Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive School

"Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity" provides a few hours of sweet and funny insight into the life of someone at loose ends while trying carry out a very tough job. The author doesn't pretend to be a hero or a know-it-all. She admits to failing in her gig as a long-term substitute teacher to a few dozen difficult teenagers at a school that labels itself as "progressive." Gold is wizardly in her use of words, offering extended and compelling accounts of what's going on inside her head--at school, at home, and even on the subway. She writes not only as a teacher, but also as a woman, as an American struggling to make a living in the early 21st century, and as an intellectual artist who's striving to find a comfortable, rewarding place for herself in this world. I urge you to pick up this book and read it, not for answers but for entertainment and as a window into the life of one particular human being, at a particular place in time in America.

A friend of mine gave me this book, knowing that I was always on the look out for something really smart,really funny,and most of all, really well-written. "You'll love this," she said, pressing it into my eager little hands, and she was right. Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity is the story of the author's four-month stint teaching English at a "progressive" New York City high school, but before you read another word, you should know this is neither a corny idealistic-teacher-whips-kids-into-noble-shape book or a sociological expose about what's-wrong-with-schools-today. Instead, Brief Intervals is a black comedy about the difference between idealism and reality and life inside an institution---in this case, an institution that should feel both weird and recognizable to us all---high school.In case you've ever forgotten what it feels like to be really young---say fourteen---this book will remind you.Gold, a poet, has a brilliant ear and brilliant eye, and almost nothing escapes her. Her portraits of the high school bully, the popular kids, the class clown and the class victim, are unforgettable. So are the sympathetic portrayals of the teachers, a multi-cultural bunch who really are trying their best. But it is Gold herself, with her failures, her doubts, her longings, and her flashbacks to her own schooldays, that makes this book a provocative and original delight.

Elizabeth Gold's book made me laugh so hard with intense recognition of my own experience on every page. I couldn't put it down for two days (very rare for me). I was a similar overeducated idealistic substitute teacher, who in the middle of the year, was placed in charge of an urban Oakland CA eighth grade ESL classroom (the previous teacher had had a nervous breakdown in the middle of class and left abruptly, leaving her students wondering where she had gone). Ms. Gold's description of the difficulty of managing such a classroom with no classroom management skills, no consequences for the student misbehavior, no support from senior administration, insufficient books/materials for her students, no curriculum, etc, etc were painfully similar and accurate to my experience. The teacher I had replaced was a "Teach for America" teacher, the best and brightest of college grads who have been placed in urban schools with 6 weeks of teacher training. Teaching in an urban school is one of the hardest jobs there is, and it takes professional, emotional, and material support to make it happen successfully. I've gone on to get my teaching credential and to realize how many more years it is going to take to become a master teacher. Elizabeth Gold is a brilliant writer and observer of urban education and its shortcomings and contradictions, and her insights of her four months teaching more than make up for her four months of inadequate "teaching" (which includes managing her classroom which she obviously couldn't manage at all).

This memoir of one writer's experience teaching in Queens, NY is not, as the book is marketed, about education. Instead, it is about a new teacher's experience within the New York City education system, and about her students and fellow teachers. As that, it works. With wit and candor, the memoir details the writer's encounters with a system on the verge of spiraling out of control.

"Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity" caught my eye when I walked into a bookstore and saw its bright yellow cover with an old-fashioned schoolgirl-turned-sideways, almost staring out at me. And then I read the title. My son is a student in one of New York's many "magnet schools" that have long and fancy names, names that are ultimately meaningless. When I read the dust jacket and discovered that it's a first-person account of one particular teacher's experience in such a school, I sat down at a table and began reading it. I'm not usually one to buy hardcovers, but I made an exception, this time. It became my subway reading, after I took my son to school, and then when coming home in the evening from work. I smiled to myself with every page, tickled at the author's excellent humor, directed more at herself and at her reactions to her situation of being a soul lost in the chaos of an urban middle school, than at any of the students placed in her charge. Even so, I felt close to her and to her students, and even to some of the author's fellow teachers. It's not mean-spirited, but it does show some bitterness and longing for something much, much better. The author's preface is the only weakness of the book, at least from my perspective. It reads awkwardly and seems rather forced, as if her editor might have suggested too strongly that one was needed, and it's really something best skimmed over or ignored, altogether. This book is not a scholarly study, nor does Gold present it as one. Instead, it's a personal narrative of a woman who had taught thousands of adult students in urban community colleges, but had her socks knocked off by the very different milieu of hormone-rich adolescents who have no choice but to be in school from morning until mid-afternoon. The author does not wear kid gloves in talking about herself, nor does she wear them in talking about her students, other teachers, or the school's hapless principal. "Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive School" is not going to inspire anyone to teach in New York City's public schools, but that's clearly not why it was written, nor why it was published. It does not offer solutions, because that's doubtlessly not its reason for being, either. But if you want a good, heartfelt story of a smart human being, describing their experience of feeling like a duck out of water, very much like a reader might encounter in the bittersweet (sometimes just plain bitter) stories of David Sedaris, this book is for you. I've noticed that another online bookseller categorizes "Brief Intervals" as an education title, and that's unfortunate because doing so might lead to expectations that aren't valid. Lest it disappoint anyone looking for a scholarly tome on the problems of public education, let me forewarn potential readers that Gold's book is good for a look into her own soul, but not into databases or cited sources.