Common Sense: What It Means to Be a Teacher [Hardcover]

Finally a book about teaching that tells it like it is, NEA Today said about Michael Goses first edition, What It Means to Be a Teacher. The second edition continues the stories that capture the meaning of teaching and now looks back with commentary on how those tales also work as parables. In the spirit of Thomas Paine, this second edition uses Common Sense to tell what is really going on with students, teachers, and schools. (Hint: the reality is actually a lot more optimistic than commonly portrayed in the media.)Michael D. Gose, Ph.D. has taught at the elementary, secondary, and university levels. He has been a professor at Pepperdine University, teaching curriculum and methods, film, and the Great Books Colloquium since 1980.

Michael Goses Common Sense: What It Means to Be a Teacher is an arresting autobiographical reflection on teaching. Similar to modern classics like Richard Rodriguezs Hunger of Memory and Keith Gilyards Voices of the Self, Gose wraps incisive reflections about education into flesh and blood narratives. With a moving examination ranging from Thomas Paine to current opinion polls and his decades of teaching experience, Gose clearly demonstrates why education remains our nations most worthwhile enterprise. A well-crafted piece of prose, Common Sense: What It Means to Be a Teacher bypasses the doom-and-gloom talking points surrounding the state of American education, opting instead for practical reasons why we can and should believe in teaching. David G. Holmes, 2013 Langston Hughes Fellow, University of Kansas, and professor of English and rhetoric, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California

What I observed about the first edition of Goses What It Means to be a Teacher remains the same only more so with this second edition of Common Sense. The book keeps it real. Gose sees teaching not only as a profession but as a heuristic journey full of lifes joys and pains, and he keeps you guessing about what you would have done inl&