Letters to a Young Teacher

Chapter One A Life Among Schoolchildren Dear Francesca, I was very happy that you wrote to me and I apologize for taking two weeks to reply. I was visiting schools in other cities in the first part of the month and I didn't have a chance to read your letter carefully until tonight. The answer to your question is that I would love to come and visit in your classroom and I'm glad that you invited me. I'd also like to reassure you that you didn't need to worry that I'd think your letter was presumptuous. I like to hear from teachers and, as you have probably suspected, I feel very close to quite a few of them, especially the ones who work with little children in the elementary grades, because those are the grades I used to teach. I think that teaching is a beautiful profession and that teachers of young children do one of the best things that there is to do in life: bring joy and beauty, mystery and mischievous delight into the hearts of little people in their years of greatest curiosity. Sometimes when I'm visiting a school, a teacher whom I may have met once when she was in college, or with whom I may have corresponded briefly, or a teacher whom I've never met but who's read one of my books and feels as if she knows me, sees me standing in the corridor and comes right up and tells me, "Come and visit in my classroom!" Sometimes she doesn't give me any choice. She simply grabs me by the arm and brings me to the classroom. Then, when I get there, typically she puts me on the spot and asks if I would like to teach a lesson or ask questions to her children. I love it when teachers let me do this, but I almost always do it wrong at first, because it's been a long time since I was a teacher, and I often ask the kind of question that gets everybody jumping from their seats and speaking out at the same time. Six-year-olds, when they become excited, as you put it in your letter, have "only a theoretical connection with their chairs." They do the most remarkable gymnastics to be sure you see them. A little girl sitting right in front of me will wave her fingers in my face, climbing halfway out of her chair, as if she's going to poke me in the eyes if I won't call on her, and making the most heartrending sounds"Ooooh! Ooooh! Ooooh! Ooooh!"in case I still don't notice that she's there. Then, when I finally call on her, more often than not she forgets the question that I asked, looks up at me in sweet bewilderment, and asks me, "What?" It turns out she didn't have a thing to say. She just wanted me to recognize that she was there. The teacher usually has to bail me out. She folds her arms and gives the class one of those looks that certain teachers do so well, and suddenly decorum is restored. It's a humbling experience, but I think that it's a good one too, for someone who writes books on education to come back into the classroom and stand up there as the teacher does day after day and be reminded in this way of what it's like to do the real work of a teacher. I sometimes think that every education writer, every would-be education expert, and every politician who pontificates, as many do so condescendingly, about the "failings" of the teachers in the front lines of our nation's public schools ought to be obliged to come into a classroom once a year and teach the class, not just for an hour with the TV cameras watching but for an entire day, and find out what it's like. It might at least impart some moderation to the disrespectful tone with which so many politicians speak of teachers. In my writings through the course of nearly 40 years, I have always tried to bring theKozol, Jonathan is the author of 'Letters to a Young Teacher ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307393715 and ISBN 0307393712.