Down from the tower

As the academic year ended, I had been a teacher educator for two years. After seven years of secondary school teaching and a doctorate in education from a relatively prestigious graduate school, I had looked forward to my involvement in teacher education. Teacher preparation needed new perspectives, I thought, and I was eager to contribute mine. Colleges of education and public schools were doing a woefully inadequate job, and I had been given a license to help correct all that. I was certain I knew what teacher education needed. I began in exactly the right way, according to the latest prescription. I assembled all the books written by Kozol, Hemdon, Kohl, Holt, Neill, and even Carl Rogers. The education classes I taught included microteaching, tutoring, interaction analysis, teacher aiding, and all the rest. The students and I analyzed endless case studies provided for us in those 125-page glossy paperbacks on problems in secondary school teaching. We spent many class hours agreeing with each other about the terrible condition of the schools, and testifying that none of my students would ever teach like that. After several semesters had passed, I noticed that changes were slowly taking place in my teaching. It became more and more difficult for me to regard myself a real secondary school

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