To Become a Teacher: Making a Difference in Children's Lives

Rating:
Summary: A must for every person pursuing a career in education
Review: To Become A Teacher...Making a Difference in Children's Lives edited by William Ayers.

This is not a book that one should ingest at one single reading. This IS a book that needs to be read at a pace so that one's mind can process and digest each sentence with the words being broken down in order to become one with the reader. Every person pursuing the "call" of becoming a teacher needs to read this book. It is impossible to condense this book into a few well-written paragraphs. This book is a compilation of advice written by educators of diverse backgrounds. Each chapter is penned by a different author who addresses a different viewpoint of teaching. Each chapter is full of gold nuggets of wisdom and thought-provoking statements.
The book is divided into three parts: Becoming a Teacher, Thinking and Teaching, and Reinventing Schools. Chapter titles are:

1. Letter to a Young Teacher
2. Taking Teaching Seriously
3. I Just Want to Be Myself: Discovering What Students
Bring to School "In Their Blood"
4. Seeing the Child, Knowing the Person
5. Choosing a Past and Inventing a Future: The Becoming of
a Teacher
6. A Teacher's Awesome Power
7. Get Ready, Get Set, Teach!
8. Reconstruction Alternatives: Opening the Curriculum
9. Building a Safe Community for Learning
10. Harout and I: A Short Story for the Becoming Teacher
11. Reexaminations: What is the Teacher and What is
Teaching?
12. Is There Room for Children's Inventive Capacity in the
Curriculum?
13. Democratic Classrooms, Democratic Schools
14. The Complexity of Teaching
15. How to Write a Lesson Plan
16. The Scary Part Is That It Happens Without Us Knowing
17. Conclusion: Ten Alternative Classrooms I

I discovered this book at Umbreit Library at Muskegon Community Class, but I am going to purchase my own so that I can underline and comment in the margin, as well as read it over and over again. This is a book that should be on every educator's bookshelf and would make a great gift for anyone who is seeking a career in education. William Ayers notes, "When teaching is done well, it resonates in the deepest parts of your being--it satisfies the soul." Jonathan Kozol writes in the foreword, "To me, this is the heart of the whole matter: teaching as something that one does not because, when it's successful, one fulfills some arbitrary and external expectation, not because we hope to see our students pass another set of seemingly irrelevant exams, not because the skills they gain are 'useful' to society, not because the business leaders in our cities will be grateful for an adult population trained to meet their mercenary needs and job-demands, but because it is a joyful way to spend one's life and because, when we feel satisfaction or exhilaration, we will often see it also in our children's eyes." This is what I desire to do as a teacher, and this book will help to do this.

Another statement by William Ayers also gives us all something to think about: "Seeing children 'at promise' is the antidote for all the talk of children at risk. Assuming an intelligence in children-perhaps obscure, perhaps hard to access, but nevertheless there-is the only hopeful way to approach teaching." We have discussed this in my PSYC 202 class several times, and I think this is one of the most important things to remember as I go into education...to see the potential in each student. This book is one that I will refer to over and over again throughout my career.

Rating:
Summary: A must for every person pursuing a career in education
Review: To Become A Teacher...Making a Difference in Children's Lives edited by William Ayers.

This is not a book that one should ingest at one single reading. This IS a book that needs to be read at a pace so that one's mind can process and digest each sentence with the words being broken down in order to become one with the reader. Every person pursuing the "call" of becoming a teacher needs to read this book. It is impossible to condense this book into a few well-written paragraphs. This book is a compilation of advice written by educators of diverse backgrounds. Each chapter is penned by a different author who addresses a different viewpoint of teaching. Each chapter is full of gold nuggets of wisdom and thought-provoking statements.
The book is divided into three parts: Becoming a Teacher, Thinking and Teaching, and Reinventing Schools. Chapter titles are:

1.Letter to a Young Teacher
2.Taking Teaching Seriously
3.I Just Want to Be Myself: Discovering What Students
Bring to School "In Their Blood"
4.Seeing the Child, Knowing the Person
5.Choosing a Past and Inventing a Future: The Becoming of
a Teacher
6.A Teacher's Awesome Power
7.Get Ready, Get Set, Teach!
8.Reconstruction Alternatives: Opening the Curriculum
9.Building a Safe Community for Learning
10.Harout and I: A Short Story for the Becoming Teacher
11.Reexaminations: What is the Teacher and What is
Teaching?
12.Is There Room for Children's Inventive Capacity in the
Curriculum?
13.Democratic Classrooms, Democratic Schools
14.The Complexity of Teaching
15.How to Write a Lesson Plan
16.The Scary Part Is That It Happens Without Us Knowing
17.Conclusion: Ten Alternative Classrooms I

I discovered this book at Umbreit Library at Muskegon Community Class, but I am going to purchase my own so that I can underline and comment in the margin, as well as read it over and over again. This is a book that should be on every educator's bookshelf and would make a great gift for anyone who is seeking a career in education. William Ayers notes, "When teaching is done well, it resonates in the deepest parts of your being--it satisfies the soul." Jonathan Kozol writes in the foreword, "To me, this is the heart of the whole matter: teaching as something that one does not because, when it's successful, one fulfills some arbitrary and external expectation, not because we hope to see our students pass another set of seemingly irrelevant exams, not because the skills they gain are 'useful' to society, not because the business leaders in our cities will be grateful for an adult population trained to meet their mercenary needs and job-demands, but because it is a joyful way to spend one's life and because, when we feel satisfaction or exhilaration, we will often see it also in our children's eyes." This is what I desire to do as a teacher, and this book will help to do this.

Another statement by William Ayers also gives us all something to think about: "Seeing children 'at promise' is the antidote for all the talk of children at risk. Assuming an intelligence in children-perhaps obscure, perhaps hard to access, but nevertheless there-is the only hopeful way to approach teaching." We have discussed this in my PSYC 202 class several times, and I think this is one of the most important things to remember as I go into education...to see the potential in each student. This book is one that I will refer to over and over again throughout my career.