Spitwad Sutras: Classroom Teaching as Sublime Vocation

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This work goes beyond the basics of classroom management to consider the path of both teacher and student toward authentic intellectual maturity and spiritual growth. It provides a framework for stripping away the external and personal pressures that bleed intellectual content out of classroom teaching so that teachers may, in fact, experience their vocation as sublime. Written in the novelistic first-person narrative, it is a seasoned teacher's story of his initiation from graduate student at the University of Chicago to ninth-grade teacher in a Catholic high school where he manned the battle lines in provincial, petty, sometime even violent world of American secondary school. It is also the story of how a certain Brother Blake, a 67-year-old practitioner of the pedagogy of the sublime, passed on his vision of classroom teaching as a sublime vocation. A major contribution to the field by the acclaimed author of The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People.

Reviews

"Not since 36 Children and The Way it Spoze to Be in the 60's have I been so completely transported into the consciousness of a beginning high school teacher confronting those awesome choices: survival by authoritarian repression, by capitulation, or by transcendence into a truer self, the discovery of an inner authority based on an ancient knowing that frees one from having to prove anything and allows one full access to the loving curiosity, the simple seeing that makes us God's eyes and hands. From this place nothing is terrifying, everything teaches. Sublime is a fine word for it."-Catharine Lucas Coordinator, Composition Studies San Francisco State University

Author Bio

ROBERT INCHAUSTI is Professor of English at California Polytechnic State University. His earlier work, The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People, examines the lives of six visionaries: Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Elie Wiesel.