Words of Wisdom from Jonathan Kozol
As we move to the end of the semester and student teacher gets that much closer, it is worth pausing to consider the wider field of education and what challenges you may face. Kozol has been a passionate voice for all students and teachers over the years, and this article from Edutopia reminds us of how your first few years can be full of challenges, and how to overcome those challenges.
If you haven’t yet read any of Kozol’s work, I think that it would be worth your time to grab one of his books for your summer reading list.
Teaching with Passion: Advice for Young Educators | Edutopia
For more than forty years, Jonathan Kozol has taught in, worked with, and written about America’s inner city public schools. His straight talk in best-selling books such as Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace has made him a hero of many teachers, and he fiercely opposes government policies he believes perpetuate educational inequities.Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)In his newest book, Letters to a Young Teacher, Kozol takes aim at the test-driven curriculum proliferating our educational system. Through a series of personal letters to Francesca, a fledgling first-grade teacher in Boston who invited him into her classroom, Kozol delivers sage advice, sharp criticism of the status quo, and stories of his own early teaching experiences. As Publishers Weekly remarked, it is “an impassioned book, not only for what it imparts of classroom doings, but even more so for the obstacles increasingly being laid at teachers’ hands.”
