To me, Susan is the quintessential teacher . . . Thanks Susan—on days when the going is toughest, you and your students will always be there with me to help me remain sane. And hopeful.
—Deborah Meier

In the tradition of Jim Herndon's The Way It Spozed To Be, but in her own passionate voice, Susan Ohanian tells stories of the real. Others might write abstractly of standards and accountability, Ohanian presents us with Sylvia and Shari, Jackson and Jolene and the other seventh graders she teaches who, in their own quirky ways, teach Ohanian what it means to be a teacher. Ultimately, this is her story.
—Gerald W. Bracey, Independent Educational Researcher and Writer

This is a book full of unapologetic piss and bile and outrage. In this take-no-prisoner book, nobody gets off easy—not the schools, teachers, the glib educational "experts", nor the standardistos. Susan Ohanion has written a dark, disturbing rebuttal to quick-fix solutions for our schools. Yet this is also written a book of tremendous caring. Again and again I was struck by Ohanion's unwillingness to give up on the "rotten readers" in an urban school that the system has forsaken. A half dozen times while reading these portraits of middle school kids, and the author's compassion for them, I found myself wiping tears from my eyes. Read this book.
—Ralph Fletcher, author of What A Writer Needs

As one of the country's most outspoken critics of standards and testing, and a former inner-city teacher, Susan Ohanian is no stranger to the "f" word: failure. She often referred to it in her best-seller, One Size Fits Few, to point out "the folly of educational standards." And now, in her follow-up book, Caught in the Middle, it's the fulcrum upon which she dares to reveal what schools are really like when nonstandard kids and a standardized curriculum collide in the classroom.

Offering both a warning and a clarion to teachers everywhere—Susan tells an insider's story of living day in and day out with students who are not likely to succeed in a world with only one definition of success. In the first of a series of heart-wrenching and heroic portraits, you'll meet twelve-year-old Sylvia ("Nobody messes with Sylvia"), who is failing all her courses but, somehow, teams up with the author in a bizarre mutual-aid arrangement. Next, one by one, you'll get to know Anita (sweet, compliant, and then pregnant) . . . Jimmy (who discovers fairy tales ten years after all his peers did) . . . Tiffany (unkempt, unwashed, whiny, and then suddenly transformed into the proud owner of words when introduced to a thesaurus) . . . Jean (teller of tall tales, including a whopper Susan fell for) . . . Clarice (the most polite kid in school, but with a locker bursting with stolen goods) . . . and Arnold ("certifiably crazy," but who is always promoted because nobody wanted him to stay another year).

Although admitting to failure, Caught in the Middle is not a downer. Hope shines through, and it comes, not from political initiatives or even from wonderful programs, but from individual interactions between teacher and students; it comes from matters of the heart.

Visit www.susanohanian.org Visit Susan Ohanian online for a wealth of information on education issues and to learn more about her. You'll find commentary, cartoons, letters, resources, quotes and a word of the day offering children a provocative way to increase their vocabulary.