It Won't Be Easy: An Exceedingly Honest (and Slightly Unprofessional) Love Letter to Teaching

Rademacher, a blogger and 2014 recipient of Minnesota's Teacher of the Year Award, offers a series of lessons on what colleges of education don't teach, from what to expect from the first job interview to how to get along with cranky colleagues. This book contains no academic references and shies away from research and statistics. Instead, the reader gets lots of stories. The most affecting tales relate back to Rademacher's key themes: school can be unfair, especially to students who are struggling with personal and family problems; and compassion is the most essential element of quality teaching. While many of these narratives are studded with insights into the art of teaching, the author's avoidance of data trips the text up at times. (For example, when he tries to convince the reader that teachers are not underpaid after all.) Rademacher presents the teaching profession—warts and all—with an air of informality. His style will surely entertain some readers, but others may be put off by the frequent appearance of such turns of phrase as "and stuff" or "but whatever," as well as the meandering parenthetical asides.