A Life In School: What The Teacher Learned

by Jane Tompkins

Here one of our leading literary scholars looks back on her own life in the classroom, and discovers how much of what she learned there needs to be unlearned. Jane Tompkins' memoir shows how her education shaped her in the mold of a high achiever who could read five languages but had little knowledge of herself. As she slowly awakens to the needs of her body, heart, and spirit, she discards the conventions of classroom teaching and learns what her students' lives are like. A painful and exhilarating story of spiritual awakening, Tompkins' book critiques our educational system while also paying tribute to it.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Teaching, Memoir, Autobiography

256 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1996

About the author

Jane Tompkins (born 1940) is an American literary scholar who has worked on canon formation, feminist literary criticism, and reader response criticism.[1] She has helped develop the idea of cultural work in literary studies.[2] She earned her PhD at Yale in 1966 and subsequently taught at Temple University, Duke University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.[3]

Reviews

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jane Tompkins, a high-profile English professor at Duke with a reputation for pushing the envelope in teaching methods, bares her soul and reveals the scars--many self-inflicted--incurred during her academic career (as student and professor). Hers is basically the story of a success/performance-driven student who achieves at each step of the academic process only to realize, 10 years into tenure, that in her striving in a realm where proving one's
authority is part of almost every exercise, she'd lost her ability to be herself and to let others do the same. So it's a story of her development in school, her professional striving, but more importantly of her movement in teaching away from "making sure students knew what I knew and what I thought" to recognizing that part of education must be learning "how to be with other people, how to love, how to take criticism, how to grieve, how to have fun," that this must be as much the "material" as any body of literature or theory.

What I found most moving about this book was how eloquently she describes the compulsion to always be _doing_ something that is both a source of success and a barrier to an even deeper need: to know how to do nothing. (And still like oneself.) Her experiences in the classroom--and within herself outside of the classroom--resonated with me especially as a teacher, but this often painful account of her journey toward self-acceptance and its ramification on her teaching is beautifully written and would be of interest to others, too, I suspect.

[Kaylee Walterbach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though this memoir was a class assignment (for a course called Teaching English) it was well-written and insightful. With a tendency towards fractured memory and integrated wisdom, Jane Tompkins turns the troubled education system into a fascinating read. She covers her own autobiographical experiences in school, from kindergarten to graduate to many years of teaching, and by turning non-chronological midway through, she includes tidbits of mindfulness, meditation, self-care, utopian dreams, and the steps she has taken to fulfill them.

[Gidget · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having gotten to know Jane personally I wanted to read her memoir and was drawn in from the first pages as I could relate to her NYC Public School experience. While I am not an English scholar nor an educator I was able to empathize with her experiences as a woman educator in the male dominated higher education world and appreciated her courage in letting the reader into her personal challenges in work and love.

[Mare]

Completely did not expect to find my stride with this book a much as I did. From the epigraph, "To my mother, my first teacher" to her bouts about the alienation of herself from her own labor, her meditations on the incessant drive towards academia and academic-insitution prestige through her graduate years at Yale (which she detested yet could not admit until near graduation), to her failures and short-comings as a teacher and intellectual later in life.

[Rachelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was hoping to be blown away by this book. I've had a quotation from it pinned to my bulletin board for years* and thought the entire book would resonate with me, but it didn't. (I wish I could give it 3.5 stars.)

Tompkins relays her experiences with schooling beginning with her early childhood. A bright but anxious student, she seems to never get over her early experiences in school. To me, her school years seem easy, unblemished by the kinds of difficulty that many of my students experience. Relatively privileged, a quick learner and high achiever, she is troubled by a too-strong desire to please teachers and others in authority. It goes on like this through her postsecondary years. I just couldn't relate to her level of angst over these seemingly minor struggles.

The other part I really could not relate to is her academic discipline (English literature). Although I love literature, I just couldn't connect with her particular passions in this area. On the other hand, I did appreciate her critiques of how literature is taught, including the weaknesses of various trends in literary criticism over the past few decades.

I do admire her tenacity and courage in trying out some fairly radical teaching experiments and in forging connections across her campus. Her attempts to connect with her students as whole people are admirable. However, I really wish she had engaged at least a little with other literature on teaching and learning, or at least reached a little more widely in the academic community to learn what others are doing. The concerns of Tompkins and her students are mainly the concerns of very privileged people -- chiefly, too much pressure to achieve. This is a very narrow slice of academic life, but it contains some food for thought if that's an area that interests you.

*"But if research universities like the one I work at are going to become places where people like to come to work in the morning, where the employees have a stake and feel they belong, then they will have to model something besides the ideal of individual excellence--the Olympic pole vaulter making it over the bar. By modeling the way that they do business, they'll need to model our dependence on one another, our need for mutual respect and support, acceptance, and encouragement. If the places that young people go to be educated don't embody the ideals of community, cooperation, and harmony, then what young people will learn will be the behavior these institutions do exemplify: competition, hierarchy, busyness, and isolation."

[Jen Leija · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was nice to come to a teaching book that is also a well written book. I like finding books that are about subjects I want to tackle/need to write about and are also valuable works of literature. And as with much of the literature that Susan talked about last semester this book is excellent because it tells me what I already knew but didn’t know I knew: being in the classroom is an act of performance, whether student or teacher. Performance and classroom actions that are performance are often acts of fear and thus fear and shame are major aspects of our time I the classroom. Education cuts off the mind from the heart and the body and the soul, especially at the undergraduate level. I think what I loved most of this book is Tompkins’ willingness to show her fragility – she is a teacher so I know she also has the strength it takes to command a classroom, to study through her PHd and her Master’s, but this book was open to her weaknesses, the pain she went through, the turmoil that educators hide from their students and student are in turn, taught to hide from their teachers. Because in a classroom we’re not people, are we? Teachers certainly aren’t and Tompkins argues that her students are being turned into the same, taught to shut down themselves and their emotional lives, to sacrifice all for the intellectual growth and structure that is imposed in an ordered classroom.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author talks about growing up as a teacher-pleaser and the anxiety surrounding her school experience. She excels through school, goes to graduate school (why not?), goes through a couple of difficult marriages with other brilliant people, and eventually runs away with (no lie) STANLEY FISH. As a professor, she starts to realize that her job is not to impress her students with her massive smarts but to put the task of learning into their hands. It's a pretty cool book once you get past some of her childhood school trauma. If you were once a teacher-pleaser, it can be a little uncomfortable to hear someone else talk about how easy it is to measure your self-worth by your academic achievement and how ultimately unfulfilling that can be. (Incidentally, I bought this book because a former professor of mine recommended it to me. Problem?) It's especially good if you are a teacher to remind yourself of how seriously some students will take your approval or disapproval.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to love this more, but it was less informative than it was self-indulgently aimless. It was missing a thesis-- what I describe to my students as a "spinal cord," the unifying structure which supports all the body's flesh (details, anecdotes, observations).

Update, 6 years (of teaching) later: I have been re-reading parts of this book today, and then re-read my review of it here. It annoys me. My criticism annoys me, even my writing annoys me. It's written by a novice teacher who is still clinging to 5-paragraph essays. I missed the point of this book completely. When I read this at the start of my teaching life, I needed a How-To. This book is not that; it is much, much more.

[Melanie Tikalsky · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really didn't like this book. I had to read it for a grad school class among other books. Tompkins came across as a needy and spoiled rich ***** who cared nothing for her students in the beginning of this book. She did change her views and her way of teaching over the years, but still to write something like I was hurt because I came home from school and my mother was napping?? seriously.. I think this lady has pretty severe emotional and self-esteem issues.. She grew up in middle class America, went to good schools yet she could never be happy, even after all she accomplished.. ugh

[bumblethunderbeast · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightfully crafted with thoughtful allusions and a clear sene of story-telling. Written by an English professor from Duke, this book asks important bigger questions about how we structure education and what messages that sends. I appreciated the questions and the earnestness with which many were left unresolved.

[Jocelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jane Tompkins started school around 1945. America was educating its children for the office and assembly line. "Good people were praised," she writes, "and bad people were humiliated." Eventually she learned to listen to herself; to be rather than to do; to value personal connections; to teach what students actually want to learn. And, one hopes, not to rely on them for personal affirmation.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I honestly couldn't make it too far in this book because Tompkins seems to beat to death her somehow scarringly terrible middle-class, trauma-free childhood in which teachers were generally not the nicest but not the worst. She really belabors her points to a frustrating point.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved her reflections on teaching, and very similar to my own thoughts I shared in Getting Messy. p. 121: "I wanted to let go of everything that separated me from the other people in the room. I wanted to know them, I wanted them to know each other, and I wanted them to discover themselves."

[Katie Elrod · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have read this twice. Explores inner life of a teacher so well. Tompkins is brave and honest. A bit kooky. But it really is her story out of the cave.

[Rachael Stollar · Rating 4 out of 5]

super insightful book on the struggles of pursuing a profession in academia

[Abbi Dion]

read this per the suggestion of one of her former students. thoroughly engaging, interesting, thought-provoking. highly recommend for people interested in education.

[Christina Potter Bieloh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was ok. She is an interesting person and professor. Her discussions about her experimental teaching were interesting to read.

[Shelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of it was long and drawn-out, as though Tompkins felt as though she had to justify certain things she did in the classroom. Overall, though, it was pretty good.

[Lorenza · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a book to make teachers and teacher trainers reflect. It shows that problems in education are the same here and there giving way to reflection and self-observation.