Zigzag: A Life of Reading and Writing, Teaching and Learning

AS I've come to expect with Tom Romano's work, Zigzag is rich with voice, humor, beautiful language, and real life experiences. What a great memoir for teachers! It will encourage you to write your own and has chapters on growing up that can be used as mentor text and will appeal to our students.

I found this book, written in an engaging and informal style, hard to put down, and since it's only a bit over 200 pages, I finished it in just a couple days--with regret. Its subtitle, A Life of Reading and Writing, Teaching and Learning, sums it up nicely for me. Romano comfortably and casually follows the zigzag path of his life, from his earliest memories of growing up in Malvern, Ohio to his present position as a professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. While it's only 260 miles from Malvern to Oxford, the route Romano followed getting from one place to the other took many detours, including a noteworthy one to the University of New Hampshire, so he traveled many more miles over many years. The last time I remember a book inspiring me the way this one has was when, many years ago, a fellow teacher handed me a copy of Ken Macrorie's Uptaught. But Macrorie's viewpoint is that of a college teacher of writing; Romano has had the advantage of working in classrooms at all levels from early elementary through graduate level in college. Partly because I was looking for a book to re-energize my teaching and partly because I liked his earlier book, Clearing the Way, so much, I bought a copy of Zigzag as soon as I first received a notice from the publisher about it. I feel it was money well spent. My teaching has been re-energized and now I have a deeper, more personal understanding of all the challenges conscientious teachers of writing face in their struggles to connect with and inspire their students. Romano's journey was indeed a zigzag one, a road "less traveled," but one I found gutsy, and--when he makes that wonderful connection with students knowing he has really helped them learn and develop as readers and writers--an inspiring and exhilarating one.