In Robert Bolt's play, A Man For All Seasons, the young man who would betray Sir Thomas More asks him for a recommendation so that he might find a place of power and prestige in the royal Court. More refuses, telling his young "friend" he should go into teaching. When the young man says pitifully, "who would know?"--even if he should become a great teacher--More slyly replies, "You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public that" Arguably, for teachers, recognition from friends and family, let alone students and God, would be welcome. When Sam Intrator, the editor of Stories of the Courage To Teach: Honoring the Teacher's Heart told his parents-both of whom are retired New York City school teachers-he was going into teaching, he writes, "I didn't anticipate their response. 'What? Why did you do that? You should look at other options,' my father said, clearly dismayed at my decision. 'You don't know what you're getting into,' my mother said quite ominously."

According to Intrator, who after many years as a high school English teacher is now an assistant professor of education and child study at Smith College, overcrowded classrooms, low pay, long hours, and teaching for state-formulated standardized testing can make teaching a demanding and under-appreciated job. Fifty percent of new teachers drop out of teaching in their first five years. What makes matters worse is that teachers are often made the scapegoat for society's failures: be they in race relations or declining test scores in reading and math. The result is that teachers often find themselves demoralized. They can lose heart in themselves and their profession, in their ability to make a difference.

The aim of Intrator's book, Stories of The Courage to Teach: Honoring the Teacher's Heart, is to renew, revitalize and rejuvenate teachers by telling their stories and reminding them and those who would listen that teaching matters. "The stories in this volume," Intrator writes in his introduction, "honor teachers who work, often against punishing odds, to keep heart so they can give heart to their students." Intrator's thesis can be understood as theoretically rooted in the work of Parker J Palmer, author of The Courage to Teach and founder of the Courage to Teach program. According to Intrator, the Courage to Teach program believes that "while technique and methodology are important, the source of good teaching emerges from the identity and integrity of the teacher." As Intrator explains, the Courage to Teach program "invites educators to reclaim their own wholeness and vocational clarity and to make connections between the renewal of a teacher's sprit and the revitalization of public education."

Intrator's book, which is really a collection of twenty-five essays with a foreword and afterword by Parker J. Palmer himself, followed by a short list of resources "compiled to honor and sustain the teacher's heart," is divided into five parts. Part I, "Turning Inward: Sustaining Our Own Hearts," argues that teachers must start their renewal by looking inward. Part II, "Reaching Out: Forging Relationships that Sustain Our Hearts," presents stories that reveal in subtle ways why teachers can't do it alone. They need each other and they need their students if they are going to make a difference. Part III, "Making Change: Reforms that Honor the Teacher's Heart," recounts stories of teachers working together to make the kind of small scale reforms that can eventually reform an entire institution. Part IV, "Rejuvenating Heart: The Courage To Teach Program," includes essays that outline the theory and practice of the Courage to Teach program and how it can be implemented to improve the quality of education in our schools.

As a university professor, the two essays that were most meaningful to me, were Robert G. Kraft's essay, "Teaching Excellence and the Inner Life of a Faculty" and Diana Chapman Walsh's essay, "Toward A Leadership of Peace for the Twenty-First Century Academy."

In Kraft's essay, which originally appeared in Change magazine, he recounts how the deaths of two colleagues in his department served as a catalyst for introspection and institutional reform. In both cases, the professors appeared to have died in an atmosphere of isolation and loneliness. Kraft's essay movingly recounts how, at the behest of his university provost, he helped establish a teaching center on his campus where faculty, among other things, could discuss the emotional side of teaching. Kraft writes, "Where can we go with our fear? To a safe place where there are no bosses. To colleagues who listen, who are not competing with us, and who understand and will admit that they feel the same fear. That is where the reach for teaching excellence begins."
In a similar way, Walsh, who is president of Wellesley College, argues that in order for good teaching to take place three things are needed. First, teachers need to feel "connected-to themselves, to one another, to their material and their students, to their schools and to the larger and deeper meaning of their work." Second, teaching institutions need "managers and leaders" who themselves understand the mission of overcoming the forces of that drive teachers into isolation. Third, connections between teachers and their students must be preserved and reinforced by what she refers to as a "leadership of peace." I read Walsh to mean that in order for good teaching to take place, there must be something akin to Martin Luther King Jr's, "beloved community," an atmosphere, however seemingly utopian, where educators sustain one another and their students through mutual respect and support.

In addition to these essays, there are inspiring essays on the multicultural classroom and the sprit and challenge of teachers working together, how one teacher broke free of viewing his teaching as an "ordinary job" and another essay on how reform of urban education is contingent on a new theology of social justice.

If I had one complaint about this volume, it was that nearly all of the essays collected here are from gifted and accomplished teachers. All of them are active in their profession, nearly all of them have won teaching awards and fellowships, and many, in addition to being accomplished writers in their own right, have written on effective teaching strategies and the like. While ordinarily not a complaint, by the time I reached the end of this collection of essays, who I most longed to hear more from, were the ordinary voices of ordinary teachers, (not unlike Intrator's own down-to-earth parents) whom everybody seems to speak for, but few people really hear.

Ken Betsalel,
UNC Asheville