Learning and schooling are different things. This seems like an obvious fact, and yet the educational system students and teachers do their daily work within often doesn’t often acknowledge it.
Zach Czaia’s book of essays Good Teaching: A Provocation works against that lazy assumption, that learning = schooling. It does this work, not through logical argumentation or reams of quantitative data but through that dangerous and nourishing morsel, the human story. Through an honest and searching account of his own experience as both student and teacher in school systems, Czaia punctures cliches and bromides about schooling and learning, and provokes his readers to do the same. In so doing, his writing works against the grain of the continuing standardization and automation of education, and centers the encounter between human teachers and human students—and the transformative power those relationships hold.
Praise for Good Teaching
“Some books offer insights into the classroom while others offer insights into teachers' lives. Good Teaching: A Provocation is a thoughtful series of essays examining the intersection of the classroom and life, professional and personal, pedagogy and calling. Reach for this book if you’re in need of a challenge, encouragement, practical resources, or personal reflection. Zach’s book has all this and more and will be one you reach for again and again.”
—Susan Barber, high school English teacher; author 100 % Engagement: 33 Lessons to Promote Participation, Beat Boredom, and Deepen Learning in the ELA Classroom
“Zach Czaia tells us: ‘I am still a classroom teacher who is always trying (struggling, really) to integrate his experience of the imaginative life with his experience of teaching in a contemporary American high school….wondering where wisdom lives, or hides, in my practice as a teacher.’ And we say, ‘You have shown us what you have learned and why you have learned it. To persist, to be humble and transparent. You live the truth. And we are grateful to be learning from you.’ This collection opens a space in which we can all find joy and hope.
—Fr. Joseph A. Brown, SJ; PhD. Professor, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and author of The Sun Whispers, Wait: New & Collected Poems
“What an intense delight, and what a clear-eyed, clear-headed challenge this collection of essays is to any reader. Any reader who has thought with attention and openness about what learning is, what teaching is and can be, and about how to stay attentive to changes or the lack of changes in educational systems—any reader!—will find food for thought in these essays.”
—Deborah Keenan, poet and author of The Saint of Everything and Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems
“By turns outraged and grateful, pensive and restorative, Czaia’s epistolary essays capture aspects of teaching’s ever-elusive art—and thereby befriend us by living up to Frost’s dictum: No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”
— Scott Newstok, author of How to Think like Shakespeare
“Wisdom, finding a guide, being in relationships: these aren’t on standardized tests. Laughter isn’t quantifiable. The power of a story isn’t found in a rubric. What does it feel to be alive as a teacher, a human being entrusted with the care of others? Read this book and you’ll have a sense of how Zach Czaia is ‘in school but not of school,’ a wish he has for his young child and for all our children. Plus you’ll get poetry!”
—Susan Debra Blum, anthropologist, and author of Schoolishness : Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning
“Zach Czaia’s vivid, personal essays remind us teachers of what we can too easily forget: that information is not wisdom, schooling is not learning, and training is not teaching. His writings crackle with a searching, honest, and critical intelligence – as well as gratitude, self-criticism, humility, wit, and an eye for what makes a student or teacher special. If you’re a teacher, this book will refresh and renew; and if you’re a lover of memoir and the essay form, it will provoke and delight.”
—Michael West, Assistant Professor, University of Dallas; Shakespeare scholar
“What a treasure! Czaia’s Good Teaching: A Provocation is a fusion of poetry, personal experience, and teacherly wisdom from a poet-teacher who has been two decades in our twenty-first century American classrooms.”
—Peter Shull, high school English teacher and novelist; author of Why Teach?
