The Sub

Jimmy Jazz tells stories about his time as a substitute teacher in the varied schools of Southern California, using a prose style that bounces between Steinbeck, Seuss, and Kerouac. The lines work equally well read silently or aloud, and have depth equal to their witty wording. Great book, well worth the read, esp. for anyone considering or already involved in teaching.

Lots of little episodes in the life of a SoCal substitute teacher make up a broad portrait of a seemingly cool young man getting slowly ground up in a dysfunctional system. Written in a kind of free-rambling, Joe Strummeresque, hip-hop rhyming lingo, the prose makes a refreshing break from the norm. It's not like there's a real narrative here to be disturbed anyway. Rather interesting all in all.

Jimmy Jazz adopts a sort of Hip Hop Dylanesque (a la "Advice for Geraldine on a Misceleaneous Birthday" or "11 Outlines Epitaphs")prose stlye in rendering his experiences, both positive and negative, as a long term substitute teacher.The book and its chapters are pretty short, but that's a positive here as otherwise the prose style would become a burden. It goes off a bit too far off base anayway on rare ocassion but not far enough to give up and start a murder mystery or whatever.Part autobigraphical retrospective, part philosophical rambling, part jive rap because it feels good apparently, the book nevertheless communicates the full range of experience a sub faces, the problems and attitudes that are creating havoc within modern public education and, amazingly, the aspects of the job that are truly fulfilling--fulfilling enough to keep a body coming back for more despit all the garbage attendant upon the task.Well worth reading, this is t! he type of book you will get the most out of by reading a chapter at a time with intervening breaks so both the message, and the prose, can digest a bit.

Jimmy Jazz, though a spaz, whose fine lines rhyme all the time (divine?) manages through his wit, mind, brains, cerebral cortex, gray matter, head cheese, noggin, to put out a synonym-ridden ultra-real tale of life as a substitute teacher. Though he write like a loose Dr. Seuss or, perhaps, a stoic beat poet in a Levi's jeans ad, there is a plot (fraught with a spot of philosophical-psychological-metabolical musings). All in all, not bad.