Letters to a Young Teacher

For Kozol, teaching is not just a job or a career: Teaching is a calling. Like many vocations, the work is difficult, and the rewards can be rare and subtle, but for the right person (like Kozol’s pen pal Francesca), teaching, even at its most challenging, is its own reward.

Kozol expects a lot from teachers. Unlike other jobs with obvious metrics of success, a teacher’s effectiveness reveals itself subtly through the long-term growth of her students. When Kozol writes that “the best teachers are not merely the technicians of proficiency; they are also ministers of innocence, practitioners of tender expectations” (4-5) and insists that teachers should see the best in even their most challenging pupils, he is speaking to a small segment of the population who are spiritually prepared to give their whole selves over to the grueling work of raising children. What does it mean to behave like a minister of innocence or a practitioner of tender expectations? Kozol would say that only experience—not expert advice or a curriculum—can reveal this.

Aside from the spiritual requirements, teachers also face the boots-on-the-ground daily grind and dealing with school politics. For progressive teachers with regressive, combative principals, each authentic word and movement in the classroom could result in disciplinary action.