Lights Out at Northern is a chemistry teacher's diary spanning thirteen years in Detroit Public Schools. He arrives from the west and adapts to a new inner-city reality and records his struggle to be a successful teacher in a failing school. His di... Read more

Lights Out at Northern is a chemistry teacher's diary spanning thirteen years in Detroit Public Schools. He arrives from the west and adapts to a new inner-city reality and records his struggle to be a successful teacher in a failing school. His diary and stories woven into it give the reader vivid insight into the mechanisms of failure in inner-city schools. It is not a scholarly treatise on education, but an account of real people, incompetence, corruption, criminal activity and some successes in a reasonably good school that degenerates to a mere building housing chaos, anger, violence and very little education. Less