The other day I saw Jonathan Kozol, author and education activist, on Book TV. I remember his name from my school teaching days.

The following quotation from his web site http://www.learntoquestion.com/seevak/groups/2002/sites/kozol/Seevak02/html/edad-open.htm will give you an idea of where his heart is:

Education is taken for granted in modern American society. If a child cannot afford to attend a private or parochial school, which are generally seen as better than the alternative, then they go to public school. The assumption is made, because of compulsory attendance laws, and the societal emphasis on childhood learning, no matter what, a child is getting an education. Unfortunately, attendance is not a prerequisite for education.

I do not know the name of the woman who interviewed him for two or three hours. I had an immediate impression, however, that she was very left brain, and Jonathan was very right brain. And I had a better understanding of how right brain people can appear to left brain people.

Please understand that I cannot attest to the truth of what I am going to say, but this is how I saw it. I would like to emphasize that the interviewer is a lovely lady. She was courteous and professional, yet I had the impression that she couldn’t quite deal with Jonathan.

He is 73 years old now. I could see how she might have seen him as an eccentric old man. He  didn’t answer her questions or questions from people on the telephone in a linear way. He had to go around and around. He couldn’t go in a straight line.  He was more like a child who has to tell his story the way he has to tell it. And the interviewer kept wanting the author to simply stick to the point and answer the question.  Jonathan couldn’t do that. He had to put what he was saying in context.

He was brilliant, creative, definitely his own man. Although the interviewer, as I saw it, perceived him as meandering, the audience loved him, and I did too.  He so stirred hearts that one teacher on the phone cried.  (I noticed that the people who called in were much like Jonathan. They had to surround their questions with their story, and I saw the poor interviewer impatient with the audience too!)

It can be lonely teaching in a school system, especially in a system you don’t agree with and where you feel like a pariah. Oh, to have someone who understands you and believes in what you believe in.

Jonathan is opposed to the emphasis on all the tests the children are subjected to. The idea is nice, No Child Left Behind, yet, in reality, real education goes out the window and teachers turn into robots teaching children how to beat the tests and to become robots too.

I would have perished as a teacher –  or as a child — with the emphasis on doing well on tests. Apparently, these standard nationalized tests are true and false tests. There is no place for the heart there.

I was reminded of when reading teachers were hired to teach kids reading comprehension while reading for the love of what you’re reading was forgotten about. I never read books for comprehension. I read because there was something there I wanted more of.

I guess I always saw teaching, not as teaching really, but as bringing the children to a place where there was something that meant something to them and they wanted to know more about it. There’s a difference between teaching grammar and sharing love of language. I am for oblique teaching and motivation.

As I listened to Jonathan and watched the interviewer, I thought of when I read The Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge out loud to my seventh grade classes. You can be sure that this narrative poem was not in the curriculum, and I sure wasn’t going to test anyone on it. This particular edition was something special I had picked up at Johnson’s 2nd Hand Book Store. It was in English but had been printed in Italy. It had a maroon moire cover and full-size black and white line drawings by Gustave Dore. The book was about the size of a large computer screen, but tall rather than wide. The book cost $10.00, and, at that time, that was an astronomical amount. I had never spent $10.00 on any book in my life.  And very rarely since.

I would, of course, as I was reading to the children, show the pictures to the class.  The illustrations were on every page. As I was reading, I would stop between pages for a little discussion, and this one little boy, Scott Crandall, who couldn’t read — he really couldn’t — kept calling out, “READ IT. READ IT.” That was music to my ears. Then the next thing I knew, he had inserted himself between the book and my arms that were holding the book.

To my mind, that was real teaching.

Now you see how I, like Jonathan Kozol, got off the point.  Or did I?!!!

You might be interested in knowing that Jonathan came from a wealthy family, was educated in private schools, went to Harvard and found himself drawn to teaching in public schools. He applied to the Boston public schools, not even knowing about things like certification. The school system let him become a substitute teacher which didn’t require certification. I don’t know if he ever got certified, but he did get fired from his first teaching job because he read a poem to his class by Langston Hughes. I don’t know whether he was fired because he read a poem that wasn’t in the curriculum or because it was a poem not in the curriculum by Langston Hughes.

I wonder what poem it was that he read. Maybe I’ll write and ask him.

Tomorrow I’ll show you the poem by Langston Hughes that I had my children memorize.

Now you know beyond a doubt how the predominantly right-brain mind dances around.  You see how I went from this to that and back and around. That is just what Jonathan did, which made the interviewer uncomfortable.

Now I will put in some left-brain stuff taken from Wikipedia:

Death at an Early Age, Kozol’s first non-fiction book, is a description of his first year as a teacher in the Boston Public Schools. It was published in 1967 and received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. It has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe.

Among the other books by Kozol are Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book award for 1989 and the Conscience-in-Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, which won the New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

His 1995 book, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, described his visits to the South Bronx of New York, the poorest congressional district in the United States. It received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr..

He published Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope in 2000 and The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America was released September 13, 2005. Kozol documents the continuing and often worsening segregation in public schools in the United States, and the increasing influence of neoconservative ideology on the way children, particularly children of color and poor children of urban areas, are educated.

Kozol is still active in advocating for integrated public education in the United States and is an outspoken critic of the voucher movement.

By the way, Jonathan is upset that 50% of inner city black male students drop out of school and don’t graduate. What good is all the testing doing?

I will say more about this tomorrow too.