Letters to a Teacher

Michael Dirda

Certainly teachers will enjoy and learn from these "letters." But anyone who enjoys a short trot with a cultured mind will be glad to encounter Sam Pickering's essays. He exemplifies the virtues he tries to impress upon his students: decency, kindness, tolerance and understanding. Plus he's funny.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Pickering, an English professor at the University of Connecticut and personal essayist (Waltzing the Magpies; The Best of Pickering; etc.), serves up pedagogical advice couched in folksy language and peppered with personal anecdotes, tall tales and family stories. In 10 letters (on "The Good Teacher," "Truth," "Pressure" and more), he ranges over the educational map, considering his education, the schooling of his children, and the middle school and college students he has taught in places as varied as Tennessee, Connecticut, Western Australia and Syria. Modest reflection ("I marvel at how superficial and fragmentary my knowledge seems to be") coexists with firm suggestions ("Instead of humiliating a child, you should talk to parents, generally the force pressuring a child to cheat") amid discussions of the practical matters of teaching (handling committee work, dealing with grade pressure, testing, preparing assignments, mentoring). Education controversies are mentioned gently ("The effects of classroom doings are always mysterious, something that should be pounded, intellectually of course, into every legislator in the nation") and sacred cows sometimes tipped ("question the emphasis education puts on writing," he says). Pickering's odd timelessness-his ideas seem simultaneously old-fashioned and up-to-date-and his warm wisdom (and occasional iconoclasm) will please educators and interested lay readers alike. Agent, Nat Sobel. (Jan.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

KLIATT

Touted as "the teacher who inspired Dead Poets Society," Sam Pickering has been teaching for more than 40 years. Currently this author of 19 books is inspiring students at the University of Connecticut. Letters to a Teacher is addressed to fellow educators, but can be enjoyed by a wider audience. His ten letters cover such diverse topics as: The Teacher's Life, The Good Teacher, Qualities of a Teacher, Words, Interests, Truth, Pressure, Requirements, and Last Thoughts. Intensely personal and passionate, these letters include real and invented stories and words of wisdom from others, such as Kenneth Grahame, Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, Thoreau, Milton, Wordsworth, and William Hazlitt. Pickering shares his teaching experiences in Australia and Jordan as well as his days at Dartmouth, where he was faced with a student's public obscenity. He advises his readers not to take his book too seriously. "Read the book. Ponder some things then push it aside and move beyond it. Advice is suggestion...Don't hold grudges, and forget slights...If your school system is not unionized, it should be...Get to know your fellow teachers well...Whatever you do has the potential to influence someone else's child. If you smoke, you should stop. I preach and urge. I tell students that I do not give good grades to fools, and that anyone who smokes, jaywalks, or rides a bicycle without a helmet cannot make higher than a C in my class." The rest of the letters are in the same vein and the anecdotes are priceless. Wise, amusing, old-fashioned, and inspiring, Pickering is a man to spend time with. KLIATT Codes: SA--Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2004, Grove,242p., Ages 15 to adult.
—Janet Julian

Library Journal

Pickering (English, Univ. of Connecticut) has authored 17 books, 14 of which are collections of essays (most recently, The Best of Pickering). This collection, as its name implies, targets both beginning and veteran teachers, offering advice on subjects ranging from a teacher's lasting influence to being a "good" teacher to such perennial topics as truth. The result is perhaps the most poetic-even elegiac-writing about education published in the past year. The poetry is more implied than stated, but Pickering does wistfully recall a time when students actually related to authors such as Wordsworth. Pickering served as the model for John Keating, the renegade English teacher at a boys academy in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society, but he does an admirable job of eschewing the temptation to pontificate from the perch of fame. Practicing teachers at all levels are likely to benefit from his well-crafted and generous prose. Recommended for public and academic libraries collecting writing about the process of education.-Ari Sigal, Catawba Valley Community Coll. Lib., Hickory, NC Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An eclectic, uneven collection of ten essays recast as letters addressed to veteran and beginning teachers. The essay is Pickering's (English/Univ. of Connecticut) favored genre, and this offering, like his others (A Little Fling, 1999, etc.), shows both his strengths and weaknesses (as writer and as teacher). Dead Poets Society, Peter Weir's 1989 film about an unconventional English teacher, was based, in part, on the screenwriter's memories of Pickering's classes, and Pickering tells us that he has found it "impossible" to escape the umbrella of that film (yet-and here's the rub-he also opens that umbrella in many of these pieces). The essays mix advice, anecdote, criticism, memoir, silliness, poignancy, pomposity and platitude. At times, they also read like journal observations, stitched together with the threads of illustration and rumination. Generally, the topic sentence reigns. "A teacher must be patient and incredibly flexible," Pickering observes atop one paragraph, then muses below about inflexible schools, quotes a friend named Josh, ends with a Palestinian parable-thus exemplifying the predominant pattern. Sometimes the writer's observations have the sharp edge of truth ("If you are unable to live in a compromised world, you should not teach"), but elsewhere his maxims are really a thin glaze on ordinary donuts. Pickering is playful, in teaching and in writing, and he relates some amusing encounters with grade-grubbing students, angry parents, dim-witted and unsmiling bureaucrats. But he also tells (with some evident pleasure) about times when he intentionally deceived folks, a la Loki and Huck Finn (writing and sending bogus crank letters, for example). He seems unaware thatthis sort of thing can compromise his credibility as a writer-and teacher-as it becomes fair to ask: Are his anecdotes here real? Or did he fabricate them to foment something?A talented teacher tells all-though not every impression we leave class with may have been in the lesson plan. Agent: Nat Sobel/Sobel Weber Associates