Full Description
In What Went Right: Lessons from Both Sides of the Teacher's Desk co-authors Roberta Israeloff and George McDermott resume a conversation they began in 1967—when she was in eleventh grade at Syosset (N.Y.) High School and he was her English teacher.
In 2014, after finding each other on Facebook, they began an email correspondence—as contemporaries, rather than student and teacher—and quickly discovered that neither had ever stopped thinking about that school and the many ways it influenced them.
As they shared their impressions of how and why public education has changed since then, they realized that a single academic year can have a deeper and longer-lasting impact than they had ever imagined.
Personal and probing, evocative and wide-ranging, the letters that compose this book ask and attempt to answer some timeless—and timely—questions: What makes a teacher or a class memorable? How can the teacher-student relationship be supported and strengthened? What does being "educated" truly mean? And, perhaps most important, what role can free public education play in sustaining our democracy?
Contents
Prologue
1: I'm hoping that you remember me
2: The opposite of burnout
3: Drills and dog clickers
4: Beneath, beyond, around the corner
5: To enjoy thinking
6: It bled into our lives
7: In the author's hands
8: The misunderstanding of education
9: The capacities that define us
10: There was no end, it seemed
11: Call it an injustice
12: The poetry inside us
13: Thinking about teachers
14: To take the long view
15: To reach judgments
16: Seduced by "observable goals"
17: How to be human
18: The best lessons
19: The crux of the problem
20: The way we conceptualize the world
21: The exaltation of ignorance
22: A hybrid profession
23: An ongoing, vital conversation
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Sources and Suggestions for Additional Reading
