Ms. Moffett's First Year: Becoming a Teacher in America

The book,Ms. Moffett's First Year, Becoming A Teacher in America, was exactly as presented by seller. Title of the book is misleading, due to the fact, there was too much rhetoric in the beginning of the book about politics and finance in NYC school system.

This book is written in a breezy, popular style that kept me turning pages right to the end. However, the content is serious, and should be of interest to parents, prospective teachers, and to anyone who cares about children. The book is partly the story of one woman's initiation into the challenging work of teaching in a troubled city school. It is also a book about the politics of education. The author does a good job of explaining the many and varied political forces at work within the world of public schools. I think this book is a fair-minded and very readable introduction to a very complex subject.

I, too, was a New York City Teaching Fellow, and this book tells it like it is in America's urban schools. If you are already a teacher, this book will reaffirm everything you already know about the ups and downs of this most challenging and rewarding job. When your friends and loved ones ask what you do every day, just give them this book to read. If you are not a teacher, then you need to read this book to see what's really going on in our country's most troubled schools. It's all here -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I was eager to read this book, as Goodnough's NY Times series on the Teaching Fellows provided the impetus for my own leap into the program. I began teaching in Fall 2003 and can say that this book is amazingly accurate. While there have been a number of program changes (noted in the epilogue) the essential experience remains the same - the daily, even sometimes hourly, ups and downs of being a first year teacher with so little training is described in such exquisite detail that the book is, somewhat surprisingly, a page-turner.

I adored this book. From the poignant anecdotes about these scrappy, precious inner-city kids, to the searing psychological portrait of this flawed but well-intentioned secretary-turned-teacher, to the lip-curling analysis of the New York City educational system, this book really has it all. Surprisingly, this intelligent, topical read is also a juicy page-turner that you will not be able to put down!