It's Not All Flowers And Sausages: My Adventures In Second Grade (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
This book started as a private blog, and it definitely reads that way. Informal to the point of unpolished, and sort of directionless (as blogs do tend to be). I can see it being a very cathartic, satisfying read for people who are already teachers of young children... but I was led to believe that this was a book with advice for young teachers, though, and it was more of a rant about bad teachers, bad support staff, lazy colleagues, uninterested parents... not a ton of advice for coping. Not any really. I was annoyed by the random-ish references to shoes and umbrella drinks, too. Was this her or her editor, I wonder? And will a book ever make it out of the gate for the next twenty years that is aimed at a largely female readership that does NOT include references to shoes and umbrella drinks??? Sex and the City, what have you done to us. All in all, meh. This is a blog turned book. A second grade teacher describes her experience teaching for her seventh year at a public school in Harlem. Her rants are mostly directed at administrative ineptitude, but can also include lazy colleagues and unhelpful parents. The children can be exasperating but are not the targets of her rants.The author’s style is very informal, which makes sense as this started as a blog. Strangely, I found this conversational style a bit off-putting at times, rather than inviting. Don’t get me wrong: the stories she tells are fascinating in their demonstration of public school ridiculousness. Like the time when the principal tells the teachers that they will not be receiving paper for their classrooms because the school is “Going Green” and yet the administration still has paper for what they do. I feel like this book’s target audience is other elementary school teachers. My friend D. works as an ESL teacher and when I read her a section of the book, she nodded in emphatic agreement, as in, Amen to that. So I think it would be cathartic in that sense, for teachers to read that other teachers are going through the same types of crap.As for me, non-teacher in nice office job, I found the stories she told from the front-lines of public school education to be interesting, even if I didn’t always like the tone or style of the book.
What do You think about It's Not All Flowers And Sausages: My Adventures In Second Grade (2009)?
This was a pretty entertaining and funny book describing the daily life of a teacher.
—axlejbautista
read it for my intro to teaching class- very insightful and very blunt.
—deedee
