Handshakes? "Take 'em to church?" This book really and truly is for white folks that teach in the hood.

Here's the trick to effective teaching: see your students as individuals and recognize that they may have a different background or experiences than you. Work hard to reach them anyway and check y ...more

Excellent distillation of urban studies, race-gender oriented critical-theory, and education philosophy applied to the urban classroom, for a non-academic audience.

This book was written for me (And for you, too, especially if you teach or are interested in the education debates). A personal anecdot ...more

This style of teaching is unreal. The author makes it seem like urban children are hard-wired to rowdy, boisterous, and overly-social, and that we should accept that as part of black and brown culture and recalibrate our teaching to accommodate it. As a black man, I disagree with almost all that he ...more

This review is lengthy and also gets quite personal, since I can’t help but examine For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood …and the Rest of Y’all Too in the light of my own experiences as a teacher.

TL;DR: Christopher Emdin is awesome, and this book is too. It’s short and accessible, but it has such s ...more

For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Eduction, by Christopher Emdin, is a fascinating and exciting work that challenges teachers who work in urban environments "in the hood" as to how they approach their work, adapt their teaching practice to ...more

Emdin's main idea is solid: White teachers need to understand and value their students' culture. What is not solid is the practical conclusions for instructional practice that he draws based on this idea. Emdin's suggestions fall into 3 groups: (1) intriguing but WAY too complicated to implement in ...more

The introduction and conclusion should be required reading for any teacher, not just those who teach in urban schools. The chapters based around the "Seven C's" of reality pedagogy didn't feel as revelatory to me. There are good ideas for teachers, even teachers like me who don't teach in diverse/ur ...more

Christopher Emdin is no LouAnne Johnson. She’s best known for her book “My Posse Don't Do Homework”, which served as — very loosely — the basis for the movie Dangerous Minds, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. But her tour de force is her primer on teaching in urban schools, Two Parts Textbook, One Part Lo ...more

I'm glad I read this. It has a lot of rich passages and chapters that reminded me of what a highly engaged classroom can look like for kids from "the hood". My overall take on the book, though, is that it would have been a good book for me to read 10 years ago, when I was still new to the profession ...more

Should be required reading in teacher education programs. I wish I had read a book like this when I was an undergrad education major. Twenty four years in the classroom later, all of this book rings true to me. ...more