Promotional Information

This book is a practitioner's confession, limited in scope and qualified by circumstance, that nevertheless aspires to be an inspirational yet tough-minded intellectual survival manual for classroom teachers.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Vocation or Provocation?
The Dialectics of Discipline
Breakthrough
The Lost Art
Classroom Praxis from A to B
Ceremonies Sacred and Profane
Attempting the Impossible
Teaching Social Science
Teaching English Composition
Teaching Social Justice
Teaching Sex Education
Teaching Literature
Higher Education
Program Notes
Maxims, Aphorisms, Insights and Reflections
Selected Reading
Index

About the Author

ROBERT INCHAUSTI is Professor of English at California Polytechnic State University. His earlier work, The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People, examines the lives of six visionaries: Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Elie Wiesel.

Reviews

"Not since 36 Children and The Way it Spoze to Be in the 60's have I been so completely transported into the consciousness of a beginning high school teacher confronting those awesome choices: survival by authoritarian repression, by capitulation, or by transcendence into a truer self, the discovery of an inner authority based on an ancient knowing that frees one from having to prove anything and allows one full access to the loving curiosity, the simple seeing that makes us God's eyes and hands. From this place nothing is terrifying, everything teaches. Sublime is a fine word for it."-Catharine Lucas Coordinator, Composition Studies San Francisco State University