Lessons with Love
Tales of teaching and learning in a small-town high school
By Marianne Love

Marianne Love's new memoir reveals the trials, and often humorous, tribulations of teaching in a small-town high school. In 1953 as an eager first-grader, Love could hardly wait to go to the red brick schoolhouse in her rural hometown of Sandpoint, Idaho. And well she remembers her first teacher, Mrs. Kinney, with her steely discipline, bright red fingernails, math drills and flash cards.

Little could that child know she was about to embark on a half-century love affair with learning and teaching, first as student and then as teacher – and all in Sandpoint, a quintessential Northwest small town where logging and farming were the way of life. Leaving town only to gain her teaching degree at the University of Idaho, she returned fresh out of college to begin a 33-year career as English teacher at Sandpoint High School.

Hers is the warm, remarkable and often humorous story about devotion to both a profession, and a place, and now she writes it in her newest book.

Lessons with Love: Tales of teaching and learning in a small-town high school tells of the three decades Love spent in the classroom, and before, as a student herself growing up in Sandpoint. Love estimates that in her years at SHS she taught to some 4,500 students, and the experiences she accumulated ran the gamut of the good, the bad – and the funny, as anyone might guess from her two first books, Pocket Girdles and Other Confessions of a Northwest Farmgirl , memories from her rural childhood; and Postcards from Potato(e) Land , a continued portrait of life in Sandpoint.

But Love's new book is more than a memoir. It's also a meditation on teaching, in which she learns her own lessons in a profession that can so profoundly shape the lives of young people. She's not afraid to offer a tart opinion of those uninspiring teachers who just coast by on their credentials: “I was disgusted that our education was being shortchanged by their ineptitude,” she writes at one point. But she also believes strongly in the positive power teachers can have with what seem like even the most difficult of students. “Don't let classroom experiences or judgments cloud your thoughts about a student's future,” she advises future teachers. “You may be surprised.” Love lards her book with observations and advice from her life in teaching and concludes it with a collection of her top 10 teaching memories, compiled a la David Letterman – though with a bit more depth, conviction and feeling. Marianne's son William Love, himself a former SHS student who is now a working journalist, contributes a chapter loaded with his own WOWs: words of wisdom to students, from the son of a teacher.

The result is a 288-page chronicle of teaching, learning and one small town's journey from a sleepy working-class village to burgeoning resort destination. Lessons with Love: Tales of teaching and learning in a small-town high school gives intriguing insights into education and teaching set in the milieu of rural America. For anyone who's ever gone to school – as a student or a teacher – it will kindle both memories and smiles.

Click to read an excerpt from chapter 4.

Praise for Lessons with Love:

"A compelling, witty look at the life of a compelling, witty – and richly compassionate teacher. What could be more important? Or more fun?"

–Ben Stein, actor, television personality and teacher

"The homespun humor and off-the-wall tales in Marianne Love's first book, Pocket Girdles , earned her a lot of fans, and she hasn't disappointed them since. Now, in Lessons with Love , she employs her characteristic humor – and subtler qualities of reflection and reminiscence – to recount some highlights of her 33-year career as a North Idaho schoolteacher. As one of Marianne's forever-grateful students, I can vouch for her talent and her unbounded enthusiasm – attributes that, page after page, have found their way into this book." 

–Keith Lee Morris, Sandpoint High School Class of 1981,Clemson University associate professor of English, author of The Greyhound God (novel) |and Best Seats in the House (stories), winner of
Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction and South Carolina Arts Commission Fiction Fellowship