Russell M. Cera

Fruit of the Bad Seed: a Memoir Novel Russell M. Cera

At no time during the history of modern education in America was there more turmoil than in the decade of the 1960s. And no teacher found the tumult more challenging than Ronald Caruso. In the 1960s the offspring of the baby boomers burgeoned school populations beyond capacities and districts struggled to fill teacher vacancies resulting in an influx of newly graduated, naive educators. The new teachers were book trained, but many were no more psychologically advanced than the students they came to teach and Nessaponic High School had her share. Growing up with a in the ?50s, Caruso found himself embroiled in the seductive allure of the sexual revolution. The ethics of the new age were so drastically contrasted to the domestic mother image of his upbringing, that Caruso felt he had been in a cultural cocoon for his entire college years. Though he ultimately found himself indulging in the liberties of the time more as a result of accident than design, it did not matter. To any observer over forty years removed, Caruso is seen as a bad seed. Though his efforts to redeem himself were constantly sabotaged by the social attitudes of his colleagues and charges, a product of the new generation promises to reclaim his values. Fruit of the Bad Seed is Ron Caruso?s story of a teacher who finds himself thrust into a new society fraught with newfound ethics; a society vastly different, eager to challenge the world and unafraid to venture into areas of promiscuity and moral values of that time yet unexplored. His story will tell about the professional and the not so professional administrators for whom he worked. It will tell about some of the teachers he taught with, some good and others not too good. It will relate what he knew of the secretaries and custodians who were employed there at the same time as he. But his story will tell even more about another group most responsible for the greater substance of Ronald Caruso?s tale, the permissive coeds of Nessaponic High. When Caruso started teaching he had no idea that the whims of fate would alter his career. It never dawned on him that he would be at the mercy of a changing world where he would become a victim of its caprice. He did not realize that his morality would change, his ethics would change and eventually, his very nature would undergo a major transformation.