Books: New Yorker Writer's Year Embedded In High School English

You might know David Denby for his writing in the New Yorker about movies among other things, but he's also interested in education.

He wrote a big profile of Diane Ravitch four years ago.

Now, the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss has this excerpt from his new book, ‘Lit Up.’

It's the account of his return to English class, following up (20 years later) on a similar tale about returning to college.

In the introduction, he explains the motivation behind the project:

"Teenagers may be reading more words than ever, but many of those words are scraps, messages, fragments of books and articles, information from everywhere and nowhere. What about reading serious books? The best way to find out, I reasoned, was not to scan education research and statistical surveys but to “embed” in a single tenth-grade English class all year long and to see what happened as a good teacher worked with 15-year-olds. I would read everything the kids read, sit on the side of the room, keep my mouth shut, and interview the kids when they had some free time."

Denby chose Beacon School, which he describes as a magnet school "with a multi-ethnic and multi-class population of New York kids." From this Wikipedia entry, you can see it's not your typical NYC high school. And the teacher whose classroom Denby observed was not just a teacher, according to Denby, he was "a maker of souls as well as a maker of readers."

It's got blurbs from Dave Eggers and Diane Ravitch, among others. Click the link above for the excerpt, or click here for some reviews.