Common Sense: What It Means to Be a Teacher

by Michael Gose

Overview

“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.)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475807608
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	06/11/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	266
File size:	652 KB

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.

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

Editorial Reviews

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.

Lisa Kodama

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.

Charles Park

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.

David G. Holmes