Then Things Got So Bad, He Started Wondering How Members Of The Bush Cabinet Would Respond In His Situation

Hey, at least you got a book out of it:

A new book by a New York City Teaching Fellows dropout raises questions about recent changes in the public schools — in particular, the alternative certification program the author quit.

The author, Dan Brown, joined the Department of Education program, which pulls high-achieving young people and career-changers into public schools for two-year teaching stints, in 2003. His “The Great Expectations School,” which is climbing the sales charts, recounts why he quit after just one year, a resignation following what he describes as so much stress that he had to begin taking medication to stave off premature hair loss.

. . .

Mr. Brown called his experience “triage.” One lesson, he said, was: “Don’t smile for the first several months of school.” Another instructed him to post a public schedule of what would be taught each day.

None of this, he writes, helped him understand how to keep his rotating roster of 26 (and sometimes more) fourth-graders from throwing their chairs, punching each other in the face, and throwing frequent tantrums.

At one point he portrays himself as so at sea that he turns to journalist Ron Suskind’s biography of a former U.S. treasury secretary, “The Price of Loyalty,” for management ideas. “What would Paul O’Neill do?” he asks himself about his classroom.