Letters to a Young Teacher

Francesca asks who is responsible for setting up education policy talks about the fun, excitement, and wonderment of children. Kozol writes that official documents do not use this language, even though the delight and joy of children is top of mind for teachers.

Kozol shares a story from a school visit where a teacher demonstrated an effective, engrossing, and playful method of keeping the classroom’s attention by having everybody imitate the flute section of an orchestra with their hands and voices. Good teachers should never be too inhibited to express themselves in the classroom like this. He shares another example of a classroom in which the teacher brought in a real caterpillar, using its growth and eventual transformation into a butterfly to teach biology.

Kozol is skeptical of education policy that primarily cares about how students will eventually fit into the national economy. Rather, he praises Francesca for refusing to push “children out of that age when many things are interesting and so much is new” (105). Kozol praises the “Tooth Line” that Francesca set up in her classroom, in which the students chart the progress of their loose teeth from “wiggly” to “wobbly” and finally to “out!” as an effective way to teach timelines through a whimsical activity that children respond to.