Tales from the Teachers' Lounge
An Irreverent View of What It Really Means To Be a Teacher Today
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
From the critically acclaimed author of Daddy Needs a Drink—hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “consistently hilarious”—comes a series of irreverent, wickedly observant essays about what it really means to be a teacher today. With his trademark wit and wisdom, Robert Wilder dissects the world’s noblest profession—whether he’s taming a classroom full of hormonal teenagers or going one-on-one with the school bully.
Wilder was twenty-six when he found his true calling. Leaving a lucrative advertising career in New York, he got a job as an assistant first-grade teacher at a Santa Fe alternative school—and never looked back. Now he brings his unique perspective—as a teacher, parent, and former student—to a series of laugh-out-loud essays that show teaching at its most absurd…and most rewarding. With brutal candor he chronicles his own lively adventures in modern education, from navigating cutthroat kindergarten sign-ups to subbing for a class experiment gone wrong–and dares to tell about it.
He shares the surprising lessons he’s learned in the trenches of his profession, including how to bribe a four-year-old (his own) to stop swearing in a Lutheran preschool and the best way to teach moody teenagers…manage “helicopter” parents…and cope with bullies—whether of the school-yard, Internet, or parental kind. And he offers tough love for cheaters who log on to www.SchoolSucks.com, then puts to rest forever the question of why new teachers gain weight (hint: the free donuts don’t help).
In Tales from the Teachers’ Lounge, Robert Wilder charts life’s learning curve with a warmth and humor you don’t find in textbooks. By turns heartwarming, eye-opening, and uproariously funny, these pitch-perfect essays offer priceless lessons in life, family, learning, and teaching from a true lover of education.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After giving up his advertising job and moving to Santa Fe with his wife, Wilder (Daddy Needs a Drink) decided he needed a day job, so he signed on as an assistant first-grade teacher at a local "alternative" school. Its New Age pedagogy "pursuing kindness and peace," counting games with "recycled organic materials," etc. was fine, but he was spending most of his time tending a delusional nine-year-old girl, flushing bad boys' turds down the toilet and coping with hippie parents in denial about their bullying son. So he shifted to teaching seventh grade in a private day school, where there was just the usual preteen wackiness. Some days, so many of his students were "hoisting the middle finger," a passerby might think he was "teaching a lesson in profanity for the hearing-impaired." Teaching taught Wilder much about what to avoid, as a parent especially about not being a "helicopter parent," obsessively hovering over his kids' every move. He also learned there are "two sides to this carpe diem coin" we want our kids to go ahead and try everything, but we're uncomfortable when our toddlers actually start dancing with the cross-dressers on Halloween. Wilder may be a bit potty-mouthed for the mainstream parenting shelf, but he's honest and funny.