Kwanzaa and Me: A Teacher's Story - Hardcover

Paley's message, conveyed with touching simplicity and never a heavy hand, is twofold. One component is to encourage people to talk to one another about race, and she is clearly a master of that. The second, more elusive, is what one of her colleagues calls 'the other curriculum, ' which allows children to feel comfortable with their emotions and their differences... Every teacher and every parent should read this. -- David K. Shipler "New York Times Book Review" strokes that can be born only of a child's most intimate, unguarded revelations. elusive, is what one of her colleagues calls 'the other curriculum, ' which allows children to feel comfortable with their emotions and their differences... Every teacher and every parent should read this. Paley has learned the essential lesson, and from her little schoolroom in Hyde Park, she's taught it to a generation of teachers and parents and caretakers of children around the globe. It is this: Take very seriously the things that children say, and take equally seriously the things you say to your children...Paley has poured what she's heard onto the pages of eight remarkable books, the latest, "Kwanzaa and Me: A Teacher's Story". Each book tackles a single central question of classroom life--the racism, the stories, the gender differences, the children's development, the outsider and the struggle to belong, the ethics, and the ways in which classrooms dismiss the differences, and thus the heart, of the children who make up their rosters...Along the way, and probably a good bit of the reason she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation 'genius' award in 1989, Paley has given all of us not just snapshots of the minds and souls of preschoolers and kindergartners but full-blown portraits of [Paley's] message, conveyed with touching simplicity and never a heavy hand, is twofold. One component is to encourage people to talk to one another about race, and she is clearly a master of that. The second, more elusive, is what one of her colleagues calls 'the other curriculum, ' which allows children to feel comfortable with their emotions and their differences... Every teacher and every parent should read this.--David K. Shipler "New York Times Book Review "

"It's all about dialogue, isn't it?", asks Lorraine, a black third-grade teacher whose story becomes a central motif. And indeed, it is the dialogue that prevails in this book, as parents and teachers learn how they must talk to each other and to their children, if every child is to secure a sense of self in the schoolroom, no matter what the predominant ethnic background. Vivian Paley offers these discoveries to readers as a starting point for their own journeys toward community and kinship in today's schools and tomorrow's culture.