![]() ![]() It was made into a film of the same name, starring Sandy Dennis, and it helped start a trend of candid education books. “Up the Down Staircase” has sold more than 6 million copies and has been translated into 16 languages. ![]() ![]() Kaufman became a heroine for teachers and students worldwide. When the book was released in 1965, The New York Times’ Beverly Grunwald praised Kaufman’s “refreshing way of stating the facts, of breaking down statistics into recognizable teenagers, of making you smile, be contrite and infuriated all at once.” When she’s not being reprimanded for her kids’ failure to memorize the school’s alma mater song, she faces a crowded but endearing class of misfits and other characters, from rebel Joe Ferone to the brown-nosing Harry A. She is a kind soul staggering under a blizzard of administrative nonsense and student impudence. “Up the Down Staircase,” a scrapbook of letters, notes and memos, follows a few months in the life of the idealistic young Sylvia Barrett, the new teacher at Calvin Coolidge High School. ![]() Like “Catch-22,” even the title of Kaufman’s book became a tell-all label, shorthand for all the senseless rules students and educators could never quite follow. Kaufman was a middle-age teacher and single mother in the mid-1960s when her autobiographical novel was welcomed as a kind of civilian companion to Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” a send-up of the most maddening bureaucracy. ![]()
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