Common Sense

What It Means to Be a Teacher

By (author) Michael Gose

Hardback - £85.00

Publication date:

12 June 2014

Length of book:

266 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781475807585

“Finally a book about teaching that tells it like it is,” NEA Today said about Michael Gose’s first edition, What It Means to Be a Teacher. The second edition continues the stories that capture the meaning of teaching and now looks back with commentary on how those tales also work as parables. In the spirit of Thomas Paine, this second edition uses “Common Sense” to tell what is really going on with students, teachers, and schools. (Hint: the reality is actually a lot more optimistic than commonly portrayed in the media.)
Michael Gose’s Common Sense: What It Means to Be a Teacher is an arresting autobiographical reflection on teaching. Similar to modern classics like Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self, Gose wraps incisive reflections about education into flesh and blood narratives. With a moving examination ranging from Thomas Paine to current opinion polls and his decades of teaching experience, Gose clearly demonstrates why education remains our nation’s most worthwhile enterprise. A well-crafted piece of prose, Common Sense: What It Means to Be a Teacher bypasses the doom-and-gloom talking points surrounding the state of American education, opting instead for practical reasons why we can and should believe in teaching.