Country Zoo: The Perils of a First Year Teacher

Country Zoo is a novel which deals with the everyday work and challenges of a beginning high school science teacher in the picturesque village of King's Park in northeastern Ohio. The disciplinary problems and the power structure he encounters are common in all our nation's schools.

What then is unusual about this novel? It is definitely not To Sir With Love. One might be tempted to compare it with Blackboard Jungle and Up the Down Staircase which depict inner-city schools freighted with crime, drugs, and violence. The author of Country Zoo, Stanley B. Graham, shows that crimes of a more subtle nature occur almost daily in the lives of teachers in small communities, far removed from the big cities. In these villages and suburban-type towns the personal and daily harassment of teachers can be a fine art perfected by individual students as well as cliques. The term clique, rather than gang, is perhaps a preferred word , but the results are the same. These cliques regard teachers, especially beginning teachers, as legitimate prey for their countless pranks, both inside school and outside. They prey upon some teachers both day and night-egging their houses and toilet-papering their trees, writing obscene words on their windows, pestering them with anonymous obscene and threatening telephone calls. Their goal, of course, is to drive the new teacher out of the school, to make him quit in midyear.

Into this arena arrives Bill Grant-24 years old, a good-looking, intelligent, and sensitive first year high school science teacher, fresh from college and his student teaching. In attempting to handle his problems, he envisions himself as a lion trainer trying to control the lions (his obstreperous and disruptive students). During the year he meets, dates, and falls in love with the charming Maggie Maguire, a nurse who lives in the next block, in the village of King's Park. The harassment eventually includes Maggie as well as Bill.

Together, they battle the troublemakers. But Bill Grant's problems become almost insurmountable when the harassment is transmuted into homosexual propositioning by the ringleader, the son of the president of the board of education and prominent lawyer. Teacher and student get into a dangerous game of implied cooperation, as each tries to con the other, and the ring leader tries to make trouble between the teacher and his new wife.

The novel is recommended for its brutal honesty and the realistic depictions of: the daily struggle of a conscientious young teacher to survive in a circus or carnival-like atmosphere; the young teacher's attempts to understand his incorrigible students; spoiled rich kids out of control; school politics; the power struggle involving students, teachers, principal/superintendent, and president of the board of education; the family relationships of trouble-making students.

Through Bill Grant's actions the reader will discern the social message of the novel-that the teacher should be empowered to be truly autonomous and be in full control of his classroom.