SUB

In this memoir, Harris recounts her days as a substitute teacher in Philadelphia’s public schools.

The book’s first section gives a detailed day-by-day account of Harris’ first months of teaching in 2001 and 2002, moving from one school to another frequently and rarely spending more than a day with the same students. By the end of the school year, Harris, who had previously worked as a screenwriter, decided that teaching was not the career for her. The book’s second section analyzes the problems facing urban public schools and the teachers who work in them and is followed by an assessment of how individual schools have changed in the past two decades. In the third section, Harris returns to the classroom in 2017 for an insider’s view of how substitute teaching has changed since her previous stint. She ended up spending most of the year with a challenging group of students who responded to her teaching but were poorly served by the system as a whole. She concludes by assessing the structural problems of the education system, focusing on the push to include children with behavioral problems in mainstream classrooms without enough supervision or support to allow all students the opportunity to learn. Harris is a strong storyteller, and although the amount of detail included in the book’s first section makes the text overlong, it also paints a lively, intimate picture of the challenges faced by well-intentioned but naïve educators. The author addresses the racial and socio-economic aspects of school problems from a unique perspective: Harris, a Black Philadelphia native who attended parochial schools, was both familiar with the lives of the students she met and also shocked by the difference between her school experience and theirs. Harris’ thoughtful and impassioned exploration of what makes a classroom work offers parents, educators, and policymakers solid suggestions for improving the school environment.

A persuasive case for education reform based on data and classroom experience.