The staff at Besley High School are choosing up sides. Not only has the ineffective head, Miss Barr, appointed the steely Miss Lexington as second head, favoring her superior degree over the years of experience of Miss Parry, but then there is the problem of Miss Cullen, the French teacher.
The staff has been frantically preparing for exams. Miss Cullen used to be a good teacher, but her methods are out of date and her students don’t respect her or pay attention in class. Unfortunately, the system is structured so that failure in French (for some incomprehensible reason, and I assume for some other subjects, too) means that the student fails the exams as a whole, no matter what her other scores are. The result is that only four students pass the exam, which reflects on the whole school.
Further, Miss Cullen has taught for 26 years, but if she quits or is fired before she puts in four more, she loses her pension, including any money she has put into the fund herself. She can’t afford to quit.
All the other teachers are more or less in the same boat. If the school is closed or they lose their jobs, they are unlikely to be hired elsewhere because of the school’s poor reputation. Miss Parry begins actively trying to drive Miss Cullen out, suspecting that Miss Cullen will blame her inability to teach the students on Miss Parry’s failure to prepare them in Beginning French.
Into this hotbed come three new teachers, particularly idealistic Viola Kennedy. She does not understand that Miss Cullen’s attempts to befriend her are misunderstood as her joining Miss Cullen’s side in the school brouhaha.
This book was written to show how hard teachers work and how unfair the system is that forces teachers to work beyond their effective years (also how unfair the pension system is). However, it certainly makes women at work look bad. Although even the most badly behaved have flashes of sympathetic impulses (except maybe the despicable Miss Parry), they are relentless gossips and many of them are petty and vindictive. Women at work, at least here in the States, were stigmatized for years (as masculine or man-traps, and the word “unnatural” is used several times), and this book doesn’t do them any favors. Only Viola mostly keeps above the fray, but that doesn’t keep her from being dragged down by some of the others.
I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.
What? Me Read? 