Acquire A Life In School: What The Teacher Learned Published By Jane Tompkins Issued As Textbook

did not expect to find my stride with this book a much as I did, From the epigraph, "To my mother, my first teacher" to her bouts about the alienation of herself from her own labor, her meditations on the incessant drive towards academia and academicinsitution prestige through her graduate years at Yale which she detested yet could not admit until near graduation, to her failures and shortcomings as a teacher and intellectual later in life.
Though this memoir was a class assignment for a course called Teaching English it was wellwritten and insightful, With a tendency towards fractured memory and integrated wisdom, Jane Tompkins turns the troubled education system into a fascinating read, She covers her own autobiographical experiences in school, from kindergarten to graduate to many years of teaching, and by turning nonchronological midway through, she includes tidbits of mindfulness, meditation, selfcare, utopian dreams, and the steps she has taken to fulfill them.
I loved her reflections on teaching, and very similar to my own thoughts I shared in Getting Messy, p.: "I wanted to let go of everything that separated me from the other people in the room, I wanted to know them, I wanted them to know each other, and I wanted them to discover themselves, " I honestly couldn't make it too far in this book because Tompkins seems to beat to death her somehow scarringly terrible middleclass, traumafree childhood in which teachers were generally not the nicest but not the worst.
She really belabors her points to a frustrating point, It's a book to make teachers and teacher trainers reflect, It shows that problems in education are the same here and there giving way to reflection and selfobservation, I wanted to love this more, but it was less informative than it was selfindulgently aimless, It was missing a thesis what I describe to my students as a "spinal cord," the unifying structure which supports all the body's flesh details, anecdotes, observations.


Update,years of teaching later: I have been rereading parts of this book today, and then reread my review of it here.
It annoys me. My criticism annoys me, even my writing annoys me, It's written by a novice teacher who is still clinging toparagraph essays, I missed the point of this book completely, When I read this at the start of my teaching life, I needed a HowTo, This book is not that it is much, much more, super insightful book on the struggles of pursuing a profession in academia Jane Tompkins, a highprofile English professor at Duke with a reputation for pushing the envelope in teaching methods, bares her soul and reveals the scarsmany selfinflictedincurred during her academic career as student and professor.
Hers is basically the story of a success/performancedriven student who achieves at each step of the academic process only to realize,years into tenure, that in her striving in a realm where proving one's
authority is part of almost every exercise, she'd lost her ability to be herself and to let others do the same.
So it's a story of her development in school, her professional striving, but more importantly of her movement in teaching away from "making sure students knew what I knew and what I thought" to recognizing that part of education must be learning "how to be with other people, how to love, how to take criticism, how to grieve, how to have fun," that this must be as much the "material" as any body of literature or theory.


What I found most moving about this book was how eloquently she describes the compulsion to always be doing something that is both a source of success and a barrier to an even deeper need: to know how to do nothing.
And still like oneself. Her experiences in the classroomand within herself outside of the classroomresonated with me especially as a teacher, but this often painful account of her journey toward selfacceptance and its ramification on her teaching is beautifully written and would be of interest to others, too, I suspect.
Some of it was long and drawnout, as though Tompkins felt as though she had to justify certain things she did in the classroom.
Overall, though, it was pretty good, This was ok. She is an interesting person and professor, Her discussions about her experimental teaching were interesting to read, Jane Tompkins started school around, America was educating its children for the office and assembly line, "Good people were praised," she writes, "and bad people were humiliated, " Eventually she learned to listen to herself to be rather than to do to value personal connections to teach what students actually want to learn.
And, one hopes, not to rely on them for personal affirmation, Here one of our leading literary scholars looks back on her own life in the classroom, and discovers how much of what she learned there needs to be unlearned.
Jane Tompkins' memoir shows how her education shaped her in the mold of a high achiever who could read five languages but had little knowledge of herself.
As she slowly awakens to the needs of her body, heart, and spirit, she discards the conventions of classroom teaching and learns what her students' lives are like.
A painful and exhilarating story of spiritual awakening, Tompkins' book critiques our educational system while also paying tribute to it, Delightfully crafted with thoughtful allusions and a clear sene of storytelling, Written by an English professor from Duke, this book asks important bigger questions about how we structure education and what messages that sends, I appreciated the questions and the earnestness with which many were left unresolved, read this per the suggestion of one of her former students, thoroughly engaging, interesting, thoughtprovoking. highly recommend for people interested in education, I really didn't like this book, I had to read it for a grad school class among other books, Tompkins came across as a needy and spoiled rich who cared nothing for her students in the beginning of this book, She did change her views and her way of teaching over the

years, but still to write something like I was hurt because I came home from school and my mother was napping seriously.
. I think this lady has pretty severe emotional and selfesteem issues, . She grew up in middle class America, went to good schools yet she could never be happy, even after all she accomplished, . ugh The author talks about growing up as a teacherpleaser and the anxiety surrounding her school experience, She excels through school, goes to graduate school why not, goes through a couple of difficult marriages with other brilliant people, and eventually runs away with no lie STANLEY FISH.
As a professor, she starts to realize that her job is not to impress her students with her massive smarts but to put the task of learning into their hands.
It's a pretty cool book once you get past some of her childhood school trauma, If you were once a teacherpleaser, it can be a little uncomfortable to hear someone else talk about how easy it is to measure your selfworth by your academic achievement and how ultimately unfulfilling that can be.
Incidentally, I bought this book because a former professor of mine recommended it to me, Problem It's especially good if you are a teacher to remind yourself of how seriously some students will take your approval or disapproval, It was nice to come to a teaching book that is also a well written book, I like finding books that are about subjects I want to tackle/need to write about and are also valuable works of literature, And as with much of the literature that Susan talked about last semester this book is excellent because it tells me what I already knew but didnt know I knew: being in the classroom is an act of performance, whether student or teacher.
Performance and classroom actions that are performance are often acts of fear and thus fear and shame are major aspects of our time I the classroom.
Education cuts off the mind from the heart and the body and the soul, especially at the undergraduate level, I think what I loved most of this book is Tompkins willingness to show her fragility she is a teacher so I know she also has the strength it takes to command a classroom, to study through her PHd and her Masters, but this book was open to her weaknesses, the pain she went through, the turmoil that educators hide from their students and student are in turn, taught to hide from their teachers.
Because in a classroom were not people, are we Teachers certainly arent and Tompkins argues that her students are being turned into the same, taught to shut down themselves and their emotional lives, to sacrifice all for the intellectual growth and structure that is imposed in an ordered classroom.
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