See Me After Class by Roxanna Elden

“Reading this book, I immediately felt I had a sense of the author and that, as a teacher, she was on my side….Elden cares about kids. But she also cares about you and your mental and physical health. If you are somewhere in your first 3 years of teaching, you really should take a look at this book. You should especially get it if you are feeling like a total failure as a teacher. (If you don’t feel like a failure, write your own damn book.)…. it will give you heart.”

Click here to read the full review and check out Mr. Teachbad’s hilarious blog.

“…features the kind of pander-free straight talk that warms even my icy tundra of a heart.“

“Elden strips away the acronyms and fat that you might expect from a central office professional development binder, and leaves you with easily readable advice that you can take with you to next period, not some unimaginable place in the future.”

Click here to read the complete review and get a few laughs from RPOA’s hilarious blog.

“…a terrific handbook of non-traditional advice and perspectives on practice. An excellent reference for new teachers, it’s also engaging for grizzled veterans–I found myself reading long passages, snorting gently and nodding. In the end, I had to buy the book. You should, too.”

Click here to read the rest of the interview on Nancy Flanagan’s blog, Teacher in a Strange Land.

“This is not Chicken Soup for the Teacher’s Soul,” writes Roxanna Elden (Houston ‘02). “It’s more like ‘Hard Liquor for the Teacher’s Soul.‘” Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it captures the unsentimental tone of See Me After Class, an acerbic guidebook for novice teachers. A grab bag of advice, anecdotes, horror stories, and tales of triumph, See Me After Class offers straightforward professional advice with a wry twist.

It’s been almost twenty years since I taught in a K-12 classroom and more than a dozen years since I last supervised student teachers. So, readers probably appreciate that I tend not to have a lot to say when it comes to classroom instruction.

But I recently picked up a new book, Roxanna Elden’s See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers, which I wish had been around when I started teaching. Elden, a teacher down in Miami-Dade, skips the treacle and talks straight, with a heavy dose of practicality, a dash of cynicism, and wry humor. I dug it, and recommend it.

Click here to read the article on Rick Hess Straight Up.

“Elden covers topics with the humor so necessary for a teacher’s survival, among them classroom management, creating a teacher persona, reviving lessons that flop, troublemakers, what principals expect, and the downside high-stakes tests. This would be a great gift for a new teacher, or someone studying to become one.”

Click this link to read the full review at internet review of books.

“Elden’s book…  is a useful, empathetic guide to weathering the first-year lumps. The author jokes that this book is not chicken soup, but rather “Hard Liquor for the Teacher’s Soul.” I’d peg it somewhere in between— perhaps a frothy, satisfying Guinness for the teacher’s soul.”

Click here to read the rest of the article on Dan Brown’s blog at Teacher Leaders Network.

P.S. Dan Brown is also the author of my favorite first-year teacher memoir: The Great Expections School.

“Basically, this book rocks. Roxanna, who is hilarious (Dave Barry gave a quote for the front of her book y’all…that qualifies as officially sanctioned funny in my book), gives practical, manageable, do-able advice for new teachers. She talks about things like how to set up your “piles and files”, how to manage all the procedural paperwork and friends, there’s even a before school starts shopping list. A LIST! You know I was sold when I saw that the book included actual lists.”

Click here to read the full article on the blog.

“We need more voices like Roxanna Elden’s, offering guidance, sympathy and support to new teachers, so that they can overcome those difficult first few years and get to the part where they are actually doing what they went into the profession to do: effecting positive changes in the community.”

Read the rest of the article by clicking this link.