Lewis Birchon's Reviews > Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

Interesting and thought-provoking. There’s a great deal of compassion and humanity in Kate Clanchy’s classroom tales, as well as the odd eye-popping safeguarding anecdote from very different times.

While there is much I agree with her on, there’s also quite a bit I doesn’t mesh with my own views. Perhaps, then, the thing that I found most useful about this book was the chance to have my understanding challenged and to see things through a slightly different lens.

However, the thing I found most distracting - and a bit off-putting - was the often-simplistic focus on race, origin, and class. The way these interact in schools is important, but they are complex systemic factors rather than simple character explanations.