Molly Hoekstra, Editor: Am I Teaching Yet? Stories From The Teacher-Training Trenches

The "teacher tale" has become so common in popular culture that it's almost like liturgy: An inexperienced but wily young educator assumes responsibility for a class of bored and/or unruly students, either poor (Stand And Deliver, Dangerous Minds) or rich (Dead Poets Society, Goodbye Mr. Chips). In spite of early failures, the teacher motivates the kids to new levels of learning and sensitivity, and is honored by his or her charges just when despair begins to set in. The tale is told repeatedly because it makes audiences feel good to see useful working folk get their due, and also because the archetype contains some truth. Teachers are, in fact, largely underappreciated for the sweat and wit that goes into getting lessons across. The anthology Am I Teaching Yet? compiles essays from current and former teachers who reminisce about their early days. In her introduction, editor Molly Hoekstra traces the impetus for the book back to her own years as a student teacher, and her frustration at being unable to find practical advice about how to survive the grind. Am I Teaching Yet? operates largely on the level of commiseration, featuring stories about novice teachers making crushing mistakes and, in some cases, deciding that education might not be as rewarding a career as they'd imagined. In Marcus Goodyear's "Dollars And Points," he reflects on his decision to fail a student who partially plagiarized her research paper, and he wonders whether grading is an adequate way to measure the student's failure—or his own wrath. Dennis Donoghue remembers calling a sixth-grader a "rotten little bastard" (in "A Classroom Exchange") and speaks of being haunted by his words for decades. Susan C. Voorhees' "We Learn From Our Mistakes" recounts a catastrophic evaluation day in which her attempts to turn learning into a game led to hurt feelings and flared tempers. These essays, which deal with specific moments and specific reactions, provide the empathetic instruction the volume intended to deliver. Others suffer from vagueness, a tendency to revert to the clichés of "know-nothing educator makes good," or a prose style more suitable to an A-worthy high-school paper than to a published book. Am I Teaching Yet? skews too much toward the challenges of teaching in poor neighborhoods, and too many of the contributors gripe about their older colleagues in a self-aggrandizing fashion. But the recurring theme of would-be teachers feeling like frauds and imposters forms a thread that binds the pieces, and makes the collection cumulatively powerful.