August 23, 2006
School Factory
When I read Mitch Albom’s, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, I was captivated by the style and the format of his book. For the past seven years, my book, The School Factory, has been brewing in me – ready to have a format. I finally found it in Albom’s structural “timelessness”, that is the shifting of time coupled with the rigidity of one single defining day.
By using this structured “timelessness”, I believe I’ve captured what it feels like to be a part of the everyday incongruity that makes most public high schools like factories. The School Factory came from my original notes, recorded day by day during my thirty-two years of teaching high school. I simply unified the theme by narrating different scenes, month-by-month, describing different kids, satirizing the institutionalization of the public school, and always bringing the reader back to Graduation Day, June 19th.
For contrast, the softer narrated sections are counterbalanced with the pages of educational jargon about the “factory” environment; the talented, untroubled kids are lined up next to the deeply troubled as the year unfolds month by month – right up to Graduation Day. The ending of the book, entitled the Beginning, lets the reader see into the future telling what happens to the products after they leave the school factory.
The School Factory presents a frighteningly honest picture of the human and inhuman aspects of a public school system from the insider’s view – the teacher and the many students she comes to know. It’s a story that rarely gets told in its totality, and to my knowledge, has never been told in this format.
