Ms. Moffett's First Year: Becoming a Teacher in America / Edition 1

by Abby Goodnough

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:	9781586483807
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	02/28/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

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

Editorial Reviews

In the summer of 2000, Donna Moffett changed professions. Responding to a New York Board of Education ad, this middle-aged legal secretary became a teacher. Education reporter Abby Goodnough followed Moffett through her first year as a teacher and wrote a front-page New York Times series about her experiences. The articles registered the gulf between "no child left behind" rhetoric and the harsh realities of the inner-city classroom. Miss Moffett's First Year is an expansion of that award-winning series. This book is neither a made-for-Hollywood feel-good story about "one teacher making a difference" nor a reductive, rhetorical indictment of the public education system. Instead, it is a complex, provocative document about battles won, lost, and abandoned.

When schools chancellor Harold Levy challenged his fellow New Yorkers to "Take [their] next business trip on a big yellow bus" by becoming teachers in the public schools, Donna Moffett, a hardworking legal secretary looking for a way to make a difference, was one of the first to sign on. This unforgettable account of her first year as a first-grade teacher in an underperforming Brooklyn school brings Moffett, her students and her struggles to life. Goodnough's even-handed examination reaches beyond Room 218 in Flatbush's P.S. 92, however: some of the book's most striking pages cover the inspired but hasty inception of the New York City Teaching Fellows program, designed in the spring of 2000 to recruit professionals from other careers to work in the city's most troubled schools. After intense but unavoidably inadequate training in that program, Moffett is given her own classroom full of frustrating, endearing six-year-olds sullen Curtis, unresponsive Melissa and charged with teaching them to read, do math and simply behave. With a keen journalist's eye, Goodnough, a former New York Times education reporter who originally wrote about Moffett for the Metro section (she's now the paper's Miami bureau chief), follows Moffett as she copes with difficult students, ineffective standardized curricula, passive parents, a resentful administration and a host of other problems. This is no Dangerous Minds: the story Goodnough tells is far too complicated for a happy ending, though Moffett does experience success. Rather, it stands as a vital portrait of a dedicated, imperfect woman struggling in an inefficient and underfunded system. Agent, David McCormick. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Written by a former education reporter for the New York Times, this book is somewhat misleadingly subtitled, as it is less about how the vast majority of people enter the teaching profession than about the tribulations of an exceptional woman taking part in a deeply flawed "alternative" route. Ms. Moffett will remind readers of many past first-year teachers, including Jonathan Kozol (whose real-life experience was recounted in Death at an Early Age) and Richard Dadier (whose fictional The Blackboard Jungle is recalled more than once here). Unfortunately, her story lacks the immediacy of memoirs recounted in the first person. Goodnough uses Moffett's story to level familiar criticisms against the bureaucracy of the New York City schools, the intellectual quality of students found in traditional teacher education programs, the relevance of teacher education in general, and the "curriculum wars" that hold teachers hostage to various forms of programmed instruction. In the end, though, Ms. Moffett's story has been told many times before, while the potentially more relevant story of the "teaching fellows" program of which she was a part remains largely untold. Recommended for all libraries as likely to be popular, this is still old wine in a new bottle and provides little new insight either to practitioners or scholars.-Scott Walter, Univ. of Kansas, Lawrence Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal