Many time teachers don't see success in the class room but somewhere deep down know they are making a difference. It's when the years past and we forget the difference that we have made in lives of many.

Be challenged to teach out of your comfort zone. Allow your sweet spirit to be given to kids who fall asleep in class because the gun shots at four am woke them up and are afraid to go back to sleep.

Be reminded to learn from your students and allow students to teach you.

Wherever you are, make your class room a safe place to share, learn and grow.

One more thing; don't rely on records from the previous year tell you what kind of class you'll have in the fall, set high yet real expectations for your students. Your students will act as you you expect them too.

The book "36 Children" is intersting to compare to Jonathan Kozol's more famous book "Death at an early age", written at about the same time, in the 1960s. I would say that Kozol had a better experience than Kohl, and he was a better teacher. But Kohl's book is valuable because it is brutally honest about the selfish motivations of the average teacher, as well as the difficulties, stereotypes and misunderstandings that get in the way of good teaching.

Another difference between Kohl and Kozol is that Kozol had one class of children to teach, while Kohl was teaching children who were 1 or 2 years older and split into separate classes. It makes me wonder if it is easier to teach kids in a single class rather then divide them up into periods so that the teachers keep changing.

Other books to recommend in this genre are "Savage Inequalities" by Jonathan Kozol, "Children of crisis" by Robert Coles, and "Ghetto schooling" by Jean Anyon.

Spatial relationships are very close to the first intelligent concepts that infants grasp. To explore the world we need to recognize locations and faces. Some of the first formal mathematics learned deals with the recognition of shapes such as circles and triangles. While numbers are learned and then abstracted to do arithmetic, the generalization of shapes is almost always left out. Which is unfortunate because the modification of shapes into new forms is the foundation of much of our lives. For is the recognition of faces not the classification of a small subset of basic shapes into an infinite set of possibilities? The abstraction of shapes into topologically equivalent sets has been sadly neglected in education and this book is an important part of the cure.
Children love to explore their world, taking the familiar and extending it into the unknown, developing new ideas about physical relationships that can be used in many areas. This book, containing no arithmetic problems, takes that approach and manages to teach an enormous amount of mathematics. The basic ideas of inside and outside a curve are explored in ways that forces the reader to grasp that the content is simple, but complex in the ways it can be used. The Mobius strip, which shows that objects can have only one side, forces thinking at a level that is simple while also profound. Recognizing the distortion of one object into another can also have fundamental benefits in many areas. As someone who has struggled with Chinese ideograms, I am convinced that the skills taught in this book will help open up another avenue for children. It would be very interesting to determine if children brought up writing in pictures are better at topological abstractions than those who have not.
Learning mathematics can be fun if properly presented. This book truly earns the highest of possible praises: "It helps to make learning fun." It belongs in school libraries at every level.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.

I gave it as a gift to my 10 yr old neice to try to expose her to another aspect of mathematics where it deals with shapes rather than numbers. She loved it and couldn't stop working on the "problems". I spent more money on the tracing paper than the book because she didn't want to mark-up the book in case she wanted to share it with her classmates.

I'm sorry, but the quality of Amazon reviews needs to be a bit higher. The last reviewer obviously hasn't read the book, but has only made a comment of what s/he assumes is in the book based on the Amazon review. The reviewer should be ashamed. I'm willing to forgive the people who thought that was a helpful comment as they may not have realized that the reviewer had not read the book. That's why I am writing this review. Herbert Kohl is a great writer and these essays are informative and sensible. Don't be fooled!!!

The essay "Should We Burn Babar?" is actually a quite thought-provoking and even-handed review of the issue of what ideas kids should have access to. Herbert Kohl may be a progressive educator, but he never advocates "political correctness" or bland literature. In fact, he argues against that approach to solving the problem. In the end, his conclusion is actually:

"I wouldn't ban or burn Babar, or pull it from libraries. But buy it? No. I see no reason to go out of one's way to make Babar available to children, primarily because I don't see much critical reading going on in the schools, and children don't need to be propagandized about colonialism, sexism, or racism. [p 28]"

The title may be a bit shocking, but his conclusions are mild and based on a good argument.

As an author/illustrator of children's books and an avid reader, I found this book a great source of inspiration--it will also be a wonderful guide for parents who are concerned about the rampant but often undiscussed stereotypes present in much children's literature.

Stories do affect us. We carry around memories of them for years, and their impact on our social behavior is immense. Kohl challenges us to look carefully at the books and stories we select for our children and at the messages, both overt and subtle, that they contain. Should be read by all caring parents (and teachers too!)

I highly recommend this unusual resource. Kohl compiled these short essays to help his college students build necessary vocabulary in particular study areas, and each chapter deals with a different discipline. His theory was that ordinary dictionary definitions don't give enough "meat" to allow someone unfamiliar with a technical term to really learn to use it. So he not only defines the words, he gives them a context, and sets the whole into a deeper context of a field of study. Thus, the literature chapter introduces "deconstructionism," "incunabula" and "magic realism," as well as "hyperbole," "irony," "simile" and so forth. The arts, the sciences, the social sciences, logic and religion are among the areas he covers. Really useful for a college-level student, or anyone learning about a new discipline.

Although I think that some of Mr. Kohl's advice is good, the stories he tells about being a teacher ring false. Examples of student work seem overcoached and disingenuous.

Mr. Kohl proposes an almost mystical teaching method which does not involve a set curriculum or lesson plans but instead relies on a teacher allowing student creativity to guide the flow of classroom learning. Mr. Kohl rejects the idea that specific topics should be taught to children in favor of an unstructured learning environment in which elementary school children explore on their own with only occasional guidance from the teacher.

Although there is nothing inherently wrong with this idea, it seems that it would require rather idealized conditions to work. Mr. Kohl seems to have achieved these conditions, according to the stories he tells in the book. He gives examples of sixth graders constructing the natural numbers using set notation, complete with curly braces and a capital lambda. He includes entire stories, supposedly written by fourth graders, which include paragraphs like: "Minnie looked at her mother's slim figure in the doorway, 'Yes, Ma,' she said gloomily". This story contained the caption "Will Minnie win Harper?" and included references to parasols and a play on the phrase "mountains out of molehills".

Apparently not just a few of his elementary school children were capable of advanced abstract thought. Mr Kohl repeatedly writes "the students did ...", "the students wondered ...", "the students said ..." as if all the students in his class acted as one. None of his students seem to have had problems, and he gives no indication of how he might have helped individual students who might have had trouble with, say, the John von Neumann construction.

I was very disappointed with this book and felt somewhat insulted by it. It was long on advice but did not include believable evidence that Mr. Kohl's methods worked in his classroom. And there is no example of the theories working for any other teacher. I don't recommend that anyone who is looking for practical teaching advice buy this book.

As an educator that works from strong roots of creativity, I have found multiple obstacles in the school system and was beginning to feel concerned about my 'calling to teach.' This book provided me with motivation to continue working from such a unique source, as I could identify with the cause & effect scenarios presented by Kohl.

If you require concrete representation, you may be disappointed -true to the ebb and flow of a creative mind, his techniques for reaching out to children and challenging their learning behaviors is quite organic and describes an environment where the class works as 'one.' Another reviewer was appalled at the mere idea of children being capable of abstract thought, also stating "...there is no example of the theories working for any other teacher" - This is not the case -

Kohl had all to recognizable troubles with children of all ages, learning styles and (of course) administration. In regards to abstract thought, Kohl has this to say, "I believe that intellectual sophistication can be developed even within the context of an overcrowded, undersupplied, stuffy public schol classroom. What is essential is taking time for what the Germans call 'Sprache,' which can loosely be translated into English as serious continuing discussion which allows people's voices to develop and be heard." The chapter that follows describes an example of Sprache and middle school children.

Each of his concepts is supported by practical experience and inspiring experiences with children that taught him how to teach. I only hope other current and future educators read this book, as we begin to revisit what the CHILDREN need, want, and how to teach accordingly.

"Teachers need to stretch out and touch the world, to forget their authority and allow themselves to be curious children every once in a while." - Herbert Kohl

I first read this book in college when I was studying to become a teacher. Herbert Kohl's story of his journey as a teacher is inspiring. His narrative about his "calling to teach" describes in great detail the dedication of a superb teacher. I have reread the book several times and often give it as a gift to other teachers. Another book about the inspiring role of the teacher is "The Last Barrier" by Reshad Feild. Both books touch both the heart and the soul as they reveal that the teacher is, in fact, merely a student himself.

I thought Ian Hamilton Finley's Star poem was strange. Is that poetry? How did he get published in your book with that? I mean, I'm taking an American Lit class and there are certain guidelines to poetry, right? Maybe if you said that was 'Art' then he could get by with stacking 'stars' and ending with a 'steer', but one wonders how long it took him to come up with that. A second? Did he get paid for that? If so, then I'm sending in some poetic art and should get paid as well. Also, I don't think we should stretch to find meaning in what we see. The examples you gave as to what the poem could mean were 'out there' to say the least. If this is the kind of stuff you put in your books, then where do we find real poetry?

This book helps readers new to poetry find ways to absorb a poem's meaning. There is usually no right or wrong answer when reading a poem; instead, it's an emotional response. This book gives helpful suggestions about how to get in touch with your emotional response to a poem.