Ms. Moffett's First Year: Becoming a Teacher in America

Ms. Moffett's First Year: Becoming a Teacher in America

by Abby Goodnough
Ms. Moffett's First Year: Becoming a Teacher in America

Ms. Moffett's First Year: Becoming a Teacher in America

by Abby Goodnough

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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780786736881
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Publication date: 04/28/2009
Sold by: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format: eBook
Pages: 304
File size: 433 KB

About the Author

Abby Goodnough spent the last four of her eight years on the metropolitan desk of the New York Times covering New York City schools. In 2003 she was named Miami Bureau Chief. Born in New York City, a graduate of Cornell University, she currently lives in Miami.

What People are Saying About This

Tracy Kidder

The politics of public education are often maddening, but always important. One of the virtues of this book is that it makes them both comprehensible and interesting, by making them a part of the setting for a tale that can never grow old: the story of an idealistic teacher laboring through her first year in the classroom. It is a moving story - heartbreaking, infuriating, delightful. I came away grateful for Ms. Moffett, all the more because of her inevitable false steps and travail. This book is an engrossing antidote to all the current sloganeering and special pleading that infect national discourse on education.
author of Among Schoolchildren and Mountains Beyond Mountains

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