Book Review: 'Becoming a Teacher in America'

More information on "Ms. Moffett's First Year: Becoming a Teacher in America" is available
from the publisher:
http://www.you-click.net/GoNow/a15864a108853a188158105a2

New York City Teaching Fellows:
http://www.you-click.net/GoNow/a15864a108853a188158105a7

In "Ms. Moffett's First Year: Becoming a Teacher in America" (PublicAffairs, $ 25.00), Abby Goodnough chronicles the experiences of Donna Moffett, a former Manhattan legal secretary who was in the first crop of recruits from New York City's Teaching Fellows alternative-certification program...A central theme of Goodnough's book is the conflict between Moffett's idealistic notions of teaching and the harsh realities of an inner-city classroom. Goodnough captures the new teacher's uneasiness in dealing with children whose lives are far removed from anything she has known...Drawn to teaching partly by its promise of intellectual stimulation and creative play, she finds herself having to subject her students to a rigidly scripted reading program and adhere to a pressure-packed daily schedule structured mainly to drive up the school's test scores...More touchingly, she becomes fervently committed to her students, seeing their troubled lives as more and more intertwined with her own. She is bouyed by small signs both of their academic progress and their growing affection for her.