![]() ![]() But, unlike selling shoes or novelty beer steins, I am daily confronted with products of knowledge, a vast array of the world's information set down on paper for the ages, from what we as a people feel is innovative, worthy of remembering, entertaining, elucidating, smart, or funny. If you require a medical text or the latest research on peak oils, I am happy to use the database before me along with any details you can supply, and I will defer to your judgment of the best title available. It's research!" Of course I cannot claim to be an expert in every field for which I sell a book. Even more disheartening is the frequent puzzlement in the face of the customer unfamiliar with the definition of "non-fiction." "But it's a history of dragons. Although it happens fairly rarely, I love answering the question "What have you read and loved lately?" Unfortunately, I am more often asked "Where is your non-fiction section?", and this by seemingly mature, well-educated patrons whom one would assume had a fair acquaintance with the varieties of non-fiction and the basic layout of any bookstore. And my paycheck comes, whether or not I sell it exceptionally well or just well enough. I read what I sell, I love what I sell, but I'm just selling it, not teaching it, not editing it, and not writing it. A nation-wide leader in book sales, but a store in the mall, after all. My parents were well-educated, and I was raised to expect a college career. I have a bachelor's degree from a fairly well-respected university, I've dabbled in graduate courses, alternate bachelor programs, both at the same university and it's little brother community college. I spend a lot of my time thinking about my education thinking about how smart I am (or not), how educated I am (or not), in relation to others and in relation to my own expectations. ![]() Funny, wry, self-deprecating, and a provocative indictment of our failing schools, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is both a brilliant academic satire and a poignant account of one teacher's seismic frustration-and unlikely salvation-as his real estate woes catapult him into a subprime crisis of an altogether more human nature. This is the story of what he learns about his struggling pupils, about the college system-a business more bent on its own financial targets than the wellbeing of its students-about the classics he rediscovers, and about himself. He finds himself on the front lines of America's academic crisis. What drives a former English major with a creative writing degree, several unpublished novels, three kids, and a straining marriage to take a job as a night teacher at a second-rate college? An unaffordable mortgage.Īs his house starts falling apart in every imaginable way, Professor X grabs first one, then two jobs teaching English 101 and 102-composition and literature-at a small private college and a local community college. A caustic expose of the deeply state of our colleges-America's most expensive Ponzi scheme.
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