Ms. Moffett's First Year
Becoming a Teacher in America
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
In summer of 2000, legal secretary Donna Moffett answered an ad for the New York City Teaching Fellows program, which sought to recruit "talented professionals" from other fields to teach in some of the city's worst schools. Seven weeks later she was in a first grade classroom in Flatbush, Brooklyn, nearly completely unprepared for what she was about to face.
New York Times education reporter Abby Goodnough followed Donna Moffett through her first year as a teacher, writing a frontpage, award-winning series that galvanized discussion nationwide. Now she has expanded that series into a book that, through the riveting story of Moffett's experiences, explores the gulf between the rhetoric of education reform and the realities of the public school classroom. Ms. Moffett's First Year is neither a Hollywood- friendly tale of 'one person making a difference,' nor a reductive indictment of the public education system. It is rather a provocative portrait of the inadequacy of good intentions, of the challenges of educating poor and immigrant populations, and of a well-meaning but underprepared woman becoming a teacher the hard way.
While the story takes place in New York, Ms. Moffett's first year is a metaphor for the experiences of teachers everywhere in America, one that illuminates the philosophical, economic, political, and ideological dilemmas that have come more and more to determine their experience -- and their students' experiences -- in the classroom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When schools chancellor Harold Levy challenged his fellow New Yorkers to "Take next business trip on a big yellow bus" by becoming teachers in the public schools, Donna Moffett, a hardworking legal secretary looking for a way to make a difference, was one of the first to sign on. This unforgettable account of her first year as a first-grade teacher in an underperforming Brooklyn school brings Moffett, her students and her struggles to life. Goodnough's even-handed examination reaches beyond Room 218 in Flatbush's P.S. 92, however: some of the book's most striking pages cover the inspired but hasty inception of the New York City Teaching Fellows program, designed in the spring of 2000 to recruit professionals from other careers to work in the city's most troubled schools. After intense but unavoidably inadequate training in that program, Moffett is given her own classroom full of frustrating, endearing six-year-olds sullen Curtis, unresponsive Melissa and charged with teaching them to read, do math and simply behave. With a keen journalist's eye, Goodnough, a former New York Times education reporter who originally wrote about Moffett for the Metro section (she's now the paper's Miami bureau chief), follows Moffett as she copes with difficult students, ineffective standardized curricula, passive parents, a resentful administration and a host of other problems. This is no Dangerous Minds: the story Goodnough tells is far too complicated for a happy ending, though Moffett does experience success. Rather, it stands as a vital portrait of a dedicated, imperfect woman struggling in an inefficient and underfunded system.
