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In this powerful, eloquent story of his return to the classroom, a former teacher offers a rousing defense of his beleaguered vocationPerhaps no profession is so constantly discussed, regulated, and maligned by non-practitioners as teaching. The voices of the teachers themselves are conspicuously missing. Defying this trend, teacher and writer Garret Keizer takes us to school--literally--in this arresting account of his return to the same rural Vermont high school where he taught fourteen years ago.Much has changed since then--a former student is his principal, standardized testing is the reigning god, and smoking in the boys' room has been supplanted by texting in the boys' room. More familiar are the effects of poverty, the exuberance of youth, and the staggering workload that technology has done as much to increase as to lighten.