Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the bookcase. I am Kate Gibson. If you're new, I recommend you hit like or love. If you're old and you've been to us before, then hit it again because algorithms don't know. And with that, I am Kate Gibson and as my co-host. And I'm Charlie Gibson. I am Kate's

father. And more importantly for today, I am Arlene Gibson's husband and Kate is Arlene Gibson's

daughter. Because today we're going to look at a book called The Teachers, written by Alexander

Robbins. And Arlene, my wife, and Kate's mom,

has been a teacher and an administrator, albeit in private schools all her life and a single-sex

schools. So maybe not typical for the Alexander Robbins book. But Alexandra's book really gives

you a good idea of what it's like to be a teacher in the

United States today. And it's not easy. No, it's sort of terrifying in the sense that her thesis

seems to be as bad as you think it is. It's worse. I mean, I think this is an important book.

You know, one of the things that Alexandra Robbins did at the end of the book

that I really loved was in her acknowledgments. She just got a chance to list every teacher

she'd ever loved. And it got me to thinking of all the teachers that I'd ever loved, Mrs. Casarino

who taught me to read, Dr. Cole, who taught me to write, Mr. Pridim, who taught me to have

confidence in myself. There are so many teachers that make me who write Mr. Pridim, who taught me to have confidence in myself. There are so many teachers

that make me who I am. And I was thinking how great it would be to have an acknowledgement section

where I could just wax rhapsodic about the people who helped shape my mind, for better or worse,

into what it is today. You know, I owe everything to the teachers that I had, and I hope this book

will be read because it makes so many important points about America's education system.

Alexandra writes in the prologue, the truth is that you don't know what it is really like

to be a teacher, the inspiration and frustration, the humor, the tears, the joys, unless you've stepped into their shoes,

to get an uncensored, no-holes barred look at their lives, I followed three teachers' stories

over the course of a school year. And she also, as she will hear, she taught during the year.

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