Teacher (Touchstone Books (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: A passionate, thought-provoking story by a great teacher.
Review: Hard for me to write a short review of this book since I've written a book about Ashton-Warner's contributions to teaching young children.

The point is, Ashton-Warner was a careful observer of the young Maori children she taught. She knew that what she had been trained to do in a college teacher-training program wasn't working, so she really looked to see what the children cared about, and invented ways to teach them based upon their deep interests and respecting their culture, different from her own. She, a left-handed artist, was different from the mainstream, and wanted to be appreciated...and she carried this and other knowledge from her personal life into her teaching. Ashton-Warner wasn't a woman of perfection, but she made a contribution that lasts...This book has changed the lives of many, many teachers -- I know because they have told me.

Rating:
Summary: Read This Book Once a Year
Review: I am a teacher of 18 years who had to read this book in 1977 as part of my college teacher training and would like to share this book with all teachers. It is as relevant for me today with our scripted phonics and literature-rich reading programs as it was then. Sylia Ashton-Warner does more than portray a method and philosophy to teach reading to New Zealand's Maori children--she paints a vivid, dramatic picture of any classroom. The reader can see the combination of her daily, organized lesson plan superimposed with the actual unpredictable, spontaneous, and social nature of children. Sylvia writes in such a perceptive, humorous way that our sympathy goes out to the Maori children who are expected to learn reading, but are expertly led, not forced.
One of her main points was that the contemporary "Dick and Jane" method of teaching reading was too imposing, stagnant, and foreign to inspire success and a love of learning for her Maori students. She created a new system to do the job of bridging the old, illiterate civilization of the Maoris to contemporary New Zealand. Her method became famous. It is fairly simple and has been used since in a multitude of kindergarten and 1st grade classrooms. Children were allowed to give Ms. Ashton-Warner, their teacher, a new word every day. The word was traced, written, practiced, shared, and reviewed the next day. If the word was important enough to the child, it was remembered and therefore called an "organic" word since it came from an important part of the individual child. Children had word cards and every day would locate their own personal word cards amidst the class' collection.
As Ms. Ashton-Warner used this method over time, she was able to categorize important words, and thereby came across universal truths regarding words that made reading easier for her students. The two widest categories she called "sex" and "fear" words, and if a word was easily learned then it fit into one of these categories. Although I personally don't like her use of the word "sex," she explains her conception of it as referring to the human needs of love, acceptance, and survival.
As students became proficient with this first introduction to words, they were "graduated" to more advanced classes in reading and writing, using their own personal word banks, until at last the traditional school books could be used successfully. In addition, Ms. Ashton-Warner wrote and illustrated her own version of basal readers for Maoris, using their own interests and lingo, as another part of transitioning them from their own culture to the literate and modern New Zealand. It is tragic that most of her original works are gone.
In actuality, the book "Teacher" is much more than a description of a pedagogical method. It is a work of art, describing the talent needed to teach. It is a work in psychology, showing one how to cope with the enormous diversity and constant problems of the real classroom. It is a work of teaching methodology, inspiring a teacher to value and inspire the inner thoughts and feelings of a child, and to take those raw materials and create real learning experiences for that child.
I actually read this book once a year. It has become a part of me that allows me to take each day as it comes, to see special inspired moments in a child's day as being a huge, poignant step in their education.