Hall of Fools, by Shamrock McShane
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Hall of Fools, by Shamrock McShane
Free Ebook PDF Hall of Fools, by Shamrock McShane
Hall of Fools is the story of public education, seen through the prism of a thirty-year career teaching Language Arts in middle school. This searing first-hand account of writing in the trenches finds its literary kin in Hemingway, Proust, Marx, a noble heritage extending to the ancients, enlisted to battle in the war on ignorance. Race, politics, philosophy, aesthetics, religion, unions, sex, gender, violence, crime, love, hate, history, all must pass through the Hall of Fools. Hall of Fools is a nonfiction novel about American public education. If you want to know what it’s like to teach in a public school for one whole year – or thirty – or any number in between, if you want to know if your children are safe in school, or if they’re learning anything and who is teaching it to them, if you’re brave enough, enter the Hall of Fools.
Hall of Fools, by Shamrock McShane- Amazon Sales Rank: #2014314 in Books
- Published on: 2015-05-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.17" w x 6.00" l, 1.50 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 466 pages
About the Author Shamrock McShane, with more than three decades of experience in teaching, from elementary school through college, primarily in middle school, from coaching the girls basketball team at Hawthorne High School to taking over Harry Crews' Intro to Fiction Writing course at the University of Florida, the critic who gave David Mamet his first rave review ("The Poet & the Rent", Pioneer Press, 1975), prize-winning playwright and filmmaker, Henfield Award for Fiction nominee, Shakespearean-trained actor whose roles have included Macbeth, Malviolio, Mercutio, Oberon and Prospero, 2004 Teacher of the Year, Language Arts and Reading Department chairman, Team Leader, host of ANTV's Puzzle of Puzzles.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Having had the opportunity to travel and see a good cross-section of the world By Michael P Bobbitt Having had the opportunity to travel and see a good cross-section of the world, and to spend time in some of the more primitive corners of the middle east, I’ve felt pretty good about my perception that America was, well, pretty great. For all of our failings, it still seemed clear to me by comparison how obviously better we were at most things, that our way of living and thinking was the high-water mark of mankind; we really were a city on the hill, so to speak. It was from this perspective, then, that I’ve always been incredulous when presented with statistics about the poor global standing America maintains with regard to education. I never really bought the story that our schools were deplorable and our students were getting worse by the year. How could that possibly be, I thought? My public education was great. The economy is humming along. Surely America will go on being awesome forever.Well, thanks a lot Shamrock McShane, for showing me how naïve and wrong I was. A Hall of Fools, among other things, is a 400+ page treatise on just how f***ed we actually are. The book starts off bleak and finds a way to get darker by the paragraph. This may seem like the blueprint for a something you don’t want to read, and I admit a few pages into it I was worried it was going to be a forum to hear a teacher gripe about how badly teachers are treated. How delighted I was to be so wrong. McShane writes like a master swordsman, cool and elegant, but in an instant so swift and deadly that the reader’s preconceived ideas on a wide range of subjects are splayed open. His fearlessness is shocking. Having taught in the public schools for more than 30 years, one would expect a kind of politically correct diplomacy from the author. Not only is this not the case, McShane seems to be on a mission to tear down the mush-mouth language of our hyper-sensitive modern culture. He has been in the trenches, and the s*** he’s seen can’t be called anything other than s***, no matter how upsetting it might be to the administration. The book plays out in a series of stories from his years in the classroom, strung together in a way that immerses the reader into the culture of McShane’s teaching journey. It’s a life steeped in Catch-22 futility and the absurdity of a Dada sound poem—a kid loses a spelling bee when they run out of words, bloodbath fights starting over a cookie, an illiterate athlete goes to Duke and becomes a millionaire, arbitrary metrics determining educator pay, a teacher’s lounge with ceiling tiles leaking actual s*** from an upstairs bathroom—a seemingly mad dash to homogenize a flock of underachievers and placate the ambition of disconnected politicians.I am a reader of books. Since I was a kid I have been captivated by the page. Turns out, I’m in the minority. McShane paints the picture of a string of generations who simply don’t read. There are so many problems in the school system—violence, apathy, lack of parental involvement, standardized testing, inept administration, laughable teacher pay—but the heart of the problem, why we are in real trouble as a nation, seems to be that we are becoming a country of non-readers. Non-reading students become adults who are incapable of thinking the big thoughts required to make life bearable, to build Rome or write Hamlet or contemplate the purpose for humanity. McShane has spent three decades leaning into the approaching storm of societal collapse, on the razor edge of it in middle school classrooms, in the ineptitude of leadership so afraid of failure they manically legislate a system of feel-good advancement for everyone except the teachers who must watch Nero fiddling and take the blame for the destruction around them. To his credit, McShane doesn’t affect the kind of grace and stoicism we expect from our teacher stereotypes. Instead, he gives it to us with both barrels—blazing vitriol, uncomfortably sharp wit, and an unwillingness to go down quietly: Hunter S. Thompson with a lesson plan, Yossarian trying to outrun a war determined to chew him up, and, sadly for all of us, Cassandra with a deaf audience.McShane has lived a life in the classroom, and written an important account of the sausage-making of the teaching profession. But is the book any good? Is it worth 400+ pages of your time when Faulkner’s The Sound the Fury is still on your to-read list, when you’re still pretending to have read Ulysses or anything by Dostoyevsky? The answer is an emphatic yes. Absolutely. Hall of Fools reads faster than its length, with the episodic narrative of Kurt Vonnegut and the gut-opening rawness of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a journey to the end of the night of our collective intellect, faltering under the weight of entitlement and a whole culture wasted on frivolity.It’s not all heaviness and despair. McShane is at times profoundly funny, light, sardonic. Like life, it’s all very funny because it has to be, a comedy because the tragedy of it is too much to swallow. Hall of Fools is challenging, infuriating, elucidative and unflinching, but never at the expense of being entertaining. McShane is a masterful storyteller whose soul as a teacher is never far from view. I finished the book worried for my son and the world he’ll help to lead one day, but hopeful that he will encounter a Mr. McShane along his educational path. Read this book. Share it with everyone you can so that Hall of Fools will become a bellwether for systemic change in how we educate our children, how we think of educators and our identity as an intellectual people, unafraid to dream big dreams.Or just read it to laugh at all the dummies and feel better about yourself. McShane will laugh with you.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Wake up America! This is a must read book. By Tess Hall of Fools is a compelling read, and page turner, despite it's 400 plus pages. The reader is taken behind the scenes of a typical (gee I hope not!) middle to upper class public middle-school in modern day America. If even 10% of this story is accurate on a national level, our country had better wake up and do something about public education. I believe this book is on the level of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" a genuine alert to the masses about a long on-going problem which is being ignored. This book is a gut wrenching story of deplorable teaching conditions, from incidents like fecal material dripping through damaged bathroom flooring, onto teachers in their lounge below eating their lunch to the constant level of violence and disrespect, both, towards teachers, and fellow students is mind boggling. When incidents like a punch to the face (facial bones broken) and heavy loaded backpacks intentionally dropped from upper levels on an unsuspecting student (resulting in a 3-week hospital stay for recipient) not only have no legal repercussion, but are the norm, it is easy to extrapolate and understand why our country is so violence orientated. It is a shocking must read for anyone and everyone. A lot of this book reminds me of the old movie, "To Sir, with Love" starring Sidney Poitier as well as other movies of that genre. The big difference is the school in this book is not an inner city, no funding school, but a middle to upper-class school district in a distinctive higher education University town, where not only do the all kids flunking at the lowest level get promoted anyway, but where the good students are the big losers in their education. The only reason I'm not giving this book 5-stars is because of it's length, I feel it needs a solid edit, to trim 150-200 pages, but otherwise it is a 5-star rating for main content. I hope one of the major publishing companies out there picks up the rights to this book, it is an important work that needs to reach the masses. The author is well qualified to write on the topic, listing his 30-years as a middle school teacher.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Smarmy liberal point of view. By Robert G. Morris Jr. Lets you know why are schools are degrading into cesspools of liberal/progressive poo. The authors ideology is contradicted by way of his contempt for the upper echelon, his contempt for his students, while at the same time his dismissal of anything southern or christian. You feel as though he would be his happiest if his lot in life was to lie around all day smoking dope and reading philosophy, and cracking smarmy liberal shots at all that he observed around him. Most of his description of minority pupils and their contempt for anything structured by the whites is spot-on. When I attended public school in Gainesville in the 70's it was actually difficult to concentrate on learning because of the disruption caused by these attendees. They just hated whites, whether student, or adult. I'm sure it's even worse now after decades of liberal policy in a very liberal town.The author offers no solution to the problem; only observations and personal disdain for the way things are. Ironic, as his liberal outlook on life, and others like him, is the source of the problem.Why do people like this (the author) leave their bastions of liberal origin which they have already screwed up beyond belief, and insert themselves into polar opposite regions only to espouse how screwed up everything here is?I say, Mr. Author, return to Chicago, smoke your dope, and enjoy what life has left for youThis fat-assed southern redneck has had about enough of you and your philosophy.
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