Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way
Book Launch - Mon, April 20, 4pm
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Soviet Union
Español
April 12, 2026
by Frank Thoms
Everyone knows who their teachers were, some memorable, others less so. I wanted to know each one my students, well over 5,000 during forty years, the last twelve of which I spent teaching teachers.
I published my first book, Teaching from the Middle of the Room (Stetson Press 2010). I have been writing ever since and have published four books for teachers with Roman & Littlefield and one from my teaching and living in the former Soviet Union, Behind the Red Veil: An American inside Gorbachev's Russia (Spark Press, 2020).
I have had a passion for teaching ever since August 1962 when I stepped into my first classroom in Hanover, New Hampshire, where I taught mostly eighth graders in middle school. From my earliest years, I was the orchestrator of what happened in my classroom despite pressures to follow dictates from various administrations.
Most of my forty years teaching were in the US. I taught a year in a primary school in Oxfordshire, England in 1970-71, and I had over six residencies from 1986-1991 as a teacher of English in four Soviet schools in three cities, Leningrad, Moscow, and Alma-Ata, Kazakstan during the Gorbachev era.
Here in San Miguel (Monday, April 20, 4pm, JC3) I will launch my latest book, Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way (Stetson Press 2026). It is a memoir of my life in the classroom over forty years. I write from a passion and conviction of the essential role that public schools have had and should be able to continue to thrive despite threats from federal and states to undermine their crucial role in America. I write in the book:
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"The classroom teacher is the backbone of every school.…Despite the glitz of social media in its ubiquitous role in our culture, the classroom must be a safe place without devices where students are face to face with one another, listen and talk together, trust each other, understand who they are, and discover their agency to bring into the world."
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Soviet Union
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To set the stage for my presence throughout the book, a New Hampshire reporter wrote after interviewing me in Leningrad in 1986:
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"After school Thoms will walk to his hotel room on the Nevsky Prospekt with a small tape recorder pressed against his cheek. He refuses to forget a smile, a tear or an important confrontation with Soviet life. He gathers impressions of the Soviet Union like a real-life Holden Caulfield, the consummate social satirist. Nothing seems to escape his discerning eye. By watching and interacting, Thoms believes he is helping civilization from going over the cliff––a teacher in the rye."
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Sharon's last words gave me the title of the book. I conclude the introduction to Teacher in the Rye:
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"The principles I cherished for all teachers are threatened with the dismantling of public schools with vouchers for private and religious schools, the culture wars putting teachers on the defensive, and pressures from parents to want their children's education to be directed to their child. And as a writer more than sixty years after stepping into my first classroom, paraphrasing Kieth Sharon's words, I'm helping civilization from going over the cliff doing what I can to prevent society from stealing education from the classroom."
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And that is what happening in many parts of the US where legislators are literally "stealing education from the classroom" with their funding vouchers to parents for homeschooling or to send their kids to private and religious schools."
Soviet Union
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An excerpt from the book reflecting on my first years as a teacher::
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"My school years and teacher training emphasized textbooks, quizzes, tests, and papers, a methodology boiled down from college academic teaching. My department chair and mentor Del Goodwin's offer for me to develop and new area studies course for the 8th grade frees me of replicating that paradigm. Frees me to become a different kind of teacher, to explore possibilities, to invent, seek, create.…
"I discover new ways to collaborate with students, to create meaningful, magnetic, and memorable learning. I understand what it means to be integral with my students. We learn together.
"I am serious, thoughtful, playful, droll, punful, ridiculous, outrageous, and no doubt in their eyes sometimes weird. I feel free to be me in the classroom. At Del's request I also teach senior electives in Russian History and Economics that bring me the closest I came to being an academic high school teacher, but I discover that I prefer mingling with volatile early adolescents and their restless, inquisitive minds. I have found my platform."
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Forty years later, in May 1999, ending one remarkable experience after another with students, ages seven to seventeen in three countries, on the last day of my last class, in my last moments in the classroom, my 8th grade students tell me their feelings about our last assignment together:
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I thought I knew myself before writing this paper, but now I understand myself differently and more clearly. Thank you, Mr. Thoms. - Dorsey
Completing this assignment was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done.…I became enlightened. - John
I wrote the paper to write the paper. I was completely submersed in the process. The paper became something that was me. - Andrew
In order to write a paper on how I could relate to others, I had to think a lot about myself, both good and bad, and how others relate to me. - Nneka
This is the first assignment where I actually learned about myself rather than information. It really forced me to think. - Diana
This paper had much meaning to me. It made me look at my life and realize that I'm not leading it as well as I could. - David
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And the years in between in classrooms in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, England, and the former Soviet Union, were equally gratifying.
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Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way
Book Launch
Monday, April 20, 4pm
JC3, Las Moras 47 (at Cinco de mayo)
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Frank Thoms was a classroom teacher and consultant for 50 years. He has taught in public and private schools in the United States, as well as in schools in England, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Mexico. In the 70s, he developed a model open-education classroom that served as a resource to New England schools. He has consulted for PBS, AFS Intercultural Programs, the Kettering Foundation, Association of Independent Schools of New England, and the Vermont State Department of Education.
As a teacher of teachers, Frank served in more than 125 schools providing keynotes, workshops, pedagogical courses, mentoring, and teacher coaching. His unique style blended serious content and pedagogies in an interactive format that serves as a model for the kind of reflective teaching he advocates throughout his writing. He has published five books and has his sixth coming out later in the year.
www.frankthoms.com
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