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LOSING MY FACULTIES: A TEACHER'S STORY by Brendan Halpin. New York: Villard Books, 2003. 187 pp. $21.95.
Alternating self-deprecation with critiques of many of contemporary public education's most difficult issues, Brendan Halpin's Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story is a frank and amusing account of one young teacher's nine years as a public school teacher in the greater Boston area. Simultaneously embracing and resisting his internal urge to be the "Great Urban Educator" (p. 60), Halpin traces his experiences as "one of those rare and probably defective people who really enjoy the company of teenagers" (p. 4) to the "front lines" (p. 7) of education. His experiences are shaped by a haphazard mix of interest, need, and blind luck that reveal the logic and illogic of much of the planning and processes that define the teaching experience.
Losing My Faculties is organized into five parts, each one describing some significant moment in Halpin's formative experiences as a teacher. Parts One and Two, Prehistory and Newcastle, capture the excitement, fear, and exhaustion that marked Halpin's year as a student teacher and his first year as a fullfledged teacher in a suburb fifty miles outside of Boston. Readers are able at once to sense the stresses brought on by last-minute teaching assignments, nonexistent curricula, and intrafaculty rivalries - stresses magnified by Halpin's epiphany about teaching's "dirty little secret": "Teaching is a really hard job to do well and a really easy job to do badly" (p. 18). It is the constant attention to the struggle between teaching and teaching well that characterize most of the moments that Halpin shares with his audience.
This struggle is illustrated in Halpin's description of drug use by two of his most disruptive male students. The boys occasionally come to his class under the influence of drugs, yet Halpin decides to look the other way. He says, "These kids are fourteen. And...