Overview

Memorable teaching memoirs exist-Frank McCourt's Teacher Man and Pat Conroy's The Water Is Wide come to mind. Adventures in the Teaching Trade represents a worthy addition to the list. Jones revisits High Plains schools at a time when public schools reflected the values and aspirations of the communities they served. Interrelated essays follow a 1960s graduate school refugee blessed with an authority-resistant personality learning his trade in small rural schools in Kansas and Nebraska. Keen observations of jargon-babbling educrats, hilarious sketches of doofy administrators, eccentric teaching colleagues, and work-resistant custodians, coupled with sympathetic student portraits, demonstrate a veteran storyteller's ability to entertain and inform. Jones shuns the didactic, but those interested in buffing their teaching skills will find examples of what to do and what, for goodness' sake, not to do. During three decades in the classroom, Jones and his students witnessed the Civil Rights Movement, urban unrest, the Vietnam War, the Great Russian Grain Robbery, the impeachment of two presidents, the Federal Reserve's near extinction of the rural economy, the Columbine massacre, and the opening skirmishes in the current war on meritocracy, parents and their children. How students and their teacher coped with major events sometimes far removed from rural High Plains communities illustrates the stubborn resilience of the human spirit.

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Bryan Jones is the author of The Farming Game, Mark Twain Made Me Do It & Other Plains Adventures, and North of the Platte, South of the Niobrara: A Little Further Into the Nebraska Sand Hills. Jones taught school for three decades and presided over a modest livestock operation for another decade. He lives somewhere in the American West with his wife Kathy, two loyal dogs, and a healthy supply of firewood.

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