Review by Kirkus Book Review
A scathing look at the New York City Public School system by a Newsday reporter who spent the 1988-89 school year as a junior-high math teacher at a Brooklyn school. Sachar raises numerous questions in this probing, personal, sometimes farcical account. Why teach exponents to eighth-grade youngsters who can barely add? Why are students with a third-grade literacy level in the eighth grade, and why aren't they referred to Special Education? Why are indifferent, ""close to illiterate"" teachers hired? None of these questions is answered to the author's satisfaction. Sachar won't place the onus entirely on a school system she calls an ""overburdened, insensitive bureaucracy,"" where even room assignments can't go smoothly. The problems run far deeper, she says, when undernourished children come to school acting out hostility with everything from cursing to knife-wielding. There were all of six minutes left in one class by the time she got all of her charges in their assigned seats. Sachar eventually won some of them over--at graduation, some of her male students, who had mastered converting fractions to percentages only in the final school week, presented her with roses--but she never gained the trust of the school's militant black teachers. An edifying memoir in the tradition of Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age and Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
