Common Sense: What It Means to Be a Teacher

“Finally a book about teaching that tells it like it is,” NEA Today said about Michael Gose’s first edition, What It Means to Be a Teacher. The second edition continues the stories that capture the meaning of teaching and now looks back with commentary on how those tales also work as parables. In the spirit of Thomas Paine, this second edition uses “Common Sense” to tell what is really going on with students, teachers, and schools. (Hint: the reality is actually a lot more optimistic than commonly portrayed in the media.)

Table of Contents:
Foreword by Rod Rock Acknowledgments Introduction Common Sense and What is Reality? Part I: Existence Chapter 1: First Year Chapter 2: Job Conditions Chapter 3: Failure Chapter 4: Success Chapter 5: I Am a Teacher Chapter 6: Curriculum Chapter 7: Favorites Chapter 8: Administration Chapter 9: Dilemmas Chapter 10: Honor and Betrayal Chapter 11: At Risk Chapter 12: Joys of Teaching Chapter 13: The Pnyx and What It Means to Be a Teacher Chapter 14: The Stories of The Existential Realities as Parables Chapter 15: The Mule, Luck, and Serenity Part II: Essence Chapter 16: ‘Conflicted’ especially by sixteen chronic, existential dilemmas Chapter 17: Essence Chapter 18: State of Our Union Address Appendix A: Rules to Live and Teach By Appendix B: Teaching Commandments Appendix C: A Letter from a School Superintendent Appendix D: A Homework Assignment: Waiting for Superman and its review by Ravitch Appendix E: It All Starts Today

About the Author :
Michael D. Gose, Ph.D. has taught at the elementary, secondary, and university levels. He has been a professor at Pepperdine University, teaching curriculum and methods, film, and the Great Books Colloquium since 1980.

Review :
Michael Gose’s Common Sense: What It Means to Be a Teacher is an arresting autobiographical reflection on teaching. Similar to modern classics like Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self, Gose wraps incisive reflections about education into flesh and blood narratives. With a moving examination ranging from Thomas Paine to current opinion polls and his decades of teaching experience, Gose clearly demonstrates why education remains our nation’s most worthwhile enterprise. A well-crafted piece of prose, Common Sense: What It Means to Be a Teacher bypasses the doom-and-gloom talking points surrounding the state of American education, opting instead for practical reasons why we can and should believe in teaching. What I observed about the first edition of Gose’s What It Means to be a Teacher remains the same only more so with this second edition of Common Sense. The book keeps it real. Gose sees teaching not only as a profession but as a heuristic journey full of life’s joys and pains, and he keeps you guessing about what you would have done in the author’s shoes. This book is about getting to know a profession that is a lot more complicated than most people realize. Gose’s stories always seem to startle, puzzle, and awe, and they give you “membership” into a mysterious profession full of the most important lessons on life. He adds his own commentary about his stories, what he thinks he might have learned, and how “common sense” tells us that schools are in a lot better shape than is commonly acknowledged. Of course, schools face great challenges, and it only seems right to sit down with a book and reflect on what it all means. NEA Today started its review of the first edition of What It Means to Be a Teacher with, “Finally a book about teaching that tells it like it is.” Now, seven years later, Michael Gose takes the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of his parabolic stories in the context of public education today. He concludes that while teachers and public schools have earned a lot more appreciation, they are the recipients of greater demands and diminishing resources. Gose retains what he captured in his first edition: the essence of teaching is both an art and a science requiring not only the lifelong development of one’s own heart and mind, but the commitment to nurturing the hearts and minds of one’s students. By sharing his best and worst moments, which are characterized by exhilaration, frustration, embarrassment and triumph, Gose reveals the dynamic, personalized nature of what it means to be a teacher. Ever the professor, Gose invites his readers to recall and reflect upon their personal adventures as student and educator, mentee and mentor, to create individual definitions of what it means to be a teacher. Aspiring, current and former educators—really anyone who seeks insight into the world of those called “teacher”—should have the opportunity to experience Common Sense: What It Means to Be a Teacher.