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Jan. 13th, 2025 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThe Unteachables by Gordon Korman
There's a throwaway joke in Gordon Korman's 1985 dark comic masterpiece Don't Care High about a former teacher of the year, a brilliantly inspirational teacher who thrived on getting his students to participate in class discussion as a way to get them engaged in active learning. Thrown into the miasma of apathy that is Don Carey High, he ends up having class discussions with himself until he loses track of reality and becomes a burnt out shell of a man.
40 years later, Korman revisits this character archetype at length in The Unteachables, a fascinating book that shows the evolution of Korman's pessimism about the effectiveness of American schooling.
Zachary Kermit was an inspirational young teacher, a teacher of the year, until one of his students stole and sold the answers to a national exam to his classmates, who all got perfect scores. The school administration had spent so much energy hyping up his class's accomplishments that they decided the only way to save face was to blame the teacher. Mr. Kermit ended up in a depressive state, losing his fiancee, losing his enthusiasm for teaching, and living for the dream of early retirement and a fixed benefit pension. Twenty five years later, he is nine months from retirement and the administration, still holding a grudge, decides to assign him to a class of special needs students with apparent personality disorders, the so-called Unteachables, as a way to try to force him to quit before he can collect his pension. His students' needs call out to him and he finds himself reflexively defending them; as the students finally find someone willing to fight for them, they start to figure out how to thrive in school.
The existence of the Unteachables is about as powerful an indictment of the modern school system structure as Korman has ever penned. Parker simply has dyslexia. Rahim and Kiana would be perfectly fine students if not for disruptive problems at home. Barnstorm is such a good athlete teachers have refused to challenge him for fear he'd become academically ineligible to play football. These students should be getting extra support, but for fear of bad test scores weighing down teacher bonuses, they're simply being warehoused with a reluctant babysitter until they can be shuffled off to the high school. It's incredibly damning in a way that feels true to life. And the stuff about Mr. Kermit's pension is persistently incisive in the economic world we live in.
And yet in a classic Korman novel, that would simply be the background status quo the students would have to grapple against. In Son of Interflux, school administration, referred to as The Basement, is a force of nature Simon and his agent T.C. must negotiate against, its interest in pedagogy dwarfed by its interest in avoiding insurance liability. In Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag, the teachers are as beleaguered by administration's insistence on tethering the school's fortunes to a broken power generation system, but they remain powerless to do anything to stop it until the book's conclusion. In Don't Care High, the erstwhile teacher of the year and the emotionally devastated guidance counselor remain unable to control the educational aspirations or whims of their student body. Or consider a book like The Toilet Paper Tigers where all of the team improvements adults attribute to the new coach are ultimately the result of the team itself struggling toward self improvement in spite of the coach's ineptitude.
Something has changed. Somehow Korman has started to believe that adults can become part of the solution instead of just part of the problem. Because The Unteachables is a book about an old teacher of the year finding that he can still inspire students, and students and administrators alike learning that an inspirational teacher can change the trajectory of a student's life.
And I don't quite know what to make of it. I think on some level it's a good thing that Korman is coming to a new, more complex vision of the role of teachers in school, but also this vision seems to exist towards the ends of make achieving a happy ending easier to achieve. The students in the story don't really have a serious antagonist they are fighting against, other than their own self-image. There is something satisfyingly messy about the endings to those 1980s/90s Korman novels I grew up with that is missing once adults can help with solving problems. In Semester in the Life, Sean and Raymond triumph, but at the cost of SACGEN II lurking around the corner next semester. But nothing like that can happen in this ending.The Unteachables is not moralistic or preachy, it is still broadly pessimistic about the utility of formal school, but it is too neat.
There's a throwaway joke in Gordon Korman's 1985 dark comic masterpiece Don't Care High about a former teacher of the year, a brilliantly inspirational teacher who thrived on getting his students to participate in class discussion as a way to get them engaged in active learning. Thrown into the miasma of apathy that is Don Carey High, he ends up having class discussions with himself until he loses track of reality and becomes a burnt out shell of a man.
40 years later, Korman revisits this character archetype at length in The Unteachables, a fascinating book that shows the evolution of Korman's pessimism about the effectiveness of American schooling.
Zachary Kermit was an inspirational young teacher, a teacher of the year, until one of his students stole and sold the answers to a national exam to his classmates, who all got perfect scores. The school administration had spent so much energy hyping up his class's accomplishments that they decided the only way to save face was to blame the teacher. Mr. Kermit ended up in a depressive state, losing his fiancee, losing his enthusiasm for teaching, and living for the dream of early retirement and a fixed benefit pension. Twenty five years later, he is nine months from retirement and the administration, still holding a grudge, decides to assign him to a class of special needs students with apparent personality disorders, the so-called Unteachables, as a way to try to force him to quit before he can collect his pension. His students' needs call out to him and he finds himself reflexively defending them; as the students finally find someone willing to fight for them, they start to figure out how to thrive in school.
The existence of the Unteachables is about as powerful an indictment of the modern school system structure as Korman has ever penned. Parker simply has dyslexia. Rahim and Kiana would be perfectly fine students if not for disruptive problems at home. Barnstorm is such a good athlete teachers have refused to challenge him for fear he'd become academically ineligible to play football. These students should be getting extra support, but for fear of bad test scores weighing down teacher bonuses, they're simply being warehoused with a reluctant babysitter until they can be shuffled off to the high school. It's incredibly damning in a way that feels true to life. And the stuff about Mr. Kermit's pension is persistently incisive in the economic world we live in.
And yet in a classic Korman novel, that would simply be the background status quo the students would have to grapple against. In Son of Interflux, school administration, referred to as The Basement, is a force of nature Simon and his agent T.C. must negotiate against, its interest in pedagogy dwarfed by its interest in avoiding insurance liability. In Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag, the teachers are as beleaguered by administration's insistence on tethering the school's fortunes to a broken power generation system, but they remain powerless to do anything to stop it until the book's conclusion. In Don't Care High, the erstwhile teacher of the year and the emotionally devastated guidance counselor remain unable to control the educational aspirations or whims of their student body. Or consider a book like The Toilet Paper Tigers where all of the team improvements adults attribute to the new coach are ultimately the result of the team itself struggling toward self improvement in spite of the coach's ineptitude.
Something has changed. Somehow Korman has started to believe that adults can become part of the solution instead of just part of the problem. Because The Unteachables is a book about an old teacher of the year finding that he can still inspire students, and students and administrators alike learning that an inspirational teacher can change the trajectory of a student's life.
And I don't quite know what to make of it. I think on some level it's a good thing that Korman is coming to a new, more complex vision of the role of teachers in school, but also this vision seems to exist towards the ends of make achieving a happy ending easier to achieve. The students in the story don't really have a serious antagonist they are fighting against, other than their own self-image. There is something satisfyingly messy about the endings to those 1980s/90s Korman novels I grew up with that is missing once adults can help with solving problems. In Semester in the Life, Sean and Raymond triumph, but at the cost of SACGEN II lurking around the corner next semester. But nothing like that can happen in this ending.The Unteachables is not moralistic or preachy, it is still broadly pessimistic about the utility of formal school, but it is too neat.
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Date: 2025-01-13 03:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2025-01-13 05:59 pm (UTC)I think the Macdonald Hall books are less interested in what's going on inside the classroom, though.
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Date: 2025-01-13 10:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-01-16 08:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-01-16 12:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-01-17 06:33 am (UTC)