The Priority List

December 2, 2013
In fall 2006, high school teacher Menasche, then age 34, was diagnosed with an aggressive and deadly type of brain tumor, glioblastoma multiforme. Despite these challenges, in November 2012 he embarked on a journeyâor Vision Quest, as he calls itâto recover his past by reconnecting with former students. Menasche, the son of booksellers, places literature at the center of his thinking and enlists it as a primary means of coping. A successful technique he used with students, the "priority list," was useful in ranking the importance of different values and provided an effective tool for identify one's own motivations. His chutzpah and quirky sense of humor more than explain Menasche's popularity at Coral Reef Senior High School in Miami; after announcing his road trip on Facebook, former students in 50 cities agreed to meet with him and offered hospitality. By reconsidering his priorities, letting others care for him, and giving in to the "beautiful turmoil" of his illness, Menasche has been able to accept the break-up of his marriage and retirement from his job while reaping surprising rewards from his quest. Like Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture, this memoir is a rousing testimony to the ways in which, in the face of death, living fully in the present moment becomes possible.

December 1, 2013
Inspiring memoir from a young teacher who refused to give up after a brain cancer diagnosis. The idea of the priority list came to Menasche in his early days teaching honors and AP English at a Miami magnet school, when his students were having trouble relating to Shakespeare's Othello. In an effort to help them, he presented a list of words that applied to everyone's life--"honor, love, wealth, power, career, respect"--and asked them to order the words according to the importance they might have had for Othello. The list, which he modified over the years to include more abstract ideas, became one of his standard teaching tools, and it helped students connect with the literary characters and reflect on their own priorities. "Their lists revealed more about their lives and what mattered to them than anything they ever said aloud," he writes. Only in 2006, after he was diagnosed with brain cancer at 34, did Menasche write his own list. He was dismayed to find that the top items on the list were friendship and education rather than love or his marriage. After two emergency operations and continuous chemotherapy, he managed to lead a relatively normal life and continue teaching for six more years. He describes his return to the classroom after the first operation as one of the happiest days of his life, and he explains that since he was childless, his students were like family to him. When his health deteriorated and he was finally forced to give up teaching in 2012, he was deeply depressed. Then he made the audacious decision to travel the country and see how his former students were doing, and he discovered that the bonds he had formed with them remained strong. Student comments at the conclusion of each chapter celebrate the author's continuing influence on their lives. A beautiful meditation.

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