Why Did I Get a B? And Other Mysteries We're Discussing in the Faculty Lounge

“Funny...revealing....So send this book to your favorite teacher. They’ll know you’re sucking up. They’ll thank you anyway.” —People, Book of the Week

This hilarious, inspirational, and wise collection of personal essays and humor from a longtime educator explores all the joys, challenges, and absurdities of being a teacher, following in the footsteps of such classics as Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire, The Courage to Teach, and Up the Down Staircase.

Shannon Reed did not want to be a teacher, but now, after twenty years of working with children from preschool to college, there’s nothing she’d rather be. In essays full of humor, heart, and wit, she illuminates the highs and lows of a job located at the intersection of youth and wisdom. Bringing you into the trenches of this most important and stressful career, she rolls her eyes at ineffectual administrators, weeps with her students when they experience personal tragedies, complains with her colleagues about their ridiculously short lunchbreaks, and presents the parent-teacher conference from the other side of the tiny table.

From dealing with bullies and working with special needs students to explaining the unwritten rules of the teacher’s lounge, Why Did I Get a B? is full of as much humor and heart as the job itself.

Shannon Reed has been a teacher and professor in Western Pennsylvania and New York City for the last twenty years. She’s taught preschool, middle, and high school, and now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and more. Why Did I Get a B? is her first book.