Letters to a Young Teacher, Jonathan Kozol
Letters to a Young Teacher, Jonathan Kozol
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Letters to a Young Teacher

Author: Jonathan Kozol

Narrator: David Drummond

Unabridged: 5 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/15/2007


Synopsis

In these affectionate letters to Francesca, a first grade teacher at an inner-city school in Boston, Jonathan Kozol vividly describes his repeated visits to her classroom while, under Francesca's likably irreverent questioning, also revealing his own most personal stories of the years that he has spent in public schools.

Letters to a Young Teacher reignites a number of the controversial issues that Kozol has powerfully addressed in recent years: the mania of high-stakes testing that turns many classrooms into test-prep factories where spontaneity and critical intelligence are no longer valued, the invasion of our public schools by predatory private corporations, and the inequalities of urban schools that are once again almost as segregated as they were a century ago.

But most of all, these letters are rich with the happiness of teaching children, the curiosity and jubilant excitement children bring into the classroom at an early age, and their ability to overcome their insecurities when they are in the hands of an adoring and hard-working teacher.

About Jonathan Kozol

Jonathan Kozol is a well-known activist and National Book Award-winning author who has focused his writings and efforts on ending illiteracy, improving the economic conditions of the poverty-stricken, and pricking the consciences of affluent Americans for over forty years. Since his early account of teaching at a public school in Roxbury, Death at an Early Age, many of his writings have pertained to his career as a public school advocate and educator and his experience as an activist on education issues. In Free Schools, he recounted his experiences in setting up a free school in Boston. Illiterate America, a seminal work in Kozol's exploration of illiteracy, draws on the author's background as a grass-roots organizer to outline his proposal for dealing with the problem of illiteracy in the United States. In Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America, Kozol looked closely at homeless families living in a shelter in New York City. In 1991 he returned to the subject of education in the bestselling Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, in which he pointed out the gross inequalities in school quality from community to community. With Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation and Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope, Kozol put a human face on the conditions experienced by residents of Mott Haven, the poorest neighborhood in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Amy

Though I’m not a k-12 teacher, this still has some important lessons for us all. Good read.......more

Goodreads review by Erica

This was a very quick read. Not so much because Kozol's writing is to easy and light but because I had read it before. Like, in his OTHER books. In the beginning of the book, he tells you that these "letters to Francesca" are edited to include some snippets of his previous books on educational polic......more

At one point in this book, Kozol describes a letter he received from a school he had recently visited. The child’s name who sent the letter was Mario. Mario signed his letter, “from my heart to my eyes, Mario.” I will now be signing all my letters as such. Thanks Mario.......more