Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School : A Glimpse into the Heart of a Nation

Rating:
Summary: Now I know why it was a bargain book!
Review: As an educator, I am usually intrigued by books like this, as long as they are unbiased, which this book is not. I could tell in the author's foreword that I would probably not like the book, for she dismisses things like cutting class, smoking pot, etc. as kids' stuff and an expected rite of passage for all teenagers.

She says, "As I did, my sons cut classes and slept through classes and love and excelled in a few classes in high school, and acquired a small store of book knowledge, and got into some trouble, and caused their parents great anxiety . . . As I did, my sons left high school with a feeble grasp of history, math, and how to diagram a sentence, and a profound understanding of themselves and of society."

So her kids got a FEEBLE grasp of basic subjects and she's ok with that? Even worse, she has the attitude of: who cares if her sons' behavior created headaches for the teachers; they learned so much about themselves! It's ok to skip classes or sleep through them? And she's trying to solve the problems of today's education? (Start with yourself, lady.) I'm all for understanding one's self, but at the same time, one of the biggest problems that I see in today's schools is a lack of parental backing of what schools are trying to do. (If her son would have slept through one of my classes, he'd be booted out on his butt. I'm not a babysitter.)

I understand that analyzing race issues would be part of the book, I just didn't think it would take up so MUCH of the book. I had to endure countless analyzations of the race makeup of each class, as well as sickeningly stereotyped poor vs. rich scene setting. I could almost imagine the author sneering whenever she wrote about the kids from the hills. Obviously the author believes these families are happy and free of worry because they are affluent.

The author thinks private schools are evil and should be done away with. How about making SMALLER schools? I do not understand how the teachers at Berkeley work in such a chaotic working environment. No bells for the first two months of school? The size of the school is astonishing to me -- the idea of ID cards and security guards has to be intimidating. I guess I should be thankful that I went to a school where I wasn't just a name on an ID card; the teachers knew me and my family as well.

I also find it disappointing that the three students Ms. Maran chooses as the "representative three" are all students who support her underlying agenda. I got very tired of the constant issue of race being brought up, not only by her, but by the teachers. Enough already!

You want to change the state of education? Start with two things: the parents (the family in general) and the colleges of education. The families need to support education as something important rather than a babysitting service, and the teaching colleges have to actually teach us how to teach, rather than concentrating on feel-good discussions about race and gender equality. Stuff like that does NOT help us when we are standing in front of a classroom of kids.

I was also a bit horrified at the lax attitude of the teachers that the author profiled at Berkeley, allowing the kids to swear and play rap songs about anal sex. Is there no expectation as to appropriate behavior? Or is that too old fashioned these days as well?

Overall, this book annoyed me rather than giving me an insightful view of a large high school. The warm fuzzies were a bit too much for me.

Rating:
Summary: rings true to me
Review: Four years ago I began teaching college students after being in the world of research and graduate students for 15 years. I experienced culture shock; it seemed obvious to me that my students had not had the same high school experience that I had had. My sister listed to my mystified stories and gave me this book for my birthday. It was a big help.

Like these students I went to an urban high school with a significant minority population, largely African-American at the time (the mid 1970s). However, we did not have "tracking" in our school system. I am a white male from a middle class family and I did well in school. I was placed in class after class with students who (if, for example, it was an English class) could not read at their grade level. At the time I found this frustrating. Instead of actually reading Native Son, for example, we read a 'teleplay' of Native Son. Looking back on the experience, however, I have seen the wisdom of putting students of varying academic ability together; it developed my empathy for people with backgrounds that were different from my own.

Meredith Maran's book is at its best when she simply reports what is going on inside of Berkeley High School. When she gets out her soapbox and starts trying to address the larger societal issues that are influencing the events at BHS she quickly bogs down.

That none of the three students whom she profiles live in Berkeley is quite beside the point. I don't remember if a number is provided, but it seems that a significant percentages of BHS students come from other parts of the East Bay. I also do not believe that any of these students will be embarrassed in the future by the way they come off in this book. All of them make mistakes and there are discrepancies between what they profess to believe and what they actually do, but that is just the way people are when they are young. Some people never grow out of that, but I suspect that these three will. You finish the book believing, no matter what their academic abilities and regardless of their various mistakes, these are decent human beings.

What you might have a harder time believing is that they are better human beings because they went to Berkeley High School. Maran is quite merciless when exposing the failures, inconsistencies and wrongheadedness of the various teachers, teaching techniques, administrative policies and administrators. There is a glaring contrast between the AP and the Communication Arts and Sciences (CAS) classes. There are different students and there are different expectations. The shining beacon of integrity is Mr. McKnight, the African American studies teacher. He makes tough rules and enforces them calmly and completely while treating the students with the utmost respect. Maran spends little time describing his classroom, but it stands in stark contrast to the laissez-faire chaos of CAS and the stern sarcasm of Mr. Miller's AP African-American lit class.

Some have complained that the well-to-do white liberal parents do not come off very well in this book. This is true, but I'm afraid they deserve it to some extent. It seems unlikely that very many of them had a high school experience analogous to the one that they are idealistically putting their own children through. Their hearts are in the right place, but they have no personal experience with which to understand what is going on at the school, so they try to "help" the school by simply putting their ideals into action. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of this kind of empathy-free "help" has felt the resentment that rises up in you. It is likely being told by someone who has never smoked that you shouldn't have any problem quitting because it is so bad for you. Yeah, thanks.

I can take or leave Maran's five "solutions" for the problems that she has observed at BHS. They all seem like worthwhile places to start discussion of the issues. For instance, her first suggestion is to abolish private schools as a way of improving public schools. I personally feel that this is ridiculous, but I wouldn't mind defending why I thought so and I do think that it is constructive to put such a radical suggestion in print.

Rating:
Summary: Small inaccuracies made for a frustrating read
Review: I was a member of the graduating class of 2000, and I knew all three of the teens that Maran writes about, as well as most of the people she quoted. However, she gets so caught up in melodrama that she misses small things, like the fact that Mr. Skeels' name is Wyn, not Wayne. Also, she seems to invent lives for everyone on campus; the white kids are all rich and drive SUVs to school, everyone else is poor, etc. The park is filled with stoners, and no one is friends with anyone outside their "clique". Having gone to Berkeley public schools since kindergarten (and being one of the few white kids, according to her, who did), I am somewhat offended at the view she has taken of my life. I live in the flats, have never driven an SUV, and didn't slack off my senior year of high school, as apparently all my peers did. I give her props for good writing, but maybe she should have had students edit it first. Had she done that, it might have presented a more realistic picture, but as it is, this book comes off as the literary form of School Colors.