Bring Your Own Pencil!

Book excerpt: In the tradition of Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Blackboard Jungle; Up the Down Staircase; and Welcome Back, Kotter: High school English and theatre teacher Buddy Lee Walter's fictionalized autobiography, Bring Your Own Pencil! The Making of a Teacher, will keep you in stitches while satirizing frustrated teachers, bumbling administrations, stupid bureaucracies, crazy students, troubled students, cool students, and the social conditions which produced all this. Eduardo Ciannelli finds himself, unexpectedly, in front of a classroom of high school students, and finds himself. His story is one of a reluctant - accidental - teacher who has to confront his own biases and assumptions about himself, his students, and the educational system, in order to reach the understanding that the entire thing is ultimately about the human connection. It is about the teacher/student relationship ... and how sometimes these roles get reversed. Join Eduardo on his journey, as he deals with the best and worst of administrators and the most centered and most troubled of students, to discover if he even wants to be a teacher and, if so, how to become a better one.