Magical Teaching

Mr. Smith serves hot tea to a perpetually tardy boy in a rat-infested portable classroom, smokes cigarettes he confiscates from his students, and looks for strength of will at the bottom of a NyQuil bottle. Even on the best of days, Smith's first year on the job feels as frantic and fragmented as the misfiring hormones of the dozens of wide-eyed freshmen under his supervision. Some of the notes he writes after the bell have more in common with an inspirational teacher movie than real life, and that's one more thing to journal about. It's 2003, and Smith is in way over his head. Welcome to Magical Teaching, the hilarious and touching tale of one young teacher and 120 students in a run-down English classroom on the edge of campus. With relentless momentum and self-effacing honesty, Magical Teaching chronicles both the sweep of American education and small successes of messy, everyday learning, putting breath and bones on one of our nearly universal experiences: school. Like Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase, Smith's journal exposes the inner workings of educational institutions. Like Esmé Raji Codell's Educating Esmé, Smith struggles to balance his free-spirited eccentricity with the autocratic ways of his administration. And like Frank McCourt's Teacher Man, Smith describes it all with an eye for raw details that translate into beautiful insights. One might say Magical Teaching is required reading for policy wonks, curriculum developers, and district mucky-mucks. But for everyone else with a stake in the success of the modern classroom--from mid- and late-career teachers in schoolwide book studies to college students in introductory and advanced methods courses hungry for nuanced portrayals of the profession--it's a refreshingly laugh-out-loud break.