Up the Down Staircase

Sylvia Barrett arrives at New York City’s Calvin Coolidge High fresh from earning literature degrees at Hunter College and eager to shape young minds. Instead she encounters broken windows, a lack of supplies, a stifling bureaucracy, and students with no interest in Chaucer. Her bumpy yet ultimately rewarding journey is narrated through an extraordinary collection of correspondence–sternly worded yet nonsensical administrative memos, furtive notes of wisdom from teacher to teacher, “polio consent slips,” and student homework assignments that unwittingly speak from the heart. An instant bestseller when it was first published in 1964, Up the Down Staircase remains as poignant, devastating, laugh-out-loud funny, and relevant today as ever. It timelessly depicts a beleaguered public school system redeemed by teachers who love to teach and students who long to be recognized.

Author: Bel Kaufman
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 04/30/2019
Pages: 384
Weight: 0.6lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.20w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780525565659
Language: English