Welcome to Litsy!

I picked up this book to get some new ideas for the upcoming school year. It has some good advice and tips that I plan to implement, but when I Googled the author to find his Pengiun blog, I found that he was fired from his district for old allegations of sexual misconduct. He started a class action suit against the district for firing teachers who were close to retirement to save on benefits, but that's kind of leaving me with a bad taste now. 😐

I really wanted to like this book and I hoped to be inspired by the author. He had me in the beginning. I was highlighting quotes and gathering ideas. As the book continued, however, I began to lose interest. This man spends 12 hours each day at school and devotes much of his weekend and vacation time at school as well. Great for him, but I can‘t live up to his expectations. Maybe this makes me just an adequate teacher, who knows?

There are so many charlatans in the world of education. They teach for a couple of years, come up with a few clever slogans, build their websites, and hit the lecture circuit. In this fast-food-society, simple solutions to complex problems are embraced far too often. We can do better. I hope that people who read this book realize that true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort. After all, there are no shortcuts.