Ms. Moffett's First Year

"As a national teaching shortage loomed in the summer of 2000, Donna Moffett, a forty-five-year-old legal secretary, answered an ad seeking "talented professionals" from other fields to teach in some of New York City's worst schools. Seven weeks later she was in a first-grade classroom at P.S. 92 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, almost completely unprepared for what she was about to face." "Abby Goodnough, a New York Times education reporter, followed Moffett through her first year in the New York City Teaching Fellows program. In this story, Goodnough, now the Times's Miami bureau chief, shows how all the education buzzwords, bromides and prescriptions for reform - the tired slogans that seem to multiply every election year - melt to irrelevance at the classroom door." "This is not a Hollywood-friendly cliche about one person making a difference, nor a reductive indictment of the public education system. It is a portrait of the inadequacy of good intentions, of the challenges of educating poor and immigrant populations, and of a well-meaning but poorly prepared teacher who tries, valiantly, to keep swimming after jumping in over her head."--Jacket.