Spitwad Sutras: Classroom Teaching as Sublime Vocation

by Robert Inchausti

This work goes beyond the basics of classroom management to consider the path of both teacher and student toward authentic intellectual maturity and spiritual growth. It provides a framework for stripping away the external and personal pressures that bleed intellectual content out of classroom teaching so that teachers may, in fact, experience their vocation as sublime. Written in the novelistic first-person narrative, it is a seasoned teacher's story of his initiation from graduate student at the University of Chicago to ninth-grade teacher in a Catholic high school where he manned the battle lines in provincial, petty, sometime even violent world of American secondary school. It is also the story of how a certain Brother Blake, a 67-year-old practitioner of the pedagogy of the sublime, passed on his vision of classroom teaching as a sublime vocation. A major contribution to the field by the acclaimed author of The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction

198 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Born in Sacramento, California, Robert (Larry) Inchausti attended Sacramento State University and received his Ph.D. in English from The University of Chicago. Robert is the author of several books, the editor of two anthologies of Thomas Merton's writings, and another an of Beat Literature titled: "Hard to be a Saint in the City" was selected as one of the best books of 2017 by The Advocate. His first book "The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People" was nominated for a National Book Award by his publisher SUNY Press. And his book on classroom teaching, "Spitwad Sutras" is taught in teacher education programs across the USA. He is an Emeritus English Professor at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

"I am bourgeois to the core and plebeian beyond belief, and yet I am drawn to great writers and thinkers as my anti-type, my shadow, the voice of genius I never possessed. So I don't think of myself as a teacher or a writer so much as "an impersonator of profundities" inhabiting the wisdom of texts in the naked confidence that the value of the thoughts I express transcend the particular fraud that I am the one espousing them. It doesn't bother me when nobody seems to notice what I have to say because those anonymous, silent readers I know nothing about-- who value my books for their own personal reasons-- are enough to keep me going --- living on the wings of borrowed metaphors."

Reviews

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read this book in grad school to prepare me for my first year of teaching, and I really liked it. So now, more than twenty years later, as a burned-out middle school teacher on the verge of quitting, it felt like a good time to revisit this book that had helped me start my career on such a good note. The second reading did not disappoint. "Spitwad Sutras" doesn't offer any instructions on how to teach; it isn't a book of strategies for pedagogy or classroom management. Instead, it offers insight on how to BE a teacher. But be forewarned: it's not exactly a pep-talk. Here's how the final chapter begins:
"To survive as a teacher, one must master the art of creative suffering. Like Ghandi's nonviolent soldiers of truth, the dedicated teacher must walk into the assault of pettiness and disinterest every day with no expectation of victory-- serene only in the hope that the abuse one endures is redemptive and encouraged by the conviction that teaching is, above all other things, an act of endurance."
Brutally honest, painfully true, depressingly encouraging. And I've signed my contract for one more year.

[Eme87 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent for people who are thinking about becoming teachers.

[Grace Geiger · Rating 5 out of 5]

My new bible