Tag Archives: Book Reviews

Pat Conroy’s award-winning memoir about his teaching experiences on remote SC island

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Periodically I come across a book about teachers that I’d like to share with you, and I have one to share today. The book is The Water is Wide by former teacher Pat Conroy (1945—2016). The award-winning memoir was published in 1972, the first of several acclaimed works he authored.

In 1969, Pat taught African American students in grades five through eight in a two-room school house on a remote island off the coast of South Carolina. He was a young, idealistic teacher, but not entirely inexperienced, since he had previously taught English and psychology courses at his high school alma mater, Beaufort High School, in Beaufort, South Carolina. And remember, he was teaching at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this memoir. I found it to be an interesting study in what were, in 1969, highly innovative instructional methods. Many of these methods have become accepted and commonplace in today’s classrooms, but in those days they were quite controversial. I was especially interested in Pat’s experiments with experiential learning (a topic which just happens to be the subject of my own Master’s thesis), student-driven curriculum, the introduction of speakers, and an informal classroom environment.

Most importantly, Pat treated his students with unconditional positive regard, and refused to utilize a paddle to maintain classroom discipline. By contrast, his principal, who taught the younger students in the two-room school house, espoused a more traditional teaching style, including textbook-driven instruction, drill tasks, and strict and rigid discipline—which included corporal punishment. And, quite frankly, she didn’t appear to even like her students. She certainly didn’t treat them with any respect. Naturally, Pat’s instructional style caused friction between himself and the school district bureaucrats. I’ll leave it to you to discover how this friction was addressed.

The Water is Wide garnered a humanitarian award from the National Education Association in 1974 and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1973. Two movies based on the book, Conrack starring John Voight in 1974 and a Hallmark production in 2006.

Learn more about Pat Conroy’s life at his website, patconroy.com. You can purchase The Water is Wide on amazon.com.

 

How educators might respond to Hurricane Helene

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At this time, empathetic Americans are looking for ways to help fellow citizens recover and rebuild their lives following the destruction of yet another devastating hurricane. Hurricane Helene has caused widespread damage in five state, including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. More than 140 people have lost their lives and an estimated 2.6 million homes and businesses are without power.

As I usually do during times such as these, I ask myself questions about what the teachers are doing during these times of upheaval. In this instance, I am reminded of a book I read recently which described a remarkable teacher who opened a school for New Orleans evacuees following Hurricane Katrina.

When surging flood waters from Hurricane Katrina forced thousands of families to flee from their homes in 2005, New Orleans residents had their minds more on survival than on whether their children would be missing school. But when a group of evacuee parents who landed in New Iberia, Louisiana, realized they would not be returning to their homes any time soon, they came to the conclusion that they had to find a strategy to help their children cope with their enforced and unexpected exile. They pooled their financial resources and hired a fellow refugee, teacher Paul Reynaud, to establish a one-room school for their children in an abandoned office building. The story furnishes valuable lessons for dealing with this latest example of nature’s fury.

The book is entitled Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember. The author of this intriguing true story is journalist Michael Tisserand, and the volume was published in 2007 by Harcourt. You can find the book on amazon.com.

For other intriguing stories about remarkable teachers in America’s sometimes turbulent history, check out my book Chalkboard Champions. You will find it on the web site for Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Great Black History Month read: Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals

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Like many teachers, I am always interested in learning more about historical events relating to the education of America’s disenfranchised students. Black History Month is a great opportunity to zero in on the education of our African American students. To learn more about this topic, there are many excellent books you can add to your reading list. Here’s a well-told first-person account about struggles of African American students in Arkansas at the onset of the Civil Rights Movement. The book is Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals, one of nine heroic African American students known as famous Little Rock Nine.

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education which declared segregated schools unconstitutional. Three years later, the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas, were still segregated. A plan for gradual integration generated an intensely hostile response from Little Rock’s staunch segregationists. Nevertheless, nine courageous African American students were selected to challenge the status quo and integrate the city’s Central High School.  Clinging stubbornly to Jim Crow tradition, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to block the entrance of the nine black students into the school, and, in response, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and charged the troops with protecting the lives of the nine and enforcing the Supreme Court’s ruling. Every school day that year, the Little Rock Nine braved angry mobs spewing hostilities, racial epithets, and threats to their lives simply for seeking the right to enter their school.

This book, Warriors Don’t Cry: The Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High, tells the story of Melba Pattilllo Beals, one of those valiant nine students. When you read this compelling account, you wonder how any kid could have that much fortitude. This book is a great read for teachers, students, and history buffs. You can acquire a copy of Warriors Don’t Cry from amazon.

Chalkboard Champion Sandra Adickes braves danger during Freedom Summer

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Sandra Adickes was an energetic and idealistic thirty-year-old New York City English teacher in 1964, the year she ventured south into Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to teach in a Freedom School. The goal of the summer program was to empower the Black community to register to vote, and to help bridge some of the gap of educational neglect that had long been a tradition in that Jim Crow state. Both educators and Civil Rights activists realized that only through education and participation in the democratic process could African Americans hope to achieve their long-denied American Dream.
The enterprise was not without danger. On the first day of Freedom Summer, three workers involved in the program disappeared while investigating the firebombing of the church facility designated for their voter recruitment activities. Six weeks later, as Sandra Adickes conducted her classes in Hattiesburg, the badly beaten and bullet-ridden bodies of the three missing men were discovered buried in an earthen dam in nearby Neshoba County.
At summer’s end, Sandra’s fearless students decided—on their own—to integrate the Hattiesburg Public Library in what became, in effect, a graduation trip with an emphasis on civic reform. Sandra was arrested in the effort. Read her riveting story, and what became of her courageous students, in her book Legacy of a Freedom School. You can also find a chapter about this remarkable teacher in my book, Chalkboard Champions.

From Classroom to White House: Stories about White House teachers

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I enjoy reading and researching stories about remarkable teachers. So it is no surprise that I was fascinated by a book that tells anecdotes about our nation’s presidents and first ladies, and their experiences as students and as teachers. The book is called From Classroom to White House by James McMurtry Longo, published in 2012.

This little volume describes the educational issues the presidents addressed during their White House years, the prevailing issues in education during their period in history, and a general overview of American schools over time.

I enjoyed reading about presidents and first ladies who had been teachers before they became residents in the White House. I am fascinated by the tales of President Lyndon Johnson as a teacher of middle school immigrants in southern Texas. And I also enjoyed the stories about First Ladies Laura Bush and Pat Nixon. Most especially, I was intrigued by the story of First Lady, Grace, who met her husband Calvin Coolidge while working as a teacher in the Clarke School for the Deaf in Massachusetts.

While reading this book, I learned so many interesting personal details about our presidents as students. For example, I was amazed to learn that John F. Kennedy’s teacher said he could “seldom locate his possessions,” and that the teacher of George H.W. Bush described the young student as “somewhat eccentric,” and that Bill Clinton’s sixth-grade teacher called him a “motormouth.”

If you’re a teacher as intrigued by presidential history as I am, you’ve got to read  From Classroom to White House, which can easily be found on amazon.com.