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“To me, Susan is the quintessential teacher . . . Thanks Susan - on days when the going is toughest, you and your students will always be there with me to help me remain sane. And hopeful.”–Deborah Meier
“In the tradition of Jim Herndon's The Way It Spozed To Be, but in her own passionate voice, Susan Ohanian tells stories of the real. Others might write abstractly of standards and accountability, Ohanian presents us with Sylvia and Shari, Jackson and Jolene and the other seventh graders she teaches who, in their own quirky ways, teach Ohanian what it means to be a teacher. Ultimately, this is her story.”–Gerald W. Bracey, Independent Educational Researcher and Writer
“This is a book full of unapologetic piss and bile and outrage. In this take-no-prisoner book, nobody gets off easy - not the schools, teachers, the glib educational "experts", nor the standardistos. Susan Ohanion has written a dark, disturbing rebuttal to quick-fix solutions for our schools. Yet this is also written a book of tremendous caring. Again and again I was struck by Ohanion's unwillingness to give up on the "rotten readers" in an urban school that the system has forsaken. A half dozen times while reading these portraits of middle school kids, and the author's compassion for them, I found myself wiping tears from my eyes. Read this book.”–Ralph Fletcher, author of What A Writer Needs
About the Author
Susan Ohanian is a longtime teacher and free-lance writer whose articles have appeared in periodicals ranging from the Atlantic and Washington Monthly to Phi Delta Kappan and Education Week. Visit www.susanohanian.org for a wealth of information on education issues and to learn more about Susan Ohanian. You'll find commentary, cartoons, letters, resources, quotes and a word of the day offering children a provocative way to increase their vocabulary. Her email address is: susano@gmavt.net.
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Why should you read Susan Ohanian's latest book? Caught in the Middle: Nonstandard Kids and a Killing Curriculum doesn't offer any lesson plans or multimedia interdisciplinary thematic units. It won't help you align your curriculum with state standards. Ohanian doesn't bolster every claim with research, or bandy about the latest educational jargon. And there's not a single rubric to be found. What Ohanian does is tell the stories of real children, mostly seventh and eighth graders she taught over a ten-year period in New York. The children she focuses on are the most vulnerable, the least likely to succeed in a bureaucratic system: Keith, a fifteen-year-old who reads his first book, Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop, in eighth grade . . . paranoid Arnold, who recites a catalog of those who are trying to kill him . . . Tiffany, nobody's friend, until she discovers a thesaurus and falls in love with whoop and rhapsodize . . . unforgettable Sylvia, a legend in her own time, who curls up and sucks her thumb while listening to John Ciardi read poems with his son. The children's stories, told in exquisite and sometimes painful detail, bring vivid particularity to themes that Ohanian addressed in more theoretical terms in her 1999 book, One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards. The new book is devoted to the children who don't meet the standards, and the harms they suffer from a standardized curriculum. Ohanian writes, "We must get back to the craft of nurturing children, proclaiming loud and clear that no curriculum silver bullet is going to enable every kid to succeed in every subject.Read more ›
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Once again, Ms. Ohanian reminds us that "it is better to do nothing than to do something bad....First, do no harm." (138) Then she tells us about Lucille who wants to pass the test but doesn't think that she did so well. And then she gets sick. "I try to rush her to the lavatory, but we don't make it, and evidence of Lucille's 'failure' lies visible in the hallway... As I clean up the vomit, I vow never again to drill children on such inappropriate curricula." (172) By telling the stories of real children who need relevant curricula in their lives, she echoes my belief that the most important factors in any lesson are connection, community, competence, and choice. "I only know that if you don't recognize and accommodate and nourish uniqueness, you don't have any chance to educate children in your care--not for writing, not for anything. And to recognize a student's uniqueness you have to offer him choices. Real choices. And to offer students choices, a teacher has to make choices herself. A teacher who makes choices is a teacher who is still alive." (99) It is my hope that educators read this book as well as Ms. Ohanian's previous book, One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards, and make note of the many wisdoms found in them. I share Ms. Ohanian's belief that the truth about education is found in our children's stories.
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The main criticism I have of this book is that it is too short. I literally couldn't put it down till I finished it, yet dreaded the last page which seemed to be looming all too soon. (Halfway through, I did put it down long enough to log onto Amazon and order four other titles by this author. And I do plan to order more copies of this book to give to certain people who need to read it.)
This book reminds me of one of my favorite books about the teaching experience, that I have reread various times over the years -- "Death at an Early Age" by Jonathan Kozol. However, while "Death" is simply and purely heartbreaking, "Caught in the Middle" has great deal of irony and humor and a sense of fierce survival. Besides differences in writing style between Kozol and Ohanian, the difference has a lot to do with the age of the students in the respective books: Kozol's students are early primary students, terribly vulnerable to the casual damage being inflicted on them, while Ohanian's students are seventh graders, who are starting to discover their own independence and forms of resistance. What the two books have in common is a passionate love and awareness for the kids themselves, and respect for their sacred personhood, and openness to learning from the kids.
This book, in a very personal way, exposes both what is wrong with the public school system and why the move toward standardization is a move in exactly the wrong direction, doomed to fail. Children are not statistics and they are not uniform products to be turned out on an assembly line, and never will be.
I had never heard of this book before I stumbled on it -- it is an obscure book published by some tiny small press. But it deserves to be better known, and I want to hear more of Susan Ohanian's stories.
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Several years ago, I read Susan Ohanian's book "One Size Fits Few". She is outstanding at dissecting what is actually taking place in education. She is able to pull together for us the internal parts of "the story." She puts into words my own feelings and beliefs about 1)age appropriate material - readiness - child development 2)what/why/how politicians, CEO's, etc. have made themselves the education experts and on and on. Ohanian re-enforces the simple truth - we must get back to remembering that we are dealing with individuals - human beings, not test scores.
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This item: Caught in the Middle: Nonstandard Kids and a Killing Curriculum
