June 23, 2003
As he's finishing grad school in the early 1990s, the author applies for positions in the Boston public school system; he wants to teach in an urban school, to work "with kids who might have their lives changed by me." In this absorbing, almost journal-like memoir, his second, Halpin (It Takes a Worried Man) shares his nine-year roller-coaster ride of life as a high school English teacher in Boston and two nearby suburbs. Halpin writes passionately about his work, from the highs of watching students "translate" scenes from Shakespeare—"One group... does a great job of turning Romeo and Juliet
into something like Beavis and Juliet"—to the lows of not being able to control a room full of disruptive teenagers. He doubts himself and thinks about quitting. "I can't believe how much I suck at this job," he writes at one point (suck, one of the author's favorite words, appears a little too often). Halpin's story doesn't have a conventional happy ending, but he does accomplish his initial goals. In what he describes as "probably the best class I will ever have," Halpin reads Wordsworth's poem "We Are Seven" with a class of academically struggling juniors in Newcastle, Mass. "They speak honestly and movingly, and, best of all from the perspective of an English teacher, they keep coming back to the poem," he writes. "By the end of the class, they have done as thorough a job analyzing the poem as I could have hoped for." Though the memoir lags a bit in the middle, especially when Halpin recounts his frustrations with colleagues and school administrators, this chronicle provides an irreverent yet earnest look at the vocation its author clearly loves.