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Brendan Halpin's new memoir, LOSING MY FACULTIES, which details his work as a high school English teacher, will certainly ring a few (school) bells for any disillusioned and exhausted teacher. This label fits me to a tee, only needing a "former" added before the teacher part. Halpin's woes were mine and I found myself on more than one occasion nodding in commiseration.
Halpin begins his teaching career somewhat haphazardly, only deciding late in his college career that he wants to be a teacher; actually, he feels "called" to become a classroom teacher, hopefully in an urban setting. He becomes aware that he is "just one of those rare and probably defective people who really enjoy the company of teenagers." Throughout the book, this dedication is never in doubt. No matter how difficult his dealings with the educational bureaucracy become, he never loses faith in the goodness of kids.
And he does have some difficult dealings. His career begins at Newcastle High, a lower middle class school where veteran teachers usually beat the students out of the parking lot at the end of the day and the kids are all tracked into one of three levels. As is frequently the case with beginning teachers, Halpin is assigned mostly Level 3 kids, those on the lowest track. On the first day, one of his students notes, "So, I guess this is the retard class, huh?" Halpin struggles to move his students beyond that type of thinking, but is held up by his own inexperience and lack of collegial support.
Throughout his early career, Halpin is plagued by the need to establish some sort of authority. Hoping to achieve more of a "we're all in this together" mentality, he neglects much classroom management, which frequently leads to out-of-control kids. In one particularly vexing situation, his students repeatedly ring the "office call" button on their way out of the classroom. I want to shake him at this point and say, "Brendan, just go stand by the button when they're leaving the room!" His desire to be friendly with the students prevents him from accomplishing many academic goals.
The classroom management issues become less intense when Halpin moves on to Northton High School, although his dissatisfaction with his colleagues does not. While he comes more into his own as a teacher, he still hopes to make large scale changes in public education and finds his fellow teachers resistant, to say the least. "Most of the staff seemed to live just for the bitter joy of scorning anything new or any kind of meaningful talk about education at all." In a move I just cannot forgive him for, Halpin leaves Northton High School in the middle of the year to take a job at a small foundation, "Famous Athlete Youth Programs" funded in part by some unnamed and, at least in terms of the program, invisible pro athlete. Eager to get his feet wet in the city, Halpin works for a pittance for this truancy prevention program, one that is suspect from the start. Although he does manage to reach a few students, Halpin is once again caught in a web of incompetent administrators and overwhelming bureaucracy.
Hoping to find an urban program with dedicated colleagues and supportive administrators (silly, silly boy, I want to tell him) Halpin signs on with "Better Than You" High School, a charter school that aims to empower teachers, a novel idea in American education. Having earlier longed for a school where teachers spent hours engaged in philosophical discussions about education, Halpin is now dismayed to find himself in just such a situation. The endless discussions are mind numbing and "despite the fact that I like and respect most of my colleagues, the work with the grown-ups kind of sucks." Halpin comes to terms with his abilities and desires, only to run into problems when the school engages a new administrative team. In fact, they engage eight administrators for only 200 kids and any veteran teacher can tell you that is a recipe for disaster.
Halpin's simmering anger and resentment with Better Than You parlays itself into yet another teaching situation and although this is where LOSING MY FACULTIES ends, we have hope that he will be truly able to utilize his talents in a functional environment. Halpin doesn't offer high-minded prescriptions about the future of education --- just a weary resignation that he can only do his job within the confines of the present system, an acceptance that may surprise many parents but not very many teachers.
--- Reviewed by Shannon Bloomstran
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