Letters to a Young Teacher

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Chapters 11-12

Chapter 13-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary: “Wild Flowers”

Kozol discusses the importance of listening carefully to children, who are usually clever, silly, and enjoy telling little secrets to teachers: For example, a young student named Ariel told Kozol that her mother called her Wild Flower at home. Honest disclosures like this can help students be more expressive later in life.

Teachers should let children write down each idea “with its freshness and its vigor still intact” (48), without worrying about fixing spelling and grammar right away. Kozol is dismayed by school systems where teachers are prohibited from displaying imperfect student work on their walls. Modern school systems are forcing teachers to stay on task and reach pre-ordained objectives that have nothing to do with the interests of teachers or students.

Children learn better when they can see a purpose or personal meaning attached to the learning objective. A gifted teacher can use a young student’s seemingly irrelevant tangent to meaningfully tie the student’s interests to course material. Kozol praises Francesca for doing exactly this with her student Shaniqua.

Education experts, keen to improve on student answers rather than consider them at face value, often miss what children are saying. For example, when a student provided the word “skinny” as an antonym for “fat” in Kozol’s classroom, a visiting writing expert asked the student to come up with a “nicer” word, and together they came up with the word “slender.” Kozol argues that in many cases, skinny would be the more effective word and the student’s original answer required no improvement.

Kozol encourages Francesca to continue validating her students by listening carefully to them. In her previous letter, Francesca described creatively finding a way to explain the word “bamboozle” to a young student—Kozol sees this as proof that Francesca is on the right track.

Chapter 6 Summary: “The Little Piper (A Few Reflections on the Kids Who Make It Clear That They’re Determined Not to Like Us)”

Francesca asks how to handle young students who are a classroom nuisance. These students can grind all learning to a halt, posing a difficulty for young teachers, who “tend to isolate that child in whatever way they can and try to lock him out of their attention for extended periods of time” (62) as a solution. Francesca herself engaged in this practice with a gangly, theatrical child named Dobie, whom she found fascinating despite his interruptions. Eventually, Dobie revealed that he was bored in class and asked Francesca to “make his life more interesting” (64).

Francesca visited Dobie at home to drop off some brownies and noticed that he shared a bedroom with his mother and sister. Dobie was surprisingly pleasant to Francesca during this visit. After her visit, Dobie began writing details of his life in a notebook, sharing “angry memories and fears he’d been reluctant to reveal to [Francesca] before” (65). Francesca used this notebook as an opportunity to help Dobie improve his writing ability. Only a few weeks before this breakthrough, Francesca was considering referring Dobie to be assessed for developmental delays or psychological impairment, which would have given Dobie a likely incorrect label that would follow him around for the rest of his life.

Kozol writes that although some children do need clinical interventions to succeed, teachers must be patient with difficult students and first understand where they might be coming from. Dobie’s holiday letter to Francesca was so much better written than his prior efforts that she hung up on her bedroom wall out of pride.

Kozol stresses the importance of small class size, so that teachers have the time and capacity to spend additional time with difficult students. He praises Francesca for her success with Dobie.

Chapters 5-6 Analysis

Kozol elevates the original, authentic, raw expression of children as having value in its own right. Children need space to make mistakes while they are expressing themselves in their work, but they will resist expressing their voices if teachers do not avoid the urge (or even the mandate by school administrators) to immediately correct student grammar and spelling errors.

Children will be also unable to produce high-quality work if they see no purpose or make no meaningful connection to the work. One of a teacher’s most sacred and difficult duties is to engage children while also upholding curricular requirements. This becomes increasingly difficult with the encroachment of business practices in public education and the insistence that teachers stay on task all day. Children’s authentic voices get bulldozed when schools force them to go through the motions of an uninspired curriculum.

It becomes even more difficult to bring children to their greatest potential when children are oppositional and difficult to work with. Kozol implores teachers to be patient with such children, despite the hardships involved—easier alternatives, such as having a problem child “assessed” and placed along an alternative educational track, could negatively affect their life forever. Sometimes, children can’t focus because of boredom, a problem that can be solved with ingenuity when a teacher finds ways to make material personal and interesting. To make this possible, small class sizes are critical because more time can be devoted to children who require extra attention to succeed.