Schooled
Alumnus' successful book details a memorable year spent teaching
Despite its title, Getting Schooled: The Re-education of an American Teacher, by Montclair State alumnus Garret Keizer, isn't about education…exactly.
"It's really more a book about facing a daunting challenge," says Keizer '75.
Getting Schooled tells the story of Keizer's return to the classroom for a year as a high school English teacher after spending 14 years working at home as a freelance writer.
"This book is being treated primarily as an education book, but I wrote it because I'm a writer," he says. "I wasn't trying to contribute to the debate about education so much as I was trying to create a work of literature."
Back in the classroom
Keizer decided to return to teaching when his wife changed jobs and they needed health insurance. By chance, he learned of an opening at his former workplace, so Keizer went back to the very school where he had taught for 15 years before becoming a full-time writer.
He quickly learned that some things had changed – specifically the technology: "Smoking in the boys' room has been replaced by texting in the boys' room," he says.
In general, Keizer, now 61, sees technology in education as a mixed bag, saying "certainly it's something that's changing education – sometimes for the better, but not always."
Learning the new technology – including a challenging computerized grading system – was at times arduous, but there was one change that went smoothly. In returning to his former school, Keizer found himself reporting to a former student, who was now the principal.
"He said he couldn't call me by my first name, so I called him 'mister' as well, to show respect for him and his position," he says. "He never made it difficult or made me feel awkward or somehow diminished because I was now answerable to someone who previously had to raise his hand to ask to use the restroom."
Though a former teacher, Keizer was teaching different courses than during his first stint in the classroom, so he did not have the benefit of road-tested lesson plans. Like a first-year teacher, he had to create new ones for each day.
However, Keizer had an advantage most first-year teachers do not: he had not only taught before, he was also a published author.
"I could now approach the teaching of writing as someone who had been making his living as a writer."
Comedy's straight man
While Getting Schooled has garnered positive reviews, including being called a "beautiful book" by Sebastian Stockman of The New York Times, Keizer, as a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and the author of eight books, has a history of literary success.
“…it was not my authorship of a book that gave me credibility in an English class but the six minutes I spent as a straight man on TV.”
- Garret Keizer
Unfortunately, his students knew almost nothing about his literary bona fides, though they knew he had been a writer. But the chance discovery of one experience related to his writing career definitely caught their attention: his appearance on Comedy Central's satire The Colbert Report.
In July 2010, his book about the implications of noise in our society titled The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want led to a guest appearance on the show.
Even though the interview with Stephen Colbert itself had been "nerve-wracking," the story excited the students. "They wanted to hear the details. There was more light in their eyes than I'd seen since the start of school," he says. "It took me awhile to realize that my larger problems were still waving in my face, that it was not my authorship of a book that gave me credibility in an English class but the six minutes I spent as a straight man on TV."
Education before reeducation
Keizer, who received his bachelor's degree in English from Montclair State before earning his master's in English from the University of Vermont, says that in many ways his experience at Montclair State helped ready him for both teaching and writing.
"My time at Montclair State helped me prepare for teaching in that I had good teachers. Seeing that modeled in the classroom helped. I also had some education courses that did a good job of acquainting me with human development."
In the years since, Keizer says, he has felt the impact of professors who were invested in his success.
"I owe a debt of gratitude to the professors who introduced me to good literature and nurtured my appreciation of it," he says. "I also had teachers who were ever ready to read something I had written. I feel the interest that certain professors took in my work and the feedback they gave was invaluable."
A good story
As an author, Keizer views every experience through a writer's lens – thinking about whether it would make a good story, but, he says, he didn't return to teaching with plans to write a book.
"I kept a journal, which I do when I'm going through something challenging," he says. "I thought I would at least get an essay out of the experience, but I didn't begin the essay, much less the book, until my year of teaching was over."
In fact, teaching was so time consuming that Keizer had to ask for an extension of the deadline for his 2012 book Privacy.
As much as he enjoyed teaching again, Keizer says he was relieved to learn that the teacher he was filling in for planned to return. And it's no wonder – his schedule was exhausting. During that year, Keizer rose at 4 a.m. to prepare for school and often worked late. He even emailed his lesson plans to school and graded papers while sidelined for a month with pneumonia.
While Keizer does not envision giving up writing to teach full time again, he occasionally lectures at colleges and has found that "I'm at my best and happiest when I work alone."
But there are days when he misses the classroom.
"There are many delights that come with teaching," Keizer says. "One of those is the knowledge that if you're doing your best, you're probably doing something worthwhile. There's at least the possibility that you might do some good. I sometimes miss that clear sense of purpose."