Full Description
Veteran teacher Julie Landsman leads the reader through a day of teaching and reflection about her work with high school students who are from a variety of cultures. She speaks honestly about issues of race, poverty, institutional responsibility, and white privilege by engaging the reader in the experiences of a day in the classroom with some of her remarkable students. Throughout the day, we meet bigotry head-on, struggle with questions of racial identity, and find cultural conflict in the corridors of the school building. Along the way, we come face to face with Tyrone, a young African-American student grappling with the realities of discrimination in suburbia. We encounter Sheila, a teenage mother struggling to raise her baby in poverty, and we get to know Sarah, a white girl living on the streets of Minneapolis. Through the author's eyes, we begin to understand the complexities of teaching in today's society and we learn within the pages of this book, if only just for a moment, what it feels like to be the other.
Contents
Part 1 Introduction: Our Changing World: A Cause for Celebration
Chapter 2 Before School: What I Bring
Chapter 3 Waiting for First Hour
Chapter 4 First Hour: Recognizing Oneself
Chapter 5 Second Hour: History and Literature
Chapter 6 Third Hour: Student Voices as the Center of the Class
Chapter 7 Lunch Hour: Students' Lives
Chapter 8 Fourth Hour: Connections
Chapter 9 Interlude: Twenty-Four Seven
Chapter 10 Fifth Hour: Representing
Chapter 11 My White Power World
Chapter 12 Sixth Hour: Expectations
Chapter 13 After School: Training Teachers
Chapter 14 At Night: Community
Chapter 15 Living in Different Worlds
Chapter 16 Celebrations at Home
Chapter 17 Resistance: The Power of White Activism
Chapter 18 Epilogue
