The surface definitely does not reveal all.Ĭonroy's prose is beautiful he captures the natural world around him so wonderfully. Perhaps my greatest take-away from it is to try to know the people to whom I speak, with whom I would like to work or deal.

He also daringly spares the rod! This is an eye-opening memoir, even though it is no longer a new book. There is an overarching lack of concern as long as discipline is maintained.Ĭonroy writes of his experiments in teaching methods and his gambles with the authorities to try new activities with the children. He learns of various types of prejudice that attack them individually and as a group in order to keep them untaught and unteachable. He encounters children who are savvy but unschooled for all the time they have spent in the classroom. He is to teach the children of the island, the people who used to live from fishing but now can't support themselves from polluted waters. There he encounters a world apart, conditions unlike anything he has encountered in his teaching on the mainland. Pat Conroy agreed to teach for a year on Yamacraw Island off the coast of South Carolina. This is an enlightening book and also obviously the book of a young man as it is at times both overwhelmingly idealistic and alarmingly naive. I'm still naive, thank goodness, and still hope to make a difference with the teachers I prepare to teach-I just never assume I'm the only one with something to say. Sometimes it's better to close your mouth and open your ears and hear what the kids have to teach you. Once I learned that I wasn't the only one in the room with something worthwhile to teach, I really became a teacher. That's what this book popping up in my Goodreads wanderings makes me realize.

Hard lessons to be sure, but critical to my nascent years as a teacher. They ate my upper middle class white butt for lunch! But, man did I LEARN from my kids.

My first year was a pretty miserable failure and I did not achieve my glorified vision of 'the Great White non-Hispanic Hope' (Hey, I said I was naive, right?). This is probably more of a reflection than a'review' I read this book when I first started teaching, and my naive and much younger self wanted to be exactly the kind of teacher Pat Conroy had wanted to be-one who worked with children who needed me and whose lives I could touch in some way-only I would do it better of course! My first teaching job plunked me down in a non-air-conditioned overcrowded school in Little Havana (in the heart of the city of Miami, FL for you non-natives) with 100% of my students hailing from Cuba, South America, Puerto Rico, etc.

The river is wide pat conroy