Author Name:
Genét Simone
Book Title:
Teaching in the Dark: A Memoir
Website URL:
Social Media Links:
Facebook: Genet-Simone
Instagram: genet_simone
Link to book page on Amazon:
Teaching in the Dark: A Memoir
What is your book about?
Teaching in the Dark chronicles my first year as a teacher in the Arctic village of Shishmaref, Alaska. The stories are funny, reflective, and poignant. They reveal the inner life of teachers everywhere: the constant doubt and confusion, mixed with hope and aspiration. My book’s primary audience is teachers, but readers from all walks of life will connect to my stories of self-exploration and trying to create relationships with people in difference places and cultures. It also has appeal for readers who love the wild quirkiness of Alaska.
What inspired you to write your book?
Over the past 40 years, I’ve been sharing stories about Shishmaref with friends and colleagues. They all said the same thing: “You need to write a book!” I tried a few times but didn’t succeed until I started teaching high school again in 2019. I was shocked to learn that, even with 30 years of experience as a teacher educator and three major universities, I felt like a first-year teacher all over again. That’s when I felt compelled to write this book—to make sense of my time in Shishmaref and also help me negotiate more skillfully working with teens in the 21st Century. The other thing that inspired me to write this book is my desire to thank people in Shishmaref for their kindness during my short tenure in their village. A book seemed like a great way to let them know about the enormous impact their lives and culture has had on me all these years.
If you have a business related to your book, tell us about it:
I own a business: Genét Simone Educational Consulting. I am in the process of creating a workshop for teachers (K-12 or college) based on a formula that came to me one day while I was writing my memoir. I call it The B.E.S.T. Formula. B.E.S.T. stands for Brave, Effective, Self-Caring, and Transformative. My experiences as a teacher in Shishmaref, Alaska, spearheaded a life-long inquiry into the teaching life: What brings people into the profession, and what keeps them there? What emerged was this formula, which I use myself and want to teach to others. It can help teachers find their ground every day, so they can take care of themselves AND be of service to others. Teaching is a transformative journey that ought to include the person who teaches. My tagine is, “If you want to ‘make a difference,’ you have to make it YOU.”
What is a typical day like for you?
I am a full-time teacher at Ingraham High School in Seattle, WA, so my days are very full! I get up at 5:00am for an hour of self-care (meditation, reading and journaling, and a short workout). Then, I get ready for school and head out the door by 7:15am. My current schedule includes teaching two classes of about thirty-five students each. I have 9-12th graders who come with all kinds of academic gifts and challenges! My class is called Career Connected Learning. Students learn about different careers, how to write a resumé, how to apply for jobs, etc. I also help them find internships for work experience, and I bring speakers to the high school and coordinate career fairs. By the time I get home, I am brain-dead, which means I am forced to be more of a weekend writer. It’s a bit frustrating, because I would love to write full-time! But I know that my presence in the classroom is still making a difference in students’ lives—as surely as their presence is making a difference in mine. So, I am making peace with less writing time, knowing that I will be able to carve out writing retreats and then become a full-time writer after I retire from the classroom in a few years.
What do you most enjoy about what you do?
With my current job at Ingraham High School, my favorite thing is when students accomplish something they worked hard on, and I witness the surprise in their eyes when they realize they learned something! I absolutely LOVE seeing the unfurling of another person’s transformation. What a RUSH. I think teenagers are the most amazing people—sharp, eager to learn, funny, polite, shy … and also confused by and anxious about this crazy world. I love being with them through all of it, playing coach and cheerleader, mentor and tough-love-adult when needed. I love the ebb and flow of teaching, the unpredictability of it, and then the enormous satisfaction of a hard day’s work, done well.
What are some favorite books you’d recommend to our readers?
Some of my favorite classics are The Color Purple (Alice Walker), The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver), and Woman on the Edge of Time (Marge Piercy). I’ve also recently enjoyed Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Carter Phipps’s Evolutionaries, and Rob McNamara’s The Elegant Self.
What advice do you have to offer our readers?
My advice is to stay open to the transformative nature of being human. I believe we are divine beings—timeless, connected throughout the centuries and into the future. Every moment we’re alive on this earth-dimension should be filled with wonder and gratitude and eagerness to keep learning, to keep giving, to keep transforming into the next best iteration of ourselves. The stories we share with each other are a magnificent venue for feeding that impulse. Stories help us connect to others and make sense of their lives, as much as they help us connect to our own life and recognize how we change over time, yet still retain an essential divinity at our core that is uniquely ours, alone. The world is a messy place and can bury our divinity with self-doubt, fear, grief, or whatever. The gift of life is to stay open through all of that—to ask, “What’s possible now? And now? And now?” Keep feeding THAT. We don’t know what happens when we leave this particular dimension, so why not go out on a high note and with as much momentum as possible?
What would people be surprised to learn about you?
I have a passion for building birdhouses. There is just something about those little structures that sings to me.
What’s next for you? I will continue to do speaking engagements with my memoir—that’s the biggest push over the next several months in particular. I also want to explore pitching my memoir as a movie or mini-series. Regarding book projects, I have a few lines in the water: an historical fiction set in the late 1800s that involves a slave girl escaping toward freedom; a novel based on my mother’s experiences as a young civilian girl during World War II in Germany; a series of essays that will serve as a sequel to my memoir, which I am titling Teaching in the Light; and a small self-published handbook for my B.E.S.T. Formula.
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