A Life In School: What The Teacher Learned
In this memoir by Tompkins, a professor of English at Duke University, there is no mind-numbing explication of favorite educational theories or classroom practices. Instead, the reader is taken inside the author's emotional education, which had its early foundation in a compelling desire to please, especially through success in school. This shaping and rewarding of intellect, which also instilled fear, is shown to have affected Tompkins's approach to her life?the grind of graduate study, the politics of becoming a professor, even withdrawal from two marriages. Through a subsequent union, a blend of professional and emotional excitement and contentment, the missing ingredients of her personality appear to have materialized. Tompkins travels painfully twisting paths by which a scholar and literary critic (West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns) came to know herself outside the academic cloister with grace and humor as she challenges universities to conceive "education less as training for a career than as the introduction to a life."Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.