Sometimes a shining moment: the foxfire experience.

• Author: Ohanian, Susan

Sometimes a Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience.

Eliot Wigginton.Anchor Press/Doubleday, $19.95.

I kept telling myself thatWigginton must be on the side of the angels: he dislikes standardized tests and textbooks and the whole malarkey of master teachers. So how come I can't like him more?

Roughly a third of Sometimes aShining Moment focuses on how Wigginton started Foxfire, an alternative school, and how the widely-read books on local crafts and lore were "put together by high school students, the majority of whom had hated English.' As an English teacher myself, I applaud the accomplishment. But Wigginton is long on self-congratulation and short on both practical and inspirational insights for teachers who are not, like him, freed from the rules and rituals of public school teaching.

Wigginton calls himself a publicschool teacher but the astounding financial success of the Foxfire books enabled him to set up a corporation which now hires him to teach the Foxfire course. In no way do I begrudge him his comfortable position: he earned it, starting out with just a tape recorder, a dream, and faith in kids. But I do begrudge him his arrogance, his barely tempered sneering that if other teachers cared about doing the job right, they'd do it his way.

Wigginton pats himself on theback for returning student themes, rigorously corrected, the next day. Most public school English teachers have a student load upwards of 125 students. Wigginton has 24. He points with pride to the beautiful Appalachian artifacts that decorate his classroom, artifacts he uses to motivate students. Most high school teachers share space with other teachers, often teaching in two or three different rooms during the day. Their classroom supplies and motivating devices are pretty much limited to what they can carry on their backs.

Wigginton, prone to absolutes,announces that his classroom rules are so natural and so obviously right that he never has to enforce them. I believe him. When your rule is that you won't "allow students to throw $250 cameras out the classroom window at passing delivery trucks,' then chances are pretty good that you won't have too much trouble enforcing it.

Wigginton's solution for problemstudents chills me to the bone. He pronounces, "Students who obviously do not belong in [the school] setting because they are determined to be antisocial and destructive, and are beyond self-discipline and the capacity to reason, must be swiftly and surgically...