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Another Planet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School by Elinor Burkett Recommendation: ••••
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Back to School Elinor Burkett reflected after the events at Columbine High School in April, 1999 and wanted to find an answer to the question, “What’s happening in America’s suburban high schools?” Burkett decided to spend a year at a high school to find out. She searched for a school that might represent suburban schools around America and finally found a principal and school board willing to let her observe and report about a school. Prior Lake High School, outside Minneapolis, has lots in common with schools around the country, and the story of the year Burkett spend there, from September 1999 through June 2000 is presented in her fine new book, Another Planet. Burkett presents teachers, students, administrators and the community at their best and worst during the course of the year, which she presents chronologically in the book. Readers will find stereotypes broken, and will come away with as many questions as answers after reading this book. Here’s an excerpt from the end of the book: “Captive of the same drumbeat of rhetoric as other news junkies, I knew what I was supposed to discover: This generation of high school students has been branded as the most violent, most unruly, most ill-mannered, disrespectful and undereducated generation in the nation’s history. That message has been blared so loudly, so regularly, on television in movies, in books, newspapers and magazines that I could hardly have missed it. And their schools, I’d been told – we’ve all been told, ad nauseam – are overcrowded, ill-repaired, dangerous places run by underpaid rubes whose classes are too big and standards too low for indolent teenagers so busy tormenting one another that they could not possibly learn anything in any event. What I discovered at Prior Lake High School bore little resemblance to these stereotypes. The kids had embraced their elders’ disparaging views of their generation as a point of pride, precisely the way that the pervious generation did before them, precisely as their own children undoubtedly will. But that view had little basis in fact. And, as I suspected, the politically popular descriptions of American schools as too dangerous, too crowded, too mean-spirited, might characterize some American high schools, especially urban ones. But they had little to do with the suburban reality. Instead, Prior Lake was another planet orbited by dozens of moons that lit its night sky into brilliance. But those same moons had turned its atmosphere turbulent, its geology unstable, its tides unpredictable. One morning in November, during a student Geography Bee, I listened as teenagers from privileged families identified Jamaica as an island in the Pacific and the mountain range separating India from China as the Indus Mountains 0 then to their teachers defend that ignorance by arguing ‘We don’t waste time on simple memorization. We’d rather spend it on “higher orders” of thinking.’ But the next afternoon I watched Katie Hallberg’s Calculus students perform mathematical feats that were dazzling to even the most educated members of my generation.” Burkett lived as a participant-observer in Prior Lake High School throughout the school year, and she describes the teachers, students, administrators and community with a writer’s eye and a keen observer’s perspective. Whatever your level of interest in modern high school life, you’re likely to enjoy Burkett’s Another Planet. Steve Hopkins, January 2, 2002
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