What Teachers Make

Adam Verner's reading starts off with a tone of sarcasm as author Taylor Mali discusses the negative remarks some people make about teachers and his anger at those remarks. However, Verner's tone gives way to excitement and pride as Mali tells listeners what teachers do to shape their students. Listeners can feel Mali's joy when his ideas "catch fire." Mali, who wrote the poem "What Teachers Make," no longer heads a classroom. Still, he draws on years of experience as he tells anecdotes that illustrate the book's points. It's a breezy listen, with Mali's writing and Verner's delivery often taking on poetic qualities. The book is likely to attract those who already agree with Mali, but critics of educators should listen as well. J.A.S. (c) AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

March 5, 2012
An insult from “an arrogant young lawyer” delivered to a prize-winning slam poet led to a work that was “copied and pasted and e-mailed around the world” and watched on YouTube by millions; this led Mali to become “a poet with a plan to improve the world one teacher at a time.” In vignettes from his peripatetic career as a middle school teacher (teaching variously English, history, and math, in locations as widespread as New York, London, Kansas, and Maine), and in interspersed poems, Mali recounts his experiences as teacher and pays tribute to those who taught him. Thoroughly anecdotal, his examples of lessons, activities, and projects are offered, not as patterns to be followed but modes of liberation for teachers. Part memoir, part encomium, this prose extension of the slam “What Teachers Make” keeps an eye on pedagogical usefulness, while eschewing a manual tone. Although occasionally treacly, the slammer in Mali keeps the work straightforward, fast-paced, and trenchant. Mali’s goal, “to convince one thousand people to become teachers,” formalized in his the New Teacher Project, finds an effective boost in this evocative small book bulging with a big idea—“to remind teachers that they are dearly loved.”