The Way It Spozed To Be
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
What happens when an idealistic young teacher walks into a chaotic inner-city classroom and refuses to give up? The Way It Spozed to Be is James Herndon's searingly honest memoir of his first year teaching at a predominantly Black junior high school in San Francisco during the early 1960s, a baptism by fire that became a landmark document of American educational dysfunction. With wry wit and unflinching candour, Herndon chronicles the daily absurdities of a rigid, dehumanising school system that seemed designed not to educate children but to contain them — and the remarkable students who pushed back against it, and him, in equal measure. Herndon writes with the sharp, vernacular energy of a man who has seen the gap between educational theory and classroom reality up close, and his account remains one of the most bracingly honest indictments of institutional schooling ever committed to the page. Sitting alongside contemporaries such as Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age and Herbert Kohl's 36 Children, this book argues that the system itself is the problem — not the children it so readily labels as failures. Decades after its first publication, Herndon's question lingers with uncomfortable urgency: who, exactly, is it that isn't doing what they're spozed to do?
Author: James Herndon
Format: Hardback
Genre: Education theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
What happens when an idealistic young teacher walks into a chaotic inner-city classroom and refuses to give up? The Way It Spozed to Be is James Herndon's searingly honest memoir of his first year teaching at a predominantly Black junior high school in San Francisco during the early 1960s, a baptism by fire that became a landmark document of American educational dysfunction. With wry wit and unflinching candour, Herndon chronicles the daily absurdities of a rigid, dehumanising school system that seemed designed not to educate children but to contain them — and the remarkable students who pushed back against it, and him, in equal measure. Herndon writes with the sharp, vernacular energy of a man who has seen the gap between educational theory and classroom reality up close, and his account remains one of the most bracingly honest indictments of institutional schooling ever committed to the page. Sitting alongside contemporaries such as Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age and Herbert Kohl's 36 Children, this book argues that the system itself is the problem — not the children it so readily labels as failures. Decades after its first publication, Herndon's question lingers with uncomfortable urgency: who, exactly, is it that isn't doing what they're spozed to do?