Following on from the success of her first memoir, A Year in the Mud the Toast and the Tears, popular South Australian author Georgie Brooks give us Semi-Educated, a laugh-out-loud look at her first year of being a 'mature age' high-school teacher.
After being bullied by cows and overwhelmed by tractors (and well-meaning husbands) that keep getting bogged in the mud, Georgie decides hobby farming is not her forte. She turns her attention to a long-held passion: imparting her love of literature to the impressionable young minds of tomorrow as a high-school English teacher. Not to mention enjoying the perks of working 9am to 3:30pm five days a week! She had just survived years of commercial litigation, life in government offices and then hobby farming combined with hand-rearing her own children, so how challenging could teaching really be? Well, quite hard as it turned out. Quite hard indeed. In fact, it would be fair to say that She. Had. No. Idea.
This amusing account of modern-day teaching, with its staff room politics, yard duty terrors, excursion nightmares and the occasional pleasure of teaching something that sticks, is for anyone who enjoys a well-written chuckle.
