#89, "I Wish My Teacher Knew"

"I Wish My Teacher Knew: How One Question Can Change Everything For Kids"
by Kyle Schwartz

This book was inspired by a simple question in the author's 3rd-grade class, a question initially intended to get to know her class. She asked her students to finish the sentence "I wish my teacher knew...", and the results were funny, sobering, and occasionally shocking. Apparently the idea of the lesson went viral a couple of years ago. I had not heard of it before. The book has only a little to do with that lesson in particular. Instead, it uses the idea of things that students wish they could say but can't or don't and explores the different kinds of pain, turmoil, or abuse that children undergo. She talks about students who change schools, due to financial or family problems, deportation, military moves. She talks about students who live in such poverty that their only meals are from their schools. She talks about students who suffer abuse. She also talks about students who lift themselves and their classmates from their challenges, who meet and overcome obstacles through their own wills and with the help of their classroom community and, often, the love and support of a caring teacher. Real learning can happen in spite of terrible circumstances when children know there is at least one place they are safe, loved. The book isn't what I would call brilliant, but it is a forceful reminder of the importance of the classroom teacher, the impact--true, real, lifelong, everyday, life and death impact--that we as teachers can and do make when we make our classes safe places for children who need help, who need strength, who need community. Every child deserves love, deserves a chance to live and grow and learn. That is really the foundational object of teaching, and something I hope to cultivate in my own classroom every day.