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

by Julie Landsman

Overview

In Basic Needs: A Year With Street Kids in a City School, Julie Landsman chronicles one year as a teacher in a program for students in such serious trouble they are asked to leave their middle schools and attend a special program for disruptive students. Landsman allows her readers to get to know the students, their home and street situations, and how their stories develop over the year, and in doing so, shows the complexity of young people, their beauty, and their individuality.

This second edition is as current a story as the original: about kids in trouble and their resiliency. Landsman has added a foreword, afterword, and an extensive Resource Guide, which includes all the text of activities from Diversity Days, revolving around how to create a community in your classroom and includes ideas for every week of the school year. Landsman also includes a list of books to read over the summer for busy teachers. In total, the second edition of Basic Needs is a worthy follow-up to the highly praised original.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781461648086
Publisher:	R&L Education
Publication date:	12/01/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Preface
Chapter 2 Acknowledgments
Chapter 3 Introduction
Chapter 4 August
Chapter 5 September
Chapter 6 October
Chapter 7 November
Chapter 8 December
Chapter 9 Winter Break
Chapter 10 February
Chapter 11 March
Chapter 12 April
Chapter 13 May
Chapter 14 June
Chapter 15 July
Chapter 16 A Week-by-Week Plan: Creating an Inclusive Community in the Classroom
Chapter 17 Afterword
Chapter 18 About the Author

Editorial Reviews

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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly