In his humorous, wry and often blue-language-laden memoir Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story, high school English teacher Brendan Halpin recounts his nine-year tenure in Boston-area public schools. He punctuates his story with anecdotes of burned-out teachers, moronic administrators, problem students and successes.

Halpin begins his teaching career as a nervous and naive student teacher constantly wondering: "What will I do if they misbehave? What do they think of me?"

He is horrified the first time he's left alone in the classroom and a student blurts out: "I don't mean to disrespect you, but you got that nasty Student Teacher Breath."

"The class breaks up," Halpin writes. "I have no idea what to say. I'm not yet secure enough to laugh at a joke like this."

Halpin begins the fall at Newcastle High School (he has changed the school's and students' names), where he carpools with a teacher he doesn't like, 13 of his 16 students are "mainstreamed" special-education kids and the teachers have to make up their own curriculum.

"I have no special-ed training," writes Halpin, who has five classes in four different classrooms. "The only thing I know for sure is that (the students) have to read a Shakespeare play every year."

Halpin's students have severe discipline problems, so he's not "Mr. Popularity" with his colleagues, who often leave their classes to tell Halpin's class to shut up. Halpin has to cook the grades to make sure the whole class doesn't fail.

Frustrated one day, he makes an almost career-ending move when he picks up a gigantic English anthology and flings it down on the linoleum floor, causing a loud crack and hitting a student's foot.

"There is really nothing I could possibly say to justify this," Halpin writes. "She insists that it's no big deal. I don't get fired for this."

Halpin does have some successes. One of his rowdier classes identifies with Wordsworth's poem We Are Seven, and can't wait to write down their thoughts.

Despite their enthusiasm, he's told by colleagues that he's too experimental. He has given the students poems that are not in the required anthology. It is also suggested that he give a multiple-choice test every two weeks on the essays and poems in the required text.

"In other words," he writes, "bore them into submission."

After moving around in suburban schools, Halpin finally makes it into the Boston school system. He's hired by "Better Than You," a charter school that operates independently from other Boston district schools. Better Than You has a reputation for being an innovative, entrepreneurial place that empowers hard-working teachers who are free from satanic teachers' unions.

But it's not long before Halpin finds himself worn down by the school's bureaucracy, an incompetent principal (whom he calls Big Daddy) and his right-hand woman, Ms. Barracuda - "whom I have been afraid of since day one," he writes. "She is one of those people who hides her desire to eviscerate you with a gooey, exaggerated niceness."

She requires teachers to reapply for their jobs at the end of the year, then humiliates them by handing out letters stating whether or not their contracts have been renewed.

"They essentially say, 'Thanks but no thanks,' and probably end with 'Govern yourself accordingly,' which is Smiley Barracuda's favorite non sequitur ending to every incomprehensible communication," Halpin writes.

When one of his colleague's contract isn't renewed, "Smiley Barracuda gives Glenn his letter before class starts. Classy."

Halpin considers quitting teaching, but reconsiders when he discovers that, despite the many roadblocks, he has made a difference in his students' lives. Still, Losing My Faculties never stoops to the author's saving the day by changing a non-yielding administration or finally getting through to an unreachable student.

Instead, Halpin's story is a smartly written, slightly tongue-in-cheek look at what it's like to be in the trenches of public education.

Laurence Washington is co-publisher and editor of Blackflix.com and teaches journalism at Metropolitan State College of Denver.