Synopses & Reviews
Welcome to “East Hudson,” an elite private school in New York where the students are attentive, the colleagues are supportive, and the tuition would make the average person choke on its string of zeroes. You might think a teacher here would have little in common with most other teachers in America, but as this veteran educator—writing anonymously—shows in this refreshingly honest account, all teachers are bound by a common thread. Stripped of most economic obstacles and freed up by anonymity, he is able to tell a deeper story about the universal conditions, anxieties, foibles, generosities, hopes, and complaints that comprise every teacher’s life. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes scandalous, but always recognizable to anyone who has ever walked into a classroom, closed the door, and started their day.
This is not a how-to manual. Rather, the author explores the dimensions of teaching that no one else has, those private thoughts few would dare put into a book but that form an important part of the day-to-day experience of a teacher. We see him ponder the clothes that people wear, think frankly about money (and the imbalance of its distribution), get wrangled by parents, provide on-the-fly psychotherapy, drape niceties over conversations that are actually all-out warfare, drop an f-bomb or two, and deal with students who are just plain unlikeable. We also see him envy, admire, fear, and hope; we see him in adulation and uncertainty, and in energy and exhaustion. We see him as teachers really are: human beings with a complex, rewarding, and very important job.
There has been no shortage of commentary on the teaching profession over the decades, but none quite like this. Unflinching, wry, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, it’s written for every teacher out there who has ever scrambled, smirked, or sighed—and toughed it out nonetheless.
Review
In a book that's both generous and skeptical, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández penetrates the inner world of a top prep school, and shows how the students first construct, and then rationalize, their elite identities. Filled with irony and insight, The Best of the Best reveals both the opportunities and the casualties of privilege. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, author of < i=""> The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other <>
Synopsis
For two years, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández shared the life of what he calls the "Weston School," an elite New England boarding school. He sat in on classes, ate meals in the dining halls, cheered at sporting events, hung out in dorms while students baked cookies or celebrated birthdays. And through it all, observing the experiences of a diverse group of students, conducting interviews and focus groups, he developed a nuanced portrait of how these students make sense of their extraordinary good fortune in attending the school.
Vividly describing the pastoral landscape and graceful buildings, the rich variety of classes and activities, and the official and unofficial rules that define the school, The Best of the Best reveals a small world of deeply ambitious, intensely pressured students. Some are on scholarship, others have never met a public school student, but all feel they have earned their place as a "Westonian" by being smart and working hard. Weston is a family, they declare, with a niche for everyone, but the hierarchy of coolness--the way in which class, race, sexism, and good looks can determine one's place--is well known.
For Gaztambide-Fernández, Weston is daunting yet strikingly bucolic, inspiring but frustratingly incurious, and sometimes--especially for young women--a gilded cage for a gilded age. "Would you send your daughter here?" one girl asks him, and seeing his hesitation asks, "Because you love her?"
Synopsis
For two years, the author shared the life of what he calls the "Weston School," an elite New England boarding school. Through it all, he developed a nuanced portrait of how these students make sense of their extraordinary good fortune in attending the school.
Synopsis
For two years, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández shared the life of what he calls the "Weston School," an elite New England boarding school. Vividly describing the pastoral landscape and graceful buildings, the rich variety of classes and activities, and the official and unofficial rules that define the school, The Best of the Best reveals a small world of deeply ambitious, intensely pressured students. For Gaztambide-Fernández, Weston is daunting yet strikingly bucolic, inspiring but frustratingly incurious, and sometimes--especially for young women--a gilded cage for a gilded age.
About the Author
Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández is Assistant Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
Table of Contents
- Totally Elite
- Getting In
- Being Smart, Working Hard
- Reserved Seating
- Bonding Rituals
- Unequal Distinctions
- Envisioning an Elite Future
- Appendix: Researching Identification at an Elite Boarding School
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Index