Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher

WHY DO ONLY WHITE PEOPLE GET ABDUCTED BY ALIENS?

Ilana Garon

Teaching Lessons from the Bronx

The true story of a young teacher attempting to change lives in a troubled educational system.

According to Ilana Garon, popular books and movies are inundated with the myth of the “hero teacher”—the one who charges headfirst into dysfunctional inner-city schools like a firefighter into an inferno, bringing the student victims to safety through a combination of charisma and innate righteousness. The students are then “saved” by the teacher’s idealism, empathy, and faith. This is not that type of book. Here, Garon reveals the sometimes humorous, oftentimes frustrating, and occasionally horrifying truths that accompany the experience of teaching at a public high school in the Bronx. The overcrowded classrooms, lack of textbooks, and abundance of mice, cockroaches, and drugs weren’t the only challenges Garon faced during her first four years as a teacher. Every day, she’d interact with students dealing with addiction, miscarriages, stints in “juvie,” abusive relationships, and gang violence. These students brought with them big dreams and uncommon insight—and challenged everything Garon thought she knew about education. In response, Garon—a naive, suburban girl with a curly ponytail, freckles, and Harry Potter glasses—opened her eyes, rolled up her sleeves, and learned to distinguish between mitigated failure and qualified success. In this book, Garon explains how she realized that being a new teacher was about trial by fire, making mistakes, learning from the very students she was teaching, and occasionally admitting that she may not have answers to their thought-provoking (and amusing) questions. My name is Ilana Garon. I was born in Washington, DC, and spent a few years in Paris, France (where I gained three brothers, much to my surprise) before my family moved back to the DC metro area. I came to New York City when I went to college and never left. Now I'm in my early 30's. Wow, what happened? I teach 9th-12th grade English at a public high school in the Bronx, which is alternately exhilarating and exhausting, and often hilarious. I also write about education and related issues; my book is in that vein, but hopefully a more humorous take on the issues than readers are accustomed to. Most of my free time is spent running competitively (I'm doing the marathon in 2013!), reading anything that isn't nailed down, napping on my couch, live-streaming movies on Netflix, thinking about education policy, and hanging out with friends. I love dark chocolate, iced coffee, and salt-and-vinegar chips.

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Book Published 2013-09-01 by Skyhorse

Comments

Ilana Garon does the rare and elegant work of marrying non-fiction and storytelling in a highly readable and uniquely honest book. Without pretension or agenda, Why Do Only White People Get Abducted by Aliens? reveals the modern classroom from all angles from the desks to the chalkboards to the windows outside. Her characters and experiences are real and graciously dispose of moth-eaten stereotypes with humility and humor. This is an important book, not just because its stories interlock and lend us unvarnished insight, but because of the way Garon deftly and graciously handles such difficult material.

In her beautifully written Why Do Only White People Get Abducted By Aliens?, Ilana Garon brings us inside the New York City public school system by taking us inside the heads and hearts of her pupils. The result is a riveting, firsthand account of what teachers, trying to help our most at-risk students, can do to make their students’ lives better. Not since Jonathan Kozol’s 1967 classic, Death at an Early Age have we had such an important report on the day-to-day workings of an urban school.

Ilana Garon writes with radical honesty and bountiful compassion about her experience as a teacher in a Bronx high school—and about the students she came to know. Anyone who thinks that what these students need is more tests should be required to read this book. In fact, we all need to go to school with Ilana Garon.

Ilana Garon’s wise and vivid narrative about her experiences in a working-class high school cuts through all the talk about 'reform' to reveal what it really means to be a good teacher. This is a book that anyone who cares about American education should read.

Ilana Garon starts by assuring readers this is not just another hero-teacher book, and this talented writer makes good on her promise. With striking honesty and wit, she tells a story about learning to embrace imperfection: her school’s, her students’, the system’s, and mostly her own. In doing so, she captures the essence of a teacher’s journey—from naive beginnings to dashed hopes to ultimately hard-earned wisdom. The best part is that, all along, it’s a joy to read.

Part memoir and part sociology study on the lives of teenagers, Garon reflects on her first four years teaching at a public high school in the Bronx.

Behind the scenes in the life of a teacher in the Bronx.

This irresistible, passionate, hilariously funny look at a young teacher and her surprisingly lovable students lights up the landscape of recent writing about American education.