Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

No Teacher Left Behind

It may be difficult to muster up a lot of sympathy for laid off Wall Street traders, especially when you start to think about how much money your retirement fund has lost in the last year, and it just keeps sinking, and sinking, and sinking. Or maybe that's just me. While most of these highly-compensated men and women are probably donning suits and hitting the pavement in search of another job in the finance industry, a small number are heading back to the classroom--to teach. Laid off traders are leveraging their years in the numbers racket to become math teachers in New Jersey, an area experiencing teacher shortages.

Before they stand in the front of the classroom, those traders might want to get a glimpse of life from a teacher's vantage point. Tracy Kidder follows Chris Zajac, a dedicated and formidable fifth grade teacher at an impoverished school in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The story of one school year, Among Schoolchildren shares Ms. Zajac's thoughts and captures her unflagging persistence at providing her students with a quality education.

For a more lighthearted story of a first-time teacher, turn to Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher's First Year. She has since given up the classroom to become a children's author and a certified Readiologist, but Esme Raji Codell's stories from the trenches will stick with you for a long time to come. Despite the intense challenges she faces from angry kids, stuffy bureaucrats, and less-than helpful parents, her stories will make you laugh out loud.

I hope you like documentaries. And subtitles. I know some folks have issues with these, but if you can get past them, one of the most charming and affecting films ever made about life in the classroom awaits you. To Be and To Have turns the lens on the teacher and children in a one-room schoolhouse in rural France. Teacher Georges Lopez has a quiet manner and seemingly inexhaustible patience for his pupils who range in age from 4 to 12. This delightful film gave me a warm feeling for its entire 104 minute run time and managed to do it without being syrupy-sweet enough to make my teeth hurt.

Extra Credit: A classic expose of the deep disparities in the public education system that still rings true today, Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools is a still-relevant read that might make you angry enough to want to throw the book against the wall--or at the unjust system of education that shortchanges so many.