Available Now — A Memoir
And Other Incredible Tales from a Teaching Life
When Susan Van Kirk drove into little Monmouth, Illinois, in 1968 — straight out of college, with her teaching degree in hand — she thought she was ready to teach English and speech to high school students. She didn’t realize she would both teach and be taught by a town, a school, and the students who entered her life.
A veteran of forty-four years of public high school and college teaching, Van Kirk takes you on a passionate and unforgettable journey through one teaching life: early fears about classroom discipline, plots to overthrow “the rookie,” handling drug overdoses, a devastating first student death, and a challenge to a major Kurt Vonnegut book in her classroom. This second edition adds a new introduction plus updated material about where the students from the stories are now. Fifteen stories, incredible and inspiring, filled with what makes us human.
“Susan Van Kirk, a first-rate cozy mystery writer, ventures into the world of nonfiction with this compelling memoir of her 34-year teaching career in a small town high school situated on the Illinois prairie. What makes this an important book? It gives the reader an honest, beautifully written view of what being a teacher should be like.”
Jim V. Jacobs, author of No Ordinary Season and A Growing Season