Give actor Tony Danza credit for hanging tough, said Jacob E. Osterhout in the New York Daily News. When the plug was pulled on his A&E reality show about teaching in a Philadelphia public high school, the rookie educator didn’t quit on his students midyear. In his new book, I’d Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had, the 61-year-old former star of Taxi and Who’s the Boss? describes sticking with the volunteer gig as an English teacher even though his two-decade marriage was ending and each day in the classroom presented new challenges. “There are very few things harder than being a high school teacher in America,” he says. It “requires total commitment at the expense of just about everything else in your life.”
Despite the rewards of the work, Danza eventually declined an invitation to teach a second year, said Lori Fradkin in HuffingtonPost.com. He says that worrying every day about the emotional and educational needs of 150 10th-graders was just too overwhelming. “One of the first things a teacher said to me was, ‘You’ve gotta be a mother, father, brother, sister, a teacher, a social worker, a best friend,’” Danza says. “It’s draining.” When the school’s principal, Linda Carroll, asked him to return in September, he considered it “the ultimate compliment.” But he also recalls that the decision wasn’t difficult. “I said, ‘I love you dearly. I love everybody here, but at this age, I’m not sure I want to care this much about anything.’ I mean, other than my own children.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
'There is a certain kind of strength in refusing to concede error'instant opinion 'Opinion, comment and editorials of the day'
-
23andMe's bankruptcy isn't just a finance story, it's a potential privacy crisisIN THE SPOTLIGHT The ancestral testing juggernaut's corporate collapse opens a new — but not wholly unforeseen — front in the battle over who has access to your genetic data
-
US officials share war plans with journalist in group chatSpeed Read Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to a Signal conversation about striking Yemen
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”