I suppose that in the interest of full disclosure I ought to point out that one of the reasons I like John T, Gatto is that he, like me, gave up a lucrative career as an advertising copywriter to become a teacher. Unlike him, I found a way to make teaching just as lucrative (running a private school to teach English in Japan), but many of the “guerrilla educational tactics” he describes in his books and speeches ring particularly familiar to me.
I used to take students on field trips out into the subtropical rain forests of the Boso peninsula where I lived, teaching them English, certainly, but also primitive survival skills such as fire making, shelter building, trapping and fishing using lines braided out of cattail leaf fibers. Yes, some parents raised some eyebrows when their progeny came marching back to the “school” in the rain, covered in mud, singing lusty sea shanties in English, but most were thrilled. I figured, if they didn’t approve of my methods they shouldn’t have signed their kids up at a place called “Adventure English.”
