From the Publisher
Dispatches from Frontier Schools is a collection of poems that pulls the reader right into the brutalities—and beauty—of teaching in a struggling charter school. With humor, wit, tears, anger, exhaustion, elation, and a refusal to give up, these poems highlight the struggles of a teacher trying to maintain her dignity and her identity and do right by her students and her own children—while being pulled apart by a system that doesn’t support or defend teachers. More than just an anthem for teachers, however, this collection is a cry for all women who try to give all they can to everything and everyone.
Dispatches from Frontier Schools is available from the Riot in Your Throat website, Bookshop, and Amazon.
If you would like to buy a signed copy of Dispatches from Frontier Schools from me, please use the button below. Books are $20, including shipping and a Frontier Schools lanyard. (Shipping to US only.)
Read an Interview with Sarah about the Book
We Call Upon the Author to Explain: Mara Hoffman interviews Sarah Beddow on the Sundress blog.
Praise
Sarah Beddow's bullshit detector is razor-sharp. Her Dispatches from Frontier Schools exposes what's wrong with K-12 education in the United States: a corporate profit model infiltrating what should be a free public good where the only players the executives value less than the teachers are the students themselves.
High school students are built out of bullshit and swagger, which adults can anticipate. Beddow writes, "Mind your business / they say Sweet girls haven't you realized You / are / my business." What we should not have to anticipate is bad behavior from fellow adults in the workplace. Bad colleagues make a hard job impossible. "He then played a game of / keep away with the paper / over the staff lounge table." The students will break your heart, but the administrators will crush it.
These Dispatches unsparingly critique not just the institution, but the complicity of every adult working within it, including Ms. Beddow the teacher, who sometimes yells or slams a door. "I listened to my ideas come out of his mouth my own mouth / muted / And it's like I am not here I am / divorced from my / thoughts I am told again and again to join the / team." An institution with incompetent management can tank the best teachers, run the best future leaders out the door. "But no amount of reflection will reveal to me how to be / professional in a system so broken it / shreds me leaves me a corpse in underwear and an ancient / t-shirt spread / on the classroom floor." This book is for anyone concerned about the future.
– Krystal Languell, author of Systems Thinking with Flowers and editor of Bone Bouquet
In her memoir-in-poems Dispatches from Frontier Schools, Sarah Beddow creates a vital frontline record of American education as it abuts the pandemic. Here, we meet Beddow, a woman teacher in full, frank embodiment: an educator unwilling to subsume herself entirely to the twinned demands of capitalism and data-driven academic achievement bearing down on her and her students by her charter school employer, yet one who still burns to offer her entire intellectual and energetic self to her under-resourced students. “In the Instruction and Culture Cabinet meeting I once again / melted / when the principal asked us to be a team,” she writes in the poem “Dispatch re: White Out,” “to / buy in I buy in / I always / buy in … in the end when I arrive home I don't talk to my / family like I’ve been thinking / to and instead / I write about the day / about the exhaustion / about the students we do not serve.” Throughout Dispatches from Frontier Schools, Beddow contrasts the sterile and un-seeing language of corporate education with her own vibrant, devastating personal testimonies and disclosures, granting us an intimate, eviscerating glimpse into the negotiations, struggles, heartbreaks, and joys as lived from her side of the overflowing teacher’s desk.
– Rachel Mennies, author of The Naomi Letters and The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards
Sarah Beddow’s debut full-length collection, Dispatches from Frontier Schools, is an incredibly important contribution to our public discussions about education in the United States. Her testimony, these poems, makes evident the myriad and deeply troubling flaws in our public school system(s) and highlights all the ways students are dragged through schooling that serves no one by stressing expediency, rote memorization, and parroting over intellectual challenge and critical thinking: “A. is angry with me because / I made her read this book / and this conversation hurt / her / It hurts me / too,” laments Beddow.
And behind their desks (and in their cars, and in their homes, grading papers late at night), Beddow shows us, again and again, that teachers are asked to hold an unsustainable amount of emotional, physical, and intellectual space for trends disguised as pedagogy, reactive administrative demands, and student needs that surpass the scope and breadth of K-12 training. These poems are brutal, laying bare the tragic and terrible ways our country is failing us all. But they are also full of moments that are often missing in contemporary education – like humility, compassion, and empathy: “we stand in the hallway as D. tells me / she is pregnant she is due in December She cries and covers her / face with her hands I well up but hide it by biting the inside of my bottom lip.”
This book should be required reading for career administrators, board of education politicos, and all the legislators who pay little more than lip-service to our nation’s educators. These poems – unique in structure and perspective, and full of beautifully orchestrated lyric turns -- are a criticism, and a call for a reckoning, to be sure. “Wait I / I know this I remember /this This is burn/out The fire / out and in its place just / a rock lined pit,” she writes in “Re: Gratitude.” “the student who says thank you is rare You / are rare / And I look him in the eyes Then / I have to leave because soon this room will / be ablaze and I have nothing left to burn.”
– Sarah Kain Gutowski, author of Fabulous Beast: Poems
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