At the time, I sometimes felt stupid for my insistence that the children call me Madame. But in the long run I realized that these children are often referred to by names that society imposes upon them. There's a certain amount of power in seeing someone choose their own name and stick by it and identify themselves before someone else has the opportunity to identify them. I'm glad I did that, even though it seemed silly at the time. I never intentionally wanted to shake things up.

You walk a line between being one of the kids and being a strict disciplinarian. How do you think that changed the way they looked at teachers?

I hope that they saw teachers as individuals. When I was student teaching, I was always told that some teachers are like mother figures, but I was never really a mother figure. I was more like a big sister figure, and I think I had the patience and temperament, unfortunately, of a big sister, too. I didn't necessarily want the children as my friends. I was trying to be a model of someone who was doing their own thing and having success at it. [I wanted to show them] that you don't necessarily have to march to the same beat as everybody else, and you can still get done what you want to get done.

I think it was very important to me to have sort of a villain for a mentor, because then I learned not to care so much. I was able to think to myself, "Well, I can play the bad guy and still get good results." After my mentor Ismene died, I had a little porcelain figure of Captain Hook on my desk that I would glance at frequently as sort of my surrogate mentor. I would think about how pirates are so rough and tough and kids love them anyway. You've just got to do what you have to do to get past that point of wondering "How am I doing?" to "How are the children doing?"

I was surprised at how firm I could be, with some of them. You know, I got a piece of advice before I started teaching that was actually very helpful for me: Act angry before you are angry. That way you can be more in control of your emotions, and you can be more fair in doling out consequences.

There always is this conflict, which you get at in your book, between the need to be able to the discipline the kids and the pressure of parents becoming unhappy, the threat of lawsuits and the issue of bad publicity. Do schools and teachers have the authority they need to handle serious discipline problems? Or do you think it's not their job?

I think teachers generally feel like they are working in a sue-happy environment and are sort of afraid to discipline. It's sort of a damned if you do damned if you don't situation and it needs to be looked at, of course, on an individual basis. The more teachers are involved in school-wide decision making -- in a real way, not just in a cool-with-the-administration way, but in designing the curriculum -- you're going to get a lot more accountability from teachers.

I think there's a lot of excuse-making on both sides. Both parents and teachers have many opportunities to focus more on the whole child and less on the system. I really believe that in the future, teachers will be able to do that, as long as they take the reins at the schools. There's a lot of top-down decision making that goes on, and teachers are often the last ones to be asked their opinion. Meanwhile, they're the ones actually in the situations with the children daily, hourly. They're an overlooked resource.

As a white teacher in a largely black inner-city school, you encountered some things that were going on with your students that you didn't fully understand and were sometimes afraid of.

I think most of what I feared didn't come from them as a racial group but as a class group. I think the fact that they were so poor and underprivileged [was scarier to me than the possibility] of them stealing from me or hurting me or having weapons available to them.

The cultural thing, that was a two-way street. There were things I didn't understand about them, but there was also plenty they didn't understand about me. And I think that we were able to bridge a lot of those gaps through literature and literature-based learning. We studied some cultures that were not even represented in the class; we did a large unit on Asia, just appreciating what culture has to offer -- food and dance -- which, by the way, aren't generally part of the mainstream curriculum. Even though we had a lot of differences, we could trust that every culture knew how to party a little bit.

Next page | Brown vs. Board of Education is still part of the American dream