All About Books discussion

Discuss our December/January group read 'I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had: My Year as a Rookie Teacher at Northeast High' by Tony Danza here.

Happy reading!

I read this book over the Summer back in May but I hope everyone else who decides to read this one enjoys it. It was a pretty good read.

I was thinking of reading it next year, for the January part!!!
I've written it down on my 20104 challenge.

I think that far ahead it's going to have to be SF, Laura! LOL

;)

Like Laura I think I will keep this until January as it is part of a couple of challenges.

Got the book today, I'll start it asap, I'm very curious about this one!

I'll start reading it sometime next week, hopefully :)

It's pretty good Elisa. You'll enjoy it. I read it over the summer and it is an interesting read. :)

About to start it in a day or two

I've finished it yesterday on the plane, and my neighbour travellers were curiously glancing at it.
I liked it even if I truly had no idea of who Tony Danza is and did back in the 80s, and I am not very familiar with the American educational system (besided all this prom stuff that they put in the movies!). I found it very honest, sometimes maybe a bit over dramatic but I think it is the writer's real personality. I'd love to watch the 6 episodes TV series - has anybody seen it?

On a more general note, I've been teaching since some years at uni and the kids there are clearly super selceted and motivated, so the job is not impossible. I did some volunteer work years ago in Italy helping immigrant children with their homework after school, and I can definetly relate that experience to Tony's struggle to get them involved and in trying to teach them how important it is to pursue an education. So I totally agree with him, the teachers that daily face such challenges are real heroes.

Just finished and liked it a lot.
The overall impression is that pubblic education in the USA is definitly behind our italian standars, even if as I've said in unother thread, we are struggling hard to lower them!
I liked the effort that Danza put in this year of "strange work" for him, but I feel that having to cope with a class only sort of helped him a lot. Like in Italy the problem is more and more too many students and too many classes for each teacher. But our teachers should read it to realize thhey're not alone in this struggle.
I've never tought in italian schools - only in England and now so many years ago - but I think that education should be the first issue for all governmets, not only a place where to cut money and attention. Think also that in Italy we don't have a real private educational system - which I find a positive point of our country, a part from some very rare and extremely expensive realities - so pubblic schools NEED to be good if we want the country to develop.
I found interesting all this "invention" in Danza's teaching: lots of computer works, going around the school for the assignments, etch. I don't know though if it helps to have a higer standard though. At a certain point kids have to understand that they have to stop playing and have to start working hard ...

Glad you enjoyed it LauraT. I thought it was cool how he tried to make a Television series out of his teaching too through A& E but its hard to find the full episodes of his show online. It's a pretty good read all in all though.

I never got around to reading this. Since it seems to have gotten some good reviews on this thread, I will add it to my to-read list.