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This is a memoir of a secondary school English teacher about one of his school years, two decades ago. I’m reviewing it for Virtual Authors Book Tour.
I studied a Masters in Education to be a secondary school Science teacher but I have never had the chance to work (well, I’m tutoring a girl at the moment, but it’s hardly the same), so I enjoy reading anything about teaching, including some of the FB posts some of my friends write about their good and bad days at their schools! That’s why I said yes to this book.
Crazy is normal is a detailed journal of an academic course, week by week. Lloyd Lofthouse taught English and Journalism and was known for being one of the tough teachers. He worked in a public school and in this book he explains what he did in every class, the assignments the students had to do, the books they were supposed to read in class, the daily work of the school newspaper at Journalism classes, the way he evaluated the students’ work and the problems he had with certain students on a regular basis.
That is exactly the pro and the con of this book: it tells you EVERYTHING regarding school, and it becomes monotonous when he was to remind the rules to the students almost every day; frustrating when he has to send the same students out of the class for bad behavior and doesn’t get anything by phoning their parents, and also exhausting when he arrives at home after more than 10 hours of work only to correct and mark assignments until bedtime. So it’s absolutely different from other memoirs you can read because I think it hasn’t been written to entertain the reader (in fact, I can say most will find it boring), but this routine is the hard truth for a number of teachers day after day, isn’t it? That’s why I liked it. I think Crazy is normal can help me to face the class and the job if the time comes.
I couldn’t help but compare every detail throughout the book to the Spanish education system, or at least to the part that I know. I wasn’t surprised that most of the issues teachers must face remain constant everywhere: bureaucrats who have never been in a classroom are the people who tell you how to do your job, or those parents who are utterly worried about their children’s self steem and ask you to give them better grades instead of making sure the kids work harder the next time.
Nevertheless, I have found interesting differences between the educational system in America and Spain. First thing that caught my attention was that in Lofthouse’s school the teacher is assigned one classroom and the students change rooms in every period, which is absolutely fantastic because, as a teacher, you can have your class distributed as you want with all the tools you might need at hand, instead of running from one classroom to another taking with you your laptop, briefcase, etc. like Spanish teachers do. They also have “after school detentions”, which, in my opinion, would solve most of the teaching problems, but actually doesn’t work as well as I expected.
The book addresses other interesting issues, some of which shocked me, like almost everything related to Journalism classes – the responsibility students have for all the paper process and how they solve all the incidentals by their own. Or the teacher feeling attracted to a brilliant student, which leads to an embarrasing situation (only for him, though) when they are alone in the classroom he solves in a forthright way. There is also the girl who is transferred to another group because she is being bullied for being the only white in the class, or the shootings happening in the neighbourhood where the school is located.
As you can see, I could be talking about this book forever because I have found it fascinating. I have learned a lot and I have borrowed several ideas from Mr. Lofthouse’s classes which can’t be learned at university. However, this is not a book for everybody: you have to be truly interested in the matter because he only talks about teaching and, therefore, the lack of information about the author’s personal life might bore the reader to death.
Finally, I would like to tell you that I happened to watch the film Precious, which I think matches perfectly well with this book, and it also gives you hope, perhaps not in the system, but in teachers and students.
Crazy is normal
Lloyd Lofthouse
Publisher: Three Clover Press (June 14, 2014)
ISBN: 978-0986032851
386 Pages
Crazy is normal has won an honorable mention at the ‘Southern California Book Festival.
The book will be on sale for $0,99 until November 15 on Amazon.
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From Isi 
I think I would find this book boring, but it’s great to see that you can compare this to the Spanish system 🙂 I’m more for popular science books, so if you know a great one on education, you can let me know! 😉
I’ll tell you, Wendy, because I have a couple of science books on my TBR list 😉
Thank you for your honest review, and I hope you will post your review on Amazon.
You are right about the structure and style appearing monotonous, because reality is often monotonous. Imagine a memoir about combat revealing what it is really like instead of just focusing on the most exciting/dangerous parts of fighting a war and where the majority of the time only becomes a footnote.
Before I started writing this memoir, I had to make a decision: to adapt the memoir to the norms and ideals of Hollywood; to make it glitzy, superficial, thrilling, etc.——or stick to reality.
I knew that if I stuck to reality, many readers wouldn’t read it, because Hollywood has created a generation that expects and even demands instant gratification that includes being happy and entertained all the time, but without revealing the repeated challenges and the monotonous facts of what it is really like for most teachers, readers would also not learn the truth about teaching.
To borrow from Robert Frost, I decided to take the path least traveled when I came to that fork in the road.
However, I do hope it was more entertaining than most of the college textbooks I had to study for the nine years I spent full or part time working toward my college degrees.
Yes, I understand that being realistic is the aim of the book, and I appreciate it because I think it’s the strong point in it. But as you said, that is the reason some people might dislike it.
Your comment has reminded me of the book “The princess bride” and its “good parts”, which happened to be only a small percentage of the book, because the whole thing was, well, monotonous!
Thank you for the tour, because I really wanted to know more about the teachers’ work!
For about two years, I taught out of different classrooms for each class I taught and was always on the move. I can’t imagine what it would be like to spend 20 to 30 years doing that.
If you start teaching full time in Spain, never lose sight of the fact that as a teacher you are there for the children and not the idiots and dolts at the top who are making too many bad decisions that make the teacher’s job more difficult.
Is Spain doing the same thing the U.S. is doing—testing children relentlessly, and then ranking teachers from those rest results and using that ranking to fire teachers and close public schools?
Well, things here are quite different in that way. Here it’s difficult to become a teacher in public schools, but once you are in, it’s almost impossible to get fired, which is good, but also bad, because some people do it because it’s a safe income for the rest of their lives, but they have no interest in educating people.
The students are also tested from time to time only to blame the teachers for their awful results. Besides, thanks to the crisis, less money is spent on education, so less teachers are working, and therefore:
– the school only brings a substitute if the teacher is absent for more than 15 days.
– the gropus have between 35 – 40 children (when the class is noisy, it’s almost impossible to teach!).
Other issues remain the same.
Be sure I’ll take everything I’m learning into account in my career.
I think it helps immeasurably to enter a classroom as a teacher knowing what to expect. The large teacher turnover in the U.S. is probably due to starting out teaching with idealistic instead of realistic expectations—almost half of new teacher in the U.S. quit in less than five years and never return to education.
The less training and more idealism a teacher brings to the classroom, the lower the retention rate. In the U.S., we have this group called Teach for America (FA) where the recruits come from college students with the highest GPA’s who usually grow up in affluent homes with literate, college educated parents. They get 5 weeks of lectures/training in the summer before they go out to teach and within two years two-thirds leave education forever and more than 80% of those who stay transfer to teach in more affluent communities where there isn’t much or any poverty.
Large class sizes does make teaching more of a challenge.
(I’m replying here because I have no more “reply buttons”).
I know exactly what you mean. In Spain you have to do a Masters in order to be a secondary school teacher. There we are taught how to create wonderful team activities to do using computers in wonderful classes designed to work in teams, with wonderful students who are willing to listen carefully to our instructions and do their best.
After several months of these kind of classes, we have practice lessons in a real secondary schood for three months, and I know it isn’t very much, but at least we can have a glimpse at how things really are.
So in my opinion, the system fails from the start, since the people who teach the teachers have never entered a classroom full of children!
That’s why I love to read about teaching 🙂
In the United States many NEW “magic bullet” teaching methods and strategies often come with guarantees that lead to miracles in the classroom. These “magic bullet” methods usually come out of university laboratory K – 12 schools that usually have long student waiting lists. I observed at the UCLA laboratory schools and there was no comparison between those highly motivated and cooperative students and the students I taught that mostly came from poverty and a violent, drug drenched, street gang environment.
And in the real classroom, where there might be many students who disrupt and do not cooperate with the teacher to learn, these so-called “magic bullets” seldom worked.
In fact, almost anything works when most or all of the students cooperate and are motivated to learn thanks to supportive parents who offer a rich home environment that supports literacy, teachers and education.
The sad fact is that teachers are often forced to use these “magic bullet” methods even when the teachers protest because the know that this will change nothing. The most important element of learning what a teacher teaches is cooperation from both parents and students.
If the parents and/or students are not on board, the train will leave them behind.
Of course, I think the role of the parents is crucial, as well as the environment.
And those magic bullets look great for those magic schools. If only parents were also taught how to educate their children!
One of the things that had me thinking was the difference between Asians and Latinos in the book. I’ve read a few books that also address the matter and say that Asian children are taught at home how important education is, even when their parents are not literate, and these parents reward their children when they get good grades and work hard.
I don’t know if it’s available in English, but there is a docummentary about education in Northern European countries that is very interesting. There teachers are considered crucial for society, they are paid a lot of money and the teaching degree has very high standards, so only the best prepared get it. The Asians of your book made me think about these countries too.
There have been many studies that focus on why Asian-American children do so well in school. You may find this one interesting:
Asian-American students have a reputation as high achievers, and a new study suggests their success comes mainly from hard work rather than innate ability.
It’s well known that compared with white students, Asian-American kids tend to get higher grades, do better on standardized tests and are more likely to go to college — including elite universities.
http://www.webmd.com/children/news/20140505/hard-work-propels-asian-american-students-to-head-of-class-study
I had no doubt everybody has more or less the same intellectual abilities and that they achieved higher goals at education because they are hard workers, but I didn’t know about that communities they create in order to support their children.
It’s interesting, thanks for the link!
By the way, I’m excited about the way you did the grading thing by letting the students give you their assignments before the deadline in order to correct it so they can improve their essays and get a better grade. I have never seen it, not when I studied the Masters in education, nor in my school years.
How a fantastic idea!! 😀
You may have also noticed that this added a lot of extra hours to correcting. Instead of correcting an assignment once, the teacher may end up correcting the same assignment several times until the student learns how to earn the highest possible grade for that assignment.
My focus on teaching was that students were allowed to fail and then learn from their failure by being given a chance to succeed. If we keep closing the door to success and all children experience is failure, then they might stop trying.
However, it’s impossible when the student doesn’t do the work in the first place. Student’s can’t improve and learn from work they never do.
And this fact is ignored by the top down leadership that seems to assume every student cooperates and is hungry to learn what a teacher teaches.
Yes, but I also think that a student who makes you work more at the beginning, by giving assignments before the deadline for you to correct them, in the long run will make you work less because their work improves.
In any case, I think that giving more opportunities to improve their grades always end up in more work for the teacher. But if you get good results in the end, it’s worth the time, I suppose.
“a student who makes you work more at the beginning, by giving assignments before the deadline for you to correct them, in the long run will make you work less because their work improves”
I found this to be true. Once a student learned certain skills like those that were on the monthly book report, they seldom had to do the same type of assignment more than once to earn a high grade.
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Thanks for taking part in the tour. I’m so glad you found ‘Crazy Is Normal’ to be “fascinating”!
Thank you for organizing it, Teddy!
Being an English teacher myself, I already know what this book consists of without picking it up! I’m betting your take is accurate. And as the author stated above, it’s not thanks to Hollywood for putting together poor versions of what teaching really is. I don’t know if it’s possible to understand if you haven’t been through it. I would be giving this book out to all the people who say teaching is glamorous or we just babysit. And those who say that education is falling apart because teachers aren’t good enough, etc.
I was looking forward to knowing your opinion, Jennine!
I see that the issues the book addresses are common to most of the teachers.
I also think that people shouldn’t judge how the teachers’ work is, being them incapable of control their own 2-3 children at home, for instance.
Anyway, thanks for your comment. And yes, it’s a good book to give to everybody for them to know what’s going on in the classroom.
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