Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

Drawing on years of teaching experience, the book carefully portrays students, colleagues, and the everyday reality of the classroom. It looks at both the pain and the hope education can produce, and reframes school from the perspective of the people inside it rather than from above.

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Work Information

Through the children she met in the classroom, the outlines of school and society come into focus.

Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me is a work in which the author looks back on education through years spent in schools and through her relationships with pupils and colleagues. It shows not only the difficulty of teaching, but also the joy of learning and the human warmth that still survives within institutional limits.

Review Summaries

Through classroom details, the book shows concretely how the relationship between teacher and student can become a miniature of society. It is praised for treating each pupil as an individual and for catching emotional nuance rather than flattening people into types.

Book Information

Publisher: Picador
Published: 2019-04-04
Pages: 288 pages
Language: 英語
Size: 14.5 x 3.2 x 22.4 cm
ISBN-13: 9781509840298
ISBN-10: 150984029X
Price: 800 JPY
Category: 洋書/Nonfiction/Education/Reference/Words & Language

'The best book on teachers and children and writing that I've ever read. No-one has said better so much of what so badly needs saying.' Philip Pullman Kate Clanchy wants to change the world and thinks school is an excellent place to do it. She invites you to meet some of the kids she has taught in her thirty-year career. Join her as she explains everything about sex to a classroom of thirteen-year-olds. As she works in the school ‘Inclusion Unit’, trying to improve the fortunes of kids excluded from regular lessons because of their terrifying power to end learning in an instant. Or as she nurtures her multicultural poetry group, full of migrants and refugees, watches them find their voice and produce work of heartbreaking brilliance. While Clanchy doesn’t deny stinging humiliations or hide painful accidents, she celebrates this most creative, passionate and practically useful of jobs. Teaching today is all too often demeaned, diminished and drastically under-resourced. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me will show you why it shouldn’t be.

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her poetry collection Slattern won a Forward Prize. Her short story ‘The Not-Dead and the Saved’ won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Prize. Her BBC 3 radio programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature, and an anthology of her students' work, England: Poems from a School , was published to great acclaim. In 2019 she published Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me , a book about her experience of teaching in state schools for several decades.

Reviews

Quite unusual. Very interesting review of her time with a decent range of kids from immigrant families. Poetry is her forte and became liked by the kids. Liked her anti Catholic stance.
This book is worth reeding. It is about making other voices heard via your own, trying to understand people, trying to make other people understand people they would not otherwise meet. It is about different ways of reading and writing, about appreciating differences and remembering what can be changed through teaching and/or writing. It’s also much better written and edited than this review. If you can, buy it from outside Amazon perhaps?
I am in the process of reading this wonderful book. Approaching retirement, I have had twenty years as a lecturer in a modern, urban University with students as diverse, challenging and rewarding as the students Kate shares with us in this book. Reading it is like reflecting on my own journey through education. And that included confronting my own prejudices and mistaken perceptions. I became a teacher later in life, after a 25 year career in book publishing where I had been surrounded by mostly white, majority University educated upper working to middle class colleagues. It was a shock to find myself in a classroom full of Europe’s rainbow 18-25 year olds. They taught me so much. I read that the publishers and Kate are considering editing this book to remove some of the ‘stereotyping’ and ‘racist’ descriptions used. I haven’t the faintest idea how they will do this without ripping the heart out of the work. The definitions we use of ‘stereotyping’ and ‘racist’ should change if they are to be applied so broadly and unthinkingly to this book. This is a book about difference and perceptions of difference; of developing and intensifying awareness of self and others. Of learning. This book is about love, not hate. Please keep it as it is.
Could have been better thought of before written.
a good read