What do you think?
Rate this book
I Passed This Way
The internationally renowned educator and novelist writes of her New Zealand childhood, her haphazard education, her marriage, her years of teaching, her country's rejection of her lifework, her years of exile, and her sorrows and successes
- GenresBiography
560 pages, Hardcover
First published December 12, 1979
24 people want to read
About the author
Sylvia Ashton-Warner
20 books8 followersAshton-Warner was born on 17 December 1908, in Stratford, New Zealand. She spent many years teaching Māori children, using stimulating and often pioneering techniques which she wrote about in her 1963 treatise Teacher and in the various volumes of her autobiography. Her success derived from a commitment to "releasing the native imagery and using it for working material" and her belief that communication must produce a mutual response in order to effect a lasting change. As a novelist, she produced several works mostly centred on strong female characters. Her novel Spinster (1958) was made into the 1961 film Two Loves (also known as The Spinster) starring Shirley MacLaine. She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to education and literature in the 1982 Queen's Birthday Honours.
Ashton-Warner died on 28 April 1984, in Tauranga. Her life story was adapted for the 1985 biographical film Sylvia, based on her work and writings.
The Faculty of Education library at The University of Auckland—the institution at which Ashton-Warner trained between 1928 and 1929— was named the Sylvia Ashton-Warner Library in 1987 and includes the Sylvia Ashton-Warner Collection.
From Wikipedia
Ashton-Warner died on 28 April 1984, in Tauranga. Her life story was adapted for the 1985 biographical film Sylvia, based on her work and writings.
The Faculty of Education library at The University of Auckland—the institution at which Ashton-Warner trained between 1928 and 1929— was named the Sylvia Ashton-Warner Library in 1987 and includes the Sylvia Ashton-Warner Collection.
From Wikipedia
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 30, 2013
Added 11/21/08.
Edited 1/30/13
I Passed This Way (1979) by Sylvia Ashton-Warner:
"The internationally renowned educator and novelist writes of her New Zealand childhood, her haphazard education, her marriage, her years of teaching, her country's rejection of her lifework, her years of exile, and her sorrows and successes."
FROM: http://books.google.com/books/about/I...
===================================
Editorial Review - Kirkus Reviews
"Lyrical, prickly, sentimental, worldly-wise, naive, passionate, mannered, telegraphic, verbose--it will come as no surprise to readers of Ashton-Warner's previous work (fiction, memoirs, credos on innovative teaching) that her writing is a blend of marvelous and maddening, and never more so than in this long, quirky autobiography.
""A freckled nonentity somewhere in the middle of a large sprawling family, thoroughly outshone"" by big brothers and pretty sisters, Sylvia grew up moving from place to place around New Zealand, with crippled Puppa and teacher Mumma, poor but never without essential creative equipment. (""We played the horse like a piano and rode the piano like a horse."")
"And, however painful it often was (""I'd like to get this chapter over and done with""), she dwells in sometimes-luminous, sometimes-syrupy detail on those young years that also became the fiction of Greenstone: schoolgirl crushes, teachers good and bad, doing homework on horseback, being odd-girl-out (""So I'm a pariah? Then I'll be the best""), discovering Jane Eyre (""The shock was like the crack of a branch splitting"").
"But Sylvia didn't want what waited at the end of 14 schools--""the last thing in God's heaven I wanted to be was a teacher""--and even while resigning herself to training for ""the bloody profesh"" in Wellington (""Learning fast about men. . . less than nothing about teaching""), she dreamed of her real career as musician, painter, artist. Enter, however, two vital men: Rousseau (with inspiration for both teaching and writing); and fellow-student Keith Henderson, who loved teaching, who married her, who took her off to be his second-in-command at isolated Maori schools--where Sylvia had babies (sometimes teaching across them), a nervous breakdown (harrowingly described), a platonic affair (wanly described, as it was in Myself), beloved friends, and futile feuds with the education establishment over what became the organic ""Key Vocabulary"" teaching method explored in Spinster and Teacher.
"Those books brought fame, but no honor in her homeland, so, after Keith's death came a new life abroad--in Israel, lazy and politics-ridden Aspen, sterile Vancouver--as teacher of teachers, guru of loving, childlike but responsible education.
"And always: loving friends, thoughts of her scattered, diminished family, and the neverending bitterness toward New Zealand ("" 'I'm not in New Zealand, I'm not in New Zealand,' the sweetest song I ever heard""), though she has finally come home to her daughter there. ""I've made my life come true. I've actually done what I set out to do and I have said what I knew.""
"So she has--and though most readers will pull back now and then from the girlish excesses, the self-conscious elaborations--it's one-of-a-kind-story told in a one-of-a-kind-voice, frequently enthralling and almost always just a little surprising."
FROM: http://books.google.com/books?id=tD5a...
===============================
She also wrote: Spinster and Teacher.
Edited 1/30/13
I Passed This Way (1979) by Sylvia Ashton-Warner:
"The internationally renowned educator and novelist writes of her New Zealand childhood, her haphazard education, her marriage, her years of teaching, her country's rejection of her lifework, her years of exile, and her sorrows and successes."
FROM: http://books.google.com/books/about/I...
===================================
Editorial Review - Kirkus Reviews
"Lyrical, prickly, sentimental, worldly-wise, naive, passionate, mannered, telegraphic, verbose--it will come as no surprise to readers of Ashton-Warner's previous work (fiction, memoirs, credos on innovative teaching) that her writing is a blend of marvelous and maddening, and never more so than in this long, quirky autobiography.
""A freckled nonentity somewhere in the middle of a large sprawling family, thoroughly outshone"" by big brothers and pretty sisters, Sylvia grew up moving from place to place around New Zealand, with crippled Puppa and teacher Mumma, poor but never without essential creative equipment. (""We played the horse like a piano and rode the piano like a horse."")
"And, however painful it often was (""I'd like to get this chapter over and done with""), she dwells in sometimes-luminous, sometimes-syrupy detail on those young years that also became the fiction of Greenstone: schoolgirl crushes, teachers good and bad, doing homework on horseback, being odd-girl-out (""So I'm a pariah? Then I'll be the best""), discovering Jane Eyre (""The shock was like the crack of a branch splitting"").
"But Sylvia didn't want what waited at the end of 14 schools--""the last thing in God's heaven I wanted to be was a teacher""--and even while resigning herself to training for ""the bloody profesh"" in Wellington (""Learning fast about men. . . less than nothing about teaching""), she dreamed of her real career as musician, painter, artist. Enter, however, two vital men: Rousseau (with inspiration for both teaching and writing); and fellow-student Keith Henderson, who loved teaching, who married her, who took her off to be his second-in-command at isolated Maori schools--where Sylvia had babies (sometimes teaching across them), a nervous breakdown (harrowingly described), a platonic affair (wanly described, as it was in Myself), beloved friends, and futile feuds with the education establishment over what became the organic ""Key Vocabulary"" teaching method explored in Spinster and Teacher.
"Those books brought fame, but no honor in her homeland, so, after Keith's death came a new life abroad--in Israel, lazy and politics-ridden Aspen, sterile Vancouver--as teacher of teachers, guru of loving, childlike but responsible education.
"And always: loving friends, thoughts of her scattered, diminished family, and the neverending bitterness toward New Zealand ("" 'I'm not in New Zealand, I'm not in New Zealand,' the sweetest song I ever heard""), though she has finally come home to her daughter there. ""I've made my life come true. I've actually done what I set out to do and I have said what I knew.""
"So she has--and though most readers will pull back now and then from the girlish excesses, the self-conscious elaborations--it's one-of-a-kind-story told in a one-of-a-kind-voice, frequently enthralling and almost always just a little surprising."
FROM: http://books.google.com/books?id=tD5a...
===============================
She also wrote: Spinster and Teacher.
Displaying 1 of 1 review