http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/753737

Losing My Faculties

In the same cuttingly observant voice that marked It Takes a Worried Man, Brendan Halpin shares an unforgettable account of the pursuit of his true calling: teaching. Losing My Faculties follows Halpin through teaching jobs in an exonomically depressed white ethnic town, a middle-class suburb, a last-chance truancy prevention program in the inner city, and an ambitious college-prep urban charter school. With refreshing candor and raw humor, Halpin tells us what it really means to be a teacher--the ups and downs in the classroom, the battles with administrators and colleagues, and the joy of doing a job that matters. Not the sappy tale of a hero who changes his troubled students' lives in one year, Losing My Faculties is, rather, the story of an all-too-fallible teacher who persists in spite of the frustrations that have driven so many others from the profession. After nine years of teaching, Halpin finds his idealism in shreds but his sense of the absurd and his love for his work blessedly intact.

Open All Close All