When I complete the final sentence of Getting Schooled and close the cover, savoring that moment with the heft of an actual book in my hands, the first thought that comes to mind is what an honest writer Garret Keizer has proven himself to be across 299 pages.

The author’s latest is the chronicle of his 2010-11 academic year teaching English at Vermont’s Lake Region Union High School. It’s a return to the place he taught for fifteen years before dedicating himself to writing full-time for the next fourteen years of his life. Month by month, August to June, Keizer present an unvarnished, honest view of his students, his colleagues, public education, life in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, and that hardest honest of them all — about himself.

Keizer, who earned his master’s in English from UVM in 1978, is a serious man in a world that, in many ways, seems to grow more frivolous by the day. Previous books by the contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and former Guggenheim Fellow have taken on broad societal issues such as privacy and noise. Much like Thoreau, his prose reaches out with a firm grip to give the world a good shake. But Keizer’s serious mind is balanced by a good deal of humor and a great deal of heart. His compassion runs deep and encircles his students who balance school with chores on the family farm or a job at the McDonalds in town; the single parents (some of them former students from his first run as a teacher) trying to make it all work; and, of course, his fellow educators.

Keizer renders the daily life of a high school with clarity and insight in passages such as this:  “No less than a city after dark, a school after hours is a different place, at once spent in its disheveled appearance and flexed for more passionate engagements. The student body’s complacent middle class is mostly gone, leaving the felons and the stars, the former in detention and the latter running drills down in the gym or practicing their scales in the band room.”

Speaking in a phone interview from his home in the Northeast Kingdom, Keizer considers the contrasting temperaments that a solitary writing life and the work of a high school teacher would seem to demand. Instead, he notes a similarity: “They both take energy and dedication,” he says. “Neither can be done well half-asleep.”

Keizer says he didn’t go into his year’s return to teaching thinking that it would yield a book. But he did keep a journal, a pattern from previous periods of intense experience in his life — when his wife was pregnant with their daughter or during international travel. He first explored the teaching year with an essay in Harper’s Magazine. Expanding on it, he strove to create “a book length essay that read almost like a novel. I was attempting the best of both worlds — taking the flights and ruminations of an essay and combining that with a story.”

During his year back in the classroom, Keizer rises at 4:30 a.m. to grab quiet time for planning before the drive to school, and his car is often the last one in the parking lot at the end of the day. He tackles above-and-beyond projects such as letting students know that he’ll be at a luncheonette in Barton every Thursday morning at 6:30 a.m. Students and parents are welcome to join him — breakfast on the English teacher.

Throughout the year, just one student takes him up on the offer, though the young man turns into a free-breakfast regular.

Reflecting on those often lonely mornings at the luncheonette, Keizer writes: “The project serves to remind me of what has to be one of the most central paradoxes of teaching: that you must reach out to every student with the belief that no student is beyond your reach and that you must, at the same time, hold to the conviction that having served one student is worth the effort of having tried to serve them all. Losing sight of the first is a quick slide to elitism; losing sight of the second is a recipe for despair.”

Many will enjoy and draw something important from this book — educators, parents of high school kids, school board members, for instance. But one of the most important audiences might be college students contemplating an education major and a career in the schools. Whether they take Keizer’s view from the front of the classroom as a cautionary tale or a call to arms will go a long way toward telling them if the teaching life is for them.

Garret Keizer will be at Phoenix Books in Burlington on Thursday, Sept. 11, at 7 p.m. for a reading, discussion and book signing. 

PUBLISHED

09-09-2014
Thomas James Weaver
Garret Keizer