Dancing Through Graveyards with Ninth Graders: A Teacher's Memoir

His students called him Thompson. He began his career in a world without smartphones. Thirty years later, in a world dominated by them, he retired. The atypical element in a typical school, Thompson was constantly rankled by educators who did not educate, parents who did not parent, and leaders who did not lead, but his interactions with more than 6000 students, some of whom you will meet in these pages, inspired him to keep fighting the good fight.In and out of his overheated and overdecorated classroom, Thompson’s stories of students, colleagues, and family members serve as a backdrop against which he reflects on teaching, raising children, and navigating the cultural and educational overhaul that occurred between 1989 and 2019.Dancing Through Graveyards with Ninth Graders is a pre-Coronavirus memoir of American public schooling that is by turns funny, sad, absurd, angry, and ultimately hopeful. It illustrates that good teachers are always in demand and that humanity is always at the heart of learning.