Letters to a Young Teacher

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.