Confessions of a Bad Teacher

As you spend more time working in one role, organization, or field, it can become easy to lose perspective on how your work is similar or different from that being done by people in other positions, places, and industries. How are you asked to spend your time? How are you given feedback? How are you evaluated? Do your workplace norms make any sense? What would an outsider say about them? Because so many teachers enter the profession right out of college and either spend their entire careers in schools or leave within a few years, they are not often in the position to hear or offer these kinds of school critiques. In Confessions of a Bad Teacher: The Shocking Truth from the Frontline of American Public Education (Sourcebooks, 2013), John Owens describes his frustrations upon leaving the publishing industry after 30 years and pursuing a second career teaching high school English in a New York City public school at the height of the education reform movement.

His recommended books included the following:

• Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and Danger to America's Public Schools by Diane Ravitch
• The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch

Listen to the interview on New Books in Education.