A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned

From Publishers Weekly
In this memoir by Tompkins, a professor of English at Duke University, there is no mind-numbing explication of favorite educational theories or classroom practices. Instead, the reader is taken inside the author's emotional education, which had its early foundation in a compelling desire to please, especially through success in school. This shaping and rewarding of intellect, which also instilled fear, is shown to have affected Tompkins's approach to her life?the grind of graduate study, the politics of becoming a professor, even withdrawal from two marriages. Through a subsequent union, a blend of professional and emotional excitement and contentment, the missing ingredients of her personality appear to have materialized. Tompkins travels painfully twisting paths by which a scholar and literary critic (West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns) came to know herself outside the academic cloister with grace and humor as she challenges universities to conceive "education less as training for a career than as the introduction to a life." Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
Tompkins's whiny musings on the state of American education, told through her own story of a lifetime in academia. Tompkins (West of Everything, 1992) seems to have had a pretty easy time of it: She grew up white and middle class, attended Bryn Mawr and Yale. She landed a teaching position immediately after graduate school, took some time off, got another teaching position, and was then tenured at Temple University. After leaving her second husband for the legendary scholar Stanley Fish, she and Fish were soon picked up and tenured by Duke University, where Tompkins now teaches English. It sounds like an academic's dream come true, but Tompkins doesn't see it that way. Here she picks through her schooling, finding fault with nearly everything she encountered: She didn't like going to school when she was young. She tried too hard to please the teachers. She once wet her pants in front of her sixth-grade class while giving a book report. Her mother, an insomniac, took naps in the afternoon. She hated a classmate who said something clever in a graduate English class. These somewhat disjointed remembrances and other anecdotes are Tompkins's proof of a malevolent force behind our educational institutions--the obsessive quest to educate (as opposed to a shared exploration by student and teacher). Her prescription is for teachers to adapt her style of instruction, using open discussions, intensive interaction, fluid syllabi. This may work for college English classes, but what about courses where a mastery of set material is more important than the immediate pleasure of the student and teacher, such as, say, medical school? While a nonstressful, nonconfrontational school environment is a wonderful goal, Tompkins offers little practical advice on how to attain it. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


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sroom and discovers how much of what she learned there needs to be unlearned. A painful and exhilarating story of spiritual awakening, Tompkins' book critiques our educational system, while also paying tribute to it.


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