Playing with Sharp Objects

I’m surprised I became a high school teacher. I both loathe and love school, for what it is and what it could be. My feelings about education are complex. The book tells the schizophrenic, often humorous story of my teaching career-a career in which I was voted most inspirational teacher and suspended for inappropriate conduct in the same year. I open the book with my humorous, dysfunctional experiences as a student to foreground the more weighty story of my teaching career. This surreal work of linear nonfiction is bookended by a prologue and epilogue in which I discuss watching kids create and destroy card houses in a 9th grade study hall. I use this story to wonder how people can come together to create meaningful things. We are capable of so much, yes, but we have to build rather than destroy. My time in schools taught me this lesson over and over again.