Teacher : The One Who Made the Difference

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Summary: Teacher: The One Who Made The Difference
Review: For my English class I read "Teacher : The One Who Made the Difference" by Mark Edmundson. I felt that this book was kind of misleading. It was supposed to be about a teacher that made an effect on his student, Mark Edmundson. The author didn't talk much about Frank Lears, the teacher, and only really focused on Edmundson's high school experience. He played football and hung out with his buddies like any other student. Mark Edmundson should've given the book a different title because I read this book hoping to learn about how teachers can make a difference on their students. Lears let his students think for themselves and that's basically what the book points out in the end. If you want to read about football and about someones high school life, then maybe this book will interest you. If you're looking for a book that talks about a teacher and their students, then definitely don't pick this book.

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Summary: Life is a crap shoot; sometimes you can win (4.5*s)
Review: How does a kid from an Archie Bunker upbringing, obsessed with high school football, though of limited ability, and with no interest in school become a college professor of English in a leading university? As it turns out, with certainly some innate ability and a lot of luck, mostly in the form of a somewhat eccentric new teacher, Frank Lears, newly graduated from Harvard, who managed to get a small class of high school seniors to start thinking about issues of the day and broader subjects, it is possible. The book is not about the pedagogical techniques of Lears. It is far more a commentary on working class life and its obstacles to learning.

Working class life for the author and his contemporaries was nothing short of wandering in a wilderness of ignorance and self-destructive behavior. School was seen as little more than a place to avoid learning and to disrupt if possible. The arena of football was a place to prove manhood, which also extended into the larger world. Aspirations were not to know "something," but to know "someone" to get ahead. Television was the by far the most pervasive cultural influence in working class homes. Parental authority and wisdom were not to be challenged. Actually, street smarts were far more important to acquire to function in communities, not to mention navigate such tensions as those racial.

Frank Lears arrived in the tumult of the late 1960s at the author's working class high school. But the new teacher, generally dressed in too-large suits with a paper clip on his lapel, was not there to dispense great amounts of wisdom to the unwashed. His method was Socratic, that is probing and questioning. Getting kids to think independently was unheard of in those kinds of schools, and there is probably more lip-service paid to that goal, even in contemporary times, than is actually practiced. Lears endured considerable resistance from the students, but was patient enough and made enough efforts to eventually have an impact.

The author is at great pains to emphasize the profound changes that occur in becoming a thinker and an independent obtainer of knowledge. He essentially lost contact with his adolescent community, including his family. Lears is an obscure figure in the book. Little was known about him when he came to teach. As far as his current status, the reader learns only that he left teaching after one year and moved to a small town as a lawyer. Similarly, little is told of the author's classmates. What was the impact of Lears on them? We can only guess. Despite any gaps in following up, the book is really a wonderful story in exploring how an improbable shift in intellectual orientation can occur in a culture that almost completely devalues an empowered, thinking individual. As far as the negative reviewers - Yes, there is some professorial showmanship that perhaps could have been avoided. The author is profoundly aware that Lears changed his life and that is well told. The author's tale expresses well the obstacles that Lear faced.


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Summary: Boring, Rambling, Poorly-Written Memoir
Review: I am a teacher and a writer, and I had so looked forward to this book. What a disappointment! This book is NOT really about the TEACHER who made the diffference to this writer (as I had expected). It is a coming-of-age story about this author. This story might mean something to anyone who experienced a similar coming of age (thug-turned-professor), but I'm afraid it meant very little to me. It was all I could do to FORCE myself to keep reading it, and by the end, I felt that I had completely wasted my time and my money. In my opinion, don't waste your money on this book.

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Summary: Read It!
Review: I doubt whether the last reviewer (code name dschepps3) has read Teacher. Although the book does take place at Medford High, anyone who reads Teacher will see that it doesn't matter whether every student experienced the school the way Edmundson did (though it's interesting to note that the writer Paul Theroux--dschepps3 points out that Theroux was a student there too--refers to Medford High in The Old Patagonian Express as a monkey house.) My own experience at a very different high school was nothing like Edmundson's either. The truths that come out of these beautifully told stories (stories about not only the transforming teacher Franklin Lears, but also about football, friends, family, war, the 1960's, race, and the woman's movement ) are moving and universal. They are good stories, whether or not you experienced the same things. Plus many of the stories are funny. I laughed out loud. Most important, the writer, who tells us he's a teacher himself now, is interesting and wise. Read it!

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Summary: As Lear might say: Not bad!
Review: I glanced at this book at 9 this morning. It is now 4 and I am done the book, sadly. It is called 'Teacher, the one who made the difference,' but could have been titled 'Student, the one who eventually made the effort.' The book is rambling and is less about teaching than about learning in at a stage of time in America, the 60s. Maybe what makes this book so interesting is that Bush seems to be taking us back in time. Some times the best way to understand the 'now' is to think about the 'then.'

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Summary: great read! why so many bad reviews?
Review: I have read few books recently that have captured my interest as completely as Teacher. I believe this was an honest and educational account of the authors high school years, the teacher that influenced him to "think outside the box," and his intellectual growth. I also enjoyed how Edmundson moves beyond stereotypes in defining what makes a good teacher. As a future teacher, I have worries about how the higher powers might interfere with my desire to create an open learning environment, where true intellectual/personal growth can occur. Frank lears is an excellent role model in that he had the courage to "stick to his guns." Though this book did spark my interest, I didn't find it particularly moving. Franz Kafka wrote something to the effect of, I don't want to read anything that doesn't totally shake my entire being. This is not one of those books. But it does have some moving parts, and I really enjoyed the prose. Though I was able to get a lot of the literary references, since I was an English major and am becoming certified to teach english--and though I understand that they are part of who he is, I wasn't quite sure he needed them, just cause they could alienate readers. But then again, this book IS about straying from the herd. This book is also interesting because the author takes you all around his adolescent life and the larger society at the time he was writing. He goes off on these tangents, which might bother some people, but I enjoyed for the most part. I wanted to write this partly because the book got so many poor reviews, which I didn't quite understand. Of course not everyone has to think the same way about this books as I do--Frank Lears wouldn't appreciate that. But I, personally, highly recommend this memoir.

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Summary: Too scholarly for an inspirational tale
Review: I love memoirs about teaching and so was anxious to read another inspirational tale about a remarkable teacher. Unfortunately, by page 50, little had been said about Franklin Lears and a lot had been said about the school, the students, and particularly the author. This probably would have been fine had the book not been written in such a scholarly, pendantic fashion. The writing is dry, better suited to academic papers than an inspirational book.

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Summary: Meffa
Review: I read the book expecting a nostalgic trip back to Medford High. What I got was total fiction as none of the characters resemble anyone that I remember. My sister was in all the honors courses that year, including history. The teacher described in the book is total fiction.

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Summary: A bit idiosyncratic, elitist
Review: I read this recollection of this little known teacher, Franklin Lears, in order to find out whether I should become a teacher. I found it too idiosyncratic to be of much use in making my decision. The author was not sensitive to gender and racial biases in the classroom, and as an African-American woman I feel both have had a strong impact on my perceptions of myself as a learner and teacher and on others' perceptions of me. Not only are these topics pursued in a cursory manner, but the author tends to patronize and undercut female and racially Other writers. One feminist delivers a rousing speech in one scene, and her speech is compared with those of a laundry list of Who's Who authors--Wordsworth, Austen, Bronte, etc. After all the deconstructing, recoding, and recontextualizing, I could barely recall the woman's speech itself. The author was far more interested in comparing this ordinary woman's ideas with those of writers of far more interest to him. With nothing in the text to suggest this, the author wondered whether the writer had arrived at her conclusions without outside help. In other words, she was far too stupid and dependent to think for herself, so who wrote her rather insightful speech for her? This is a newer and subtler kind of racism and sexism, but it's fundamentally the same thing as the kind that physically closed the academic gates to the Other. In short, this book didn't speak to me, and I actually felt excluded from its conversation. Luckily, there are more truthful, more communciative books out there.

Rating:
Summary: far better than I thought it was gonna be
Review: I really didn't have time to pick this book up, but I did anyway. It was such a page-turner, though, I finished it in only two days (partly at work!).

Coming into it, I was prepared for yet another well-trodden tale of how some dedicated teacher awakened some recalcitrant pupil or other to the delights of the written word, but this book turned out to be much more profound, moving, and well-written than I was expecting.

Unquestionably the best book of its kind I know of. Touching, humorous . . . the final chapter achieves greatness. And I thought I had outstanding teachers!

Complaints? I thought Edmundson could have done a better job of describing Lears physically: till the end of the book I really couldn't picture him, and I think this would have helped in some parts.

Also, what ever happened to Lears? This coda was conspicuously missing from the book. Sure, there was a quick little note at the end, but what, really, became of him? Obviously Edmundson forwent a more satisfying account of the fate of his great galvanizer for a reason, I felt he should have at least laid out what it was. Or why he apparently never tried to contact him in later years.

I can't believe I'm complaining about this book, though. Something's gotta be wrong with me.