Vintage March 1969 Publication
Book's generally in Good Condition...been stored 55yrs!!
The Pics are of the exact book im shipping....not a facsimile or stock pics with a claim the books ok...
plus i know the book's over 4 bucks just to ship with tracking...then ebay gets a cut....so the 3 buck 4 or even the 5buck guys gotta be shipping by stamp licking...they have no clue if anything arrives or when itll arrive...no sense in gambling on a shipment on the promise its cheap...have it never show up...then start the arguments with the seller then ebay to get your money back...too much of a pain-in-the-***!....i track everything sold...if you buy something make sure you know when its supposed to be at your front door!!
Top reviews from the United States
Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2011
When I taught in South Central LA 25 or more years ago I did not have this book.
What I had were two eyes, no funds, no books, no materials at all except binder paper and a box or two of pencils, a few readers, a couple broken dictionaries, and an extraordinary sense of the real difficulties instructing in the midst of the crack wars. I taught in grade school, Herndon the author, tackled teaching Junior High in the early 60's, releasing this book a number of years later as a reflection on the experience. The book was the way he came to terms with something I think maybe was an unwinnable experience. With so much current talk about "bad teachers" and getting rid of teachers- I think of the book.
On the cover this is how the book was sold recommended by the New York Times:
"Here is the sad, yet funy, record of one ill-fated year in a metropolitan ghetto school, 98 per cent Negro, 99 per cent "deprived", and 100 per cent chaotic. It tells how the educational bureaucracy, the schools, and life itself in our big cities are all rigged against the students who can't take it-the ones we call "deprived."
Since our national educational leader won't allow teachers any excuses, and doesn't think his policies do anything but solve the cycles of poverty, I read this book again with the same eyes I took to the issues I witnessed throughout my career working in poverty schools. I just hear too much truth to ignore it.
When we moved to the Salinas Valley, after this first experience (my husband taught with me) and I found the book the first month or so on a shelf in the library it called me back into contemplating what I had just finished trying to do. Survive. I believe it was found on a shelf marked "free books for teachers." I took it home and slowly working backwards I unraveled my experience in trying to teach in South Central Los Angeles in 1985-1986 at 93rd Street School. Somehow. The book probably meant more to me then than I can translate here.
It told the story of a man that entered a teaching job in a 99% black school in a ghetto, how he met each day, and how he eventually lost his job, but not his will to teach. The book was poetry, it was alive, it was one of the very few books that seemed to get the sound of it all right. And it's a study in what isn't said as much as what is. James Herndon, if you don't know, was able to translate to his times the urgent need for "school reform." He thought critically. And the way he did it was by staying close to reality. A willingness to look at it, write it, think deeply about it, present it and allow the reader to take away from his words their opinion.
Amazingly as my daughter's boyfriend is in his 4th month teaching in a high school in South Central-some 50 years later-and as far as I can tell not much has changed. As I hear of it through him, nothing much basically different except perhaps the severe escalation of violence I knew there- appears to be "better." If one would call it that.
I sent him the book.
I think he would agree that not much has changed.I felt he might be facing a no win situation.
Perhaps you've never read the book. I would task you to do so. Perhaps listening as if you were in his shoes would be a valuable retrospective on schools in cities like LA. Because gosh knows everyone thinks this work is easy enough to go do, it might be of value to start putting some perspective around that.
In the book Herndon describes the various periods of his day teaching English, pretty much focusing in not on the couple of classes that go okay, but on those kids "tracked" in this school who are basically very difficult to teach, difficult to reach, the failing tracks. As we base more and more on test scores -the result you must realize is grouping, labels, and divisions within teaching that always seem to lead to those who can in one place, and everyone else. In these brief chapters he will acquaint you with some of the absurdities that now in current reform mode continue to make much of what is said relevant discussion. I don't see much innovation. We narrowed, we track, we test in ways completely along the lines of what he saw "tried" in these schools. Management is escalated to a position of being mistaken for curriculum. What a great book for a discussion.
The poor "know" here, they know their "position", they struggle with schools designed to control over teach, they understand a liberating curriculum will not be their fare. And the teacher sits in the pages telling you how the year went, and the way he was dumped out of the classroom and why. When I read the work years ago it soothed my need to understand all I'd been through. If you think you might understand-you don't unless you've walked that line. Really, you don't.
What I loved was how he talked about the "system", how he took a sheet of paper and made it so very important. From a sheet of binder paper Herndon makes you understand the way it is.
In schools in CA scarcity is always an issue. It is enforced as a way of mind. Tragic underfunding is partially why this got into place-and that comes from a model that accepts less for those with less. Herndon takes the binder paper and uses it-and how it was distributed- to talk in his book to the system generally. It is hard to recreate his prose. Basically the admin won't let him give out much of this supply. The students want it, want several sheets at a time, this to his observing mentors is intolerable. Work isn't really done on it he reasons but the feel of several sheets really is a luxury they value, and the paper fixation stops any real accounting for the other things that don't exist-the books-the supplies-the work-the opportunity-the jobs-the pathways to higher education-the support system that isn't there for them. It seems that keeping the game of "you can't have it" going is important to the entire dynamics. It stands metaphorically both in the book and in his year. And Herndon coming in from outside this system can't understand it. He can just report on what he sees. And suggest to the reader through a piece of paper what long term antics have been used even societally over addressing poverty, racism and a multitude of issues in a divided class society. It gets better to read it now against the backdrop of these 50 years knowing what I do about teaching in high poverty schools, knowing about societal will.Knowing the shallow lip service in the last few years when over paying for new, dynamic, functional, modern, technological schools with well paid teachers and support structures in our hoods we've bought some crappy tests and supported a boat load of consultants that by and large "don't work with children." I've watched the paper distribution as well. We don't have it. Message clear. My school asked the kids to send in the supplies this year, not because we aren't getting two sizable grants to under-performing schools but to reinforce to parents a fundamental message. Pull up your boot straps you must "deserve" this somehow. It is no different than what Herndon documented really.
Somewhere along the line he gets advice from a teacher-a coaching one-about how to do his job as an English teacher, "Find out what they can do and give them lots of it," and I can fully attest to the predominance of that as the philosophy in the schools I've worked in. Herndon chooses to let the students make noise. He allows them to direct a lot of the choices. He figures out what they will write and lets them have at it in plays especially. I'm sure today, and certainly in the early 60's this was seen as so much loss of control. When he describes it I flashed to my paper bag project a few years back with an active far, far, below grade level group of 38 6th graders when they studied the myth systems of the Greeks and Romans, the Egyptians and Chinese in my room by creating elaborate paper bag puppets that were filmed and interviewed by a precocious student with a Larry King puppet doing an excellent impersonation. I sincerely doubt before the project there was ANY hope to get them read the myths. Most were 2nd grade readers any practice reading was pulling teeth. No they weren't reading no baby books. But to then see them script write and study Larry King's style, develop the filming skills, and do this as we were conducting other work, there was a decided three ring circus aspect. Noise and a kind of choas. The messy sound of learning. I'm sure it would offend someone looking for a chanting ritual as I so often see praised in my underperforming school.
I'm sure it would not appeal to standards thumping authoritarians. But, it worked. It resembled what the peers do in other places far away and ones I knew a bit about. On every level possible kids did better, including the scores. That was fairly irrelevant in his day too. Herndon lost the job just as he was doing the work to figure out how to do the job.
Here was a man clearly a brilliant writer, brilliant in his time, making learning in a constructivist way that was deselected.
There are places where he states something so important it still needs to be heard-how data ruled the day, how crappy the work of the kids was, how teachers were mostly there in an authoritarian stance -the students "making it" so beyond their scope, how student empowerment frightened the school leadership, how inexperienced the leadership was and caught up in "looking effective", how students reacted-spoke-interacted with him, how divided a society we were, how poverty looked at this time, what the students "saw" in the school as models, and how they saw themselves, how he worked building relationships, how quickly others advice fell apart, what excited students, how what he documents is really a social piece on being young in our country, as well as poor, black and alive with dreams and hopes in his times. It is the stuff of my work. And there is no one with the writing ability Herndon has writing now. Simply no one.
Who should read this? Teachers, student teachers, ed reformers, people that think they have "a lot" to say about education, those that are so isolated they have never been in an inner city school. Those who think they know about it anyway. Who is the audience? I believe Herndon left that up to the fates.
I have to fill you in on a conclusion he reached. Not that it will surprise anyone. But speaking to the students, their resilience, the effect of what he saw on their lives, he said he figured that many of the kids "could not take it."
"All right. Some can take it, and some can't. Those who cannot expose the point-it's not good for anyone. My wife's father was once bitten by a cottonmouth, and survived. Another man from the same community was bitten and died. No one argued that the experience was good for either one of them. Sitting in a classroom or a home pretending to "study" a badly written text full of false information, adding up twenty sums when they're all the same and one would do, being bottled up for seven hours a day in a place where you decide nothing, having your success or failure depend, a hundred times a day, on the plan, invention, whim of someone else, being put in a position where most of your real desires are not only ignored but actively penalized, undertaking nothing for its own sake but only for that illusory carrot of the future-maybe you can do it, and maybe you can't, but either way, it's probably done you some harm."
I don't know if that can be appreciated for what it is, in its simplicity. It calls on us to wage wars on poverty, to design good public systems, to not align ourselves with the interests of wealth, it asks of us to see what we do as not pitting a dog against a dog having our young essentially eaten. What Herndon was saying is that we are losing to this. And I can tell you my feeling is in the last ten years we moved farther and farther away from the truth of that as teachers in poverty public schools were vilified and blamed and we sorted those with better schools and opportunity into even better systems. By continuing our fascination with standardized test scores as barriers we choose to not deal with our children in need, we are rewarding those who started out ahead.
It might serve everyone well to go see how like 1961 we are.
It made me shake my head to see that stating something obvious just as verboten now as it was then. Something as simple as "it isn't a good idea to narrow the arts and music, science, active learning out of instruction for students in poverty."
Later in his life, on retirement, Herndon wrote another book I enjoyed-Notes From A School Teacher. Just as brilliant. One observation from that that stays with me- that school is exactly what society "wants" -no more and no less. I give him so much credit for making that completely clear.
And salute the career he gave to public instruction.
What I had were two eyes, no funds, no books, no materials at all except binder paper and a box or two of pencils, a few readers, a couple broken dictionaries, and an extraordinary sense of the real difficulties instructing in the midst of the crack wars. I taught in grade school, Herndon the author, tackled teaching Junior High in the early 60's, releasing this book a number of years later as a reflection on the experience. The book was the way he came to terms with something I think maybe was an unwinnable experience. With so much current talk about "bad teachers" and getting rid of teachers- I think of the book.
On the cover this is how the book was sold recommended by the New York Times:
"Here is the sad, yet funy, record of one ill-fated year in a metropolitan ghetto school, 98 per cent Negro, 99 per cent "deprived", and 100 per cent chaotic. It tells how the educational bureaucracy, the schools, and life itself in our big cities are all rigged against the students who can't take it-the ones we call "deprived."
Since our national educational leader won't allow teachers any excuses, and doesn't think his policies do anything but solve the cycles of poverty, I read this book again with the same eyes I took to the issues I witnessed throughout my career working in poverty schools. I just hear too much truth to ignore it.
When we moved to the Salinas Valley, after this first experience (my husband taught with me) and I found the book the first month or so on a shelf in the library it called me back into contemplating what I had just finished trying to do. Survive. I believe it was found on a shelf marked "free books for teachers." I took it home and slowly working backwards I unraveled my experience in trying to teach in South Central Los Angeles in 1985-1986 at 93rd Street School. Somehow. The book probably meant more to me then than I can translate here.
It told the story of a man that entered a teaching job in a 99% black school in a ghetto, how he met each day, and how he eventually lost his job, but not his will to teach. The book was poetry, it was alive, it was one of the very few books that seemed to get the sound of it all right. And it's a study in what isn't said as much as what is. James Herndon, if you don't know, was able to translate to his times the urgent need for "school reform." He thought critically. And the way he did it was by staying close to reality. A willingness to look at it, write it, think deeply about it, present it and allow the reader to take away from his words their opinion.
Amazingly as my daughter's boyfriend is in his 4th month teaching in a high school in South Central-some 50 years later-and as far as I can tell not much has changed. As I hear of it through him, nothing much basically different except perhaps the severe escalation of violence I knew there- appears to be "better." If one would call it that.
I sent him the book.
I think he would agree that not much has changed.I felt he might be facing a no win situation.
Perhaps you've never read the book. I would task you to do so. Perhaps listening as if you were in his shoes would be a valuable retrospective on schools in cities like LA. Because gosh knows everyone thinks this work is easy enough to go do, it might be of value to start putting some perspective around that.
In the book Herndon describes the various periods of his day teaching English, pretty much focusing in not on the couple of classes that go okay, but on those kids "tracked" in this school who are basically very difficult to teach, difficult to reach, the failing tracks. As we base more and more on test scores -the result you must realize is grouping, labels, and divisions within teaching that always seem to lead to those who can in one place, and everyone else. In these brief chapters he will acquaint you with some of the absurdities that now in current reform mode continue to make much of what is said relevant discussion. I don't see much innovation. We narrowed, we track, we test in ways completely along the lines of what he saw "tried" in these schools. Management is escalated to a position of being mistaken for curriculum. What a great book for a discussion.
The poor "know" here, they know their "position", they struggle with schools designed to control over teach, they understand a liberating curriculum will not be their fare. And the teacher sits in the pages telling you how the year went, and the way he was dumped out of the classroom and why. When I read the work years ago it soothed my need to understand all I'd been through. If you think you might understand-you don't unless you've walked that line. Really, you don't.
What I loved was how he talked about the "system", how he took a sheet of paper and made it so very important. From a sheet of binder paper Herndon makes you understand the way it is.
In schools in CA scarcity is always an issue. It is enforced as a way of mind. Tragic underfunding is partially why this got into place-and that comes from a model that accepts less for those with less. Herndon takes the binder paper and uses it-and how it was distributed- to talk in his book to the system generally. It is hard to recreate his prose. Basically the admin won't let him give out much of this supply. The students want it, want several sheets at a time, this to his observing mentors is intolerable. Work isn't really done on it he reasons but the feel of several sheets really is a luxury they value, and the paper fixation stops any real accounting for the other things that don't exist-the books-the supplies-the work-the opportunity-the jobs-the pathways to higher education-the support system that isn't there for them. It seems that keeping the game of "you can't have it" going is important to the entire dynamics. It stands metaphorically both in the book and in his year. And Herndon coming in from outside this system can't understand it. He can just report on what he sees. And suggest to the reader through a piece of paper what long term antics have been used even societally over addressing poverty, racism and a multitude of issues in a divided class society. It gets better to read it now against the backdrop of these 50 years knowing what I do about teaching in high poverty schools, knowing about societal will.Knowing the shallow lip service in the last few years when over paying for new, dynamic, functional, modern, technological schools with well paid teachers and support structures in our hoods we've bought some crappy tests and supported a boat load of consultants that by and large "don't work with children." I've watched the paper distribution as well. We don't have it. Message clear. My school asked the kids to send in the supplies this year, not because we aren't getting two sizable grants to under-performing schools but to reinforce to parents a fundamental message. Pull up your boot straps you must "deserve" this somehow. It is no different than what Herndon documented really.
Somewhere along the line he gets advice from a teacher-a coaching one-about how to do his job as an English teacher, "Find out what they can do and give them lots of it," and I can fully attest to the predominance of that as the philosophy in the schools I've worked in. Herndon chooses to let the students make noise. He allows them to direct a lot of the choices. He figures out what they will write and lets them have at it in plays especially. I'm sure today, and certainly in the early 60's this was seen as so much loss of control. When he describes it I flashed to my paper bag project a few years back with an active far, far, below grade level group of 38 6th graders when they studied the myth systems of the Greeks and Romans, the Egyptians and Chinese in my room by creating elaborate paper bag puppets that were filmed and interviewed by a precocious student with a Larry King puppet doing an excellent impersonation. I sincerely doubt before the project there was ANY hope to get them read the myths. Most were 2nd grade readers any practice reading was pulling teeth. No they weren't reading no baby books. But to then see them script write and study Larry King's style, develop the filming skills, and do this as we were conducting other work, there was a decided three ring circus aspect. Noise and a kind of choas. The messy sound of learning. I'm sure it would offend someone looking for a chanting ritual as I so often see praised in my underperforming school.
I'm sure it would not appeal to standards thumping authoritarians. But, it worked. It resembled what the peers do in other places far away and ones I knew a bit about. On every level possible kids did better, including the scores. That was fairly irrelevant in his day too. Herndon lost the job just as he was doing the work to figure out how to do the job.
Here was a man clearly a brilliant writer, brilliant in his time, making learning in a constructivist way that was deselected.
There are places where he states something so important it still needs to be heard-how data ruled the day, how crappy the work of the kids was, how teachers were mostly there in an authoritarian stance -the students "making it" so beyond their scope, how student empowerment frightened the school leadership, how inexperienced the leadership was and caught up in "looking effective", how students reacted-spoke-interacted with him, how divided a society we were, how poverty looked at this time, what the students "saw" in the school as models, and how they saw themselves, how he worked building relationships, how quickly others advice fell apart, what excited students, how what he documents is really a social piece on being young in our country, as well as poor, black and alive with dreams and hopes in his times. It is the stuff of my work. And there is no one with the writing ability Herndon has writing now. Simply no one.
Who should read this? Teachers, student teachers, ed reformers, people that think they have "a lot" to say about education, those that are so isolated they have never been in an inner city school. Those who think they know about it anyway. Who is the audience? I believe Herndon left that up to the fates.
I have to fill you in on a conclusion he reached. Not that it will surprise anyone. But speaking to the students, their resilience, the effect of what he saw on their lives, he said he figured that many of the kids "could not take it."
"All right. Some can take it, and some can't. Those who cannot expose the point-it's not good for anyone. My wife's father was once bitten by a cottonmouth, and survived. Another man from the same community was bitten and died. No one argued that the experience was good for either one of them. Sitting in a classroom or a home pretending to "study" a badly written text full of false information, adding up twenty sums when they're all the same and one would do, being bottled up for seven hours a day in a place where you decide nothing, having your success or failure depend, a hundred times a day, on the plan, invention, whim of someone else, being put in a position where most of your real desires are not only ignored but actively penalized, undertaking nothing for its own sake but only for that illusory carrot of the future-maybe you can do it, and maybe you can't, but either way, it's probably done you some harm."
I don't know if that can be appreciated for what it is, in its simplicity. It calls on us to wage wars on poverty, to design good public systems, to not align ourselves with the interests of wealth, it asks of us to see what we do as not pitting a dog against a dog having our young essentially eaten. What Herndon was saying is that we are losing to this. And I can tell you my feeling is in the last ten years we moved farther and farther away from the truth of that as teachers in poverty public schools were vilified and blamed and we sorted those with better schools and opportunity into even better systems. By continuing our fascination with standardized test scores as barriers we choose to not deal with our children in need, we are rewarding those who started out ahead.
It might serve everyone well to go see how like 1961 we are.
It made me shake my head to see that stating something obvious just as verboten now as it was then. Something as simple as "it isn't a good idea to narrow the arts and music, science, active learning out of instruction for students in poverty."
Later in his life, on retirement, Herndon wrote another book I enjoyed-Notes From A School Teacher. Just as brilliant. One observation from that that stays with me- that school is exactly what society "wants" -no more and no less. I give him so much credit for making that completely clear.
And salute the career he gave to public instruction.
Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2020
I first read this book in the early 1970s. Herndon was considered innovative by some, and controversial by others. I find that if teachers today would read and adopt the ideas, they are relevant for 'disadvantaged' and for 'advantaged' students. Trouble is, nobody took the ideas to heart.
Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2020
I really enjoyed this book when I first got it. Unfortunately, a hurricane took it away. Noe I've got it back.
Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2020
Great book on education
Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2010
It's a great book written by my former 7th grade Home Room teacher. He was a great teacher and I always meant to read it.
Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2020
Am not sure why I'm writing this...just felt the inexplicable urge to do so. In 1968-69 I was a first-year teacher of 5th grade in Southern Louisana...feeling quite radical yearnings for how I would like to be in a public school, someday. Was blessed to encounter this book then...as I was planning how to get to San Francisco at the first opportunity. That Summer I was there with two Peace Corps friends who were students at SF State University. They were enrolled in an awesome 5-day-a-week intensive education class that I, as a non-student, easily "audited" [i.e., just showing up and acting like I belonged]. Jim was part of the faculty along with some other big names in alternative education circles. I cranked up as much hutzpah as I could from my shy personality and got myself invited to visit him at his South San Francisco middle school. Over the next year or so, I would drop in from time to time to his classroom. It was never known ahead of time and I never recall feeling unwelcome. He just trusted life, it seems, as he trusted his students. They were pretty much allowed to spend their time doing what they were drawn to. It was the most "Summerhill" (of UK fame) experience that I could imagine at a regular public school...but he somehow pulled it off. At some point "real life" took over...primarily via marriage to a woman I met that first Summer in the intensive course...and I lost touch with Jim. But I have never really lost the impact he had on me. In reaching out to him, my instincts were richly rewarded...and I deepened my own Trust in Life
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