Basic Needs: A Year With Street Kids in a City School - Softcover

Julie Landsman has been a teacher for over 30 years, primarily in Minneapolis Public Schools. She has written or edited four books, including two others by ScarecrowEducation, A White Teacher Talks About Race and Diversity Days. She has become a frequent consultant, speaker, and visiting professor at colleges and universities across the country.

Landsman, a Minneapolis teacher, here recounts episodes from the year she taught troubled teenagers who had been tossed out of their regular schools. The narrative contains some worthwhile observations: one teacher has a knack for inviting hugs from his needy students; during a discussion of birth control, teenage girls claim their boyfriends will leave them rather than use condoms. Landsman asserts the value of getting students away from their drab institutions and includes excerpts from a student's horrific diary of life as a prostitute as well as the author's own grave but simple comments to the girl. "The trick is to respect the details without being swallowed by them," Landsman observes of her students' traumas. However, her book never becomes compelling. It suffers from superficial accounts of the students' lives, awkward attempts to reflect on the author's own uneasy youth and a narrative style that feels somewhat artificial (aggravated by the fact that some of the "students" are composites), as when all students call their teacher by her last name. One chapter frontispiece offers a quote from Samuel G. Freedman's Small Victories ; that book offers a far deeper portrait of urban students.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.