It couldn't have been the pay

In 1963, Irving Rothstein was a 29-year-old office bureaucrat in Sacramento, a paper-pusher bored out of his gourd. He called on an ad to work as a tutor and got his first lesson on what to do with his life. Rothstein's memoir, It Couldn't Have Been the Pay: A Life of Teaching and Learning in Public Schools, collects his stories from more than 30 years of teaching, mostly in San Francisco. He used his storytelling and humor in the classroom to teach but also to help students from all backgrounds learn about themselves and each other.