2017

Nice review of What I Didn’t Know: True Stories of Becoming a Teacher in the Seattle Times: 

“There are some terrific passages in this volume. 

Beatty, in Los Angeles, offers an on-the-ground parable about the realities of student discipline in a school where the scent of a teacher’s desperation reeks like body odor and ‘the possibility of mutiny’ hangs in the air.

‘What scared me were the ways in which our interactions confirmed biases in me that I did not want to see,’ she writes of her fear. ‘One reason idealistic young people give for quitting teaching is that they don’t like the person it is turning them into.’

But Beatty suggests that beneath this, there may be another reason: ‘We don’t like the person that teaching reveals us to be.’ In her case, the realization necessitates a profound change.

Instead of sending her students to the dean’s office for cursing, Beatty begins to build lessons around their profanity. She makes cursing the subject of her English classes, using it to introduce ideas about language and, in the process, discovers that her students like discussing curse words almost as much as using them. Off-color language becomes a learning game. Each time a kid curses, he or she must fish a vocabulary word from a box, find its definition in the dictionary and write it on the board in a sentence. Her students, jazzed by the exercise, begin sending each other to the vocabulary box.

‘Sometimes I hadn’t even heard the offending language, but I would always nod knowingly, and the kid with the dictionary would hunker down, Beatty writes. ‘I began to glimpse how there could be functional pockets in a dysfunctional system.’”