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.
Julie Landsman is Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Until her recent retirement, she had spent many years working with both troubled and gifted students in middle and high schools in the Minneapolis Public School System. She continues to teach in Minneapolis as a Writer in the Schools. Ms. Landsman presently has a monthly column in the Skyway News.
Table of Contents
Part 1 Introduction: Our Changing World: A Cause for CelebrationChapter 2 Before School: What I BringChapter 3 Waiting for First HourChapter 4 First Hour: Recognizing OneselfChapter 5 Second Hour: History and LiteratureChapter 6 Third Hour: Student Voices as the Center of the ClassChapter 7 Lunch Hour: Students' LivesChapter 8 Fourth Hour: ConnectionsChapter 9 Interlude: Twenty-Four SevenChapter 10 Fifth Hour: RepresentingChapter 11 My White Power WorldChapter 12 Sixth Hour: ExpectationsChapter 13 After School: Training TeachersChapter 14 At Night: CommunityChapter 15 Living in Different WorldsChapter 16 Celebrations at HomeChapter 17 Resistance: The Power of White ActivismChapter 18 Epilogue
What People are Saying About This
Peggy McIntosh
If you are one of the teachers exhausted by the ways that systemic race and class dynamics play out in school, Landsman's stories may give you courage....This is a teacher I would cherish for my children: wise about power dynamics, committed to justice, engaged with students, and never self-righteous.