachers who not only have completed a course of academic study, but who also have been formally trained to be teachers. In those same schools you find teachers who are passionate about their own love of learning; who like kids and believe in their potential; who are serious about what they do and, who believe that today's kids can be tomorrow's solid citizens and leaders. That's where success is found! It's in the training and it's in the commitment to kids and it's in the belief in the ability of kids to succeed and in the hard work of that will assure that success happens. Ask any successful person who had some of the greatest influence on their lives. Often enough they will tell you the story of a teacher who believed in them and made them work hard so that they could believe in themselves. In contrast, Elizabeth Gold takes took on many negative views of her charge right from the start. By the midpoint of the book (and she only lasts four months), she sounds like one of the most burned out and worst examples of teachers who gave up years ago and still come to school everyday just for the paycheck and the retirement benefits; kids be damned. Guess, what? Kids know who cares. Kids will respond in environments where they are treated respectfully and where a seriousness of purpose is made clear to them. Kids want and appreciate good discipline. And, they want to experience personal success! One of the most telling and maddening moments in this book for me was when the failed teacher - author, mockingly comments about the fact that no one should build up any false hope in the kids and that they should be told they have no futures and will be failures. Ms. Gold clearly will not be on the list of any of her former students' most influential life forces for sure! Thank God, Elizabeth Gold is not the norm in the teaching profession. While in the first line in her Chapter entitled Apologia, Gold states: "Look, I did try. To love the children. I mean." My response would be this: Sorry Elizabeth, you didn't try or care enough! You didn't work hard enough and you didn't believe in those kids. You weren't honest enough to admit your own fear and failure and to recognize the gravity of cheating those kids of four months of the opportunity for an education. If you did, you would have either succeeded or realized that you needed to resign. And while you eventually resigned, from my view, you stayed in that school masquerading to those kids as their teacher months beyond what was appropriate or humanly decent! While Gold makes a few further attempts at self-redemption in her Afterword, I still have to conclude it's Not Enough and it's far too late. Gold got a book contract. What did her former students get? High Recommended. This should be required reading for legislators, urban leaders, school leaders and anyone else who believes it is ok to withhold appropriate salaries that will attract and keep highly qualified teachers, or that teaching is an easy job with a great schedule. Perhaps Elizabeth Gold's story will convince them otherwise. Or, maybe they would consider giving her a special license to do their next medical surgery instead of continuing to believe that untrained teachers will breathe life into a system already marked by far too much failure. Daniel J. Maloney
Saint Paul, Minnesota USA
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