cover image In There with the Kids: Teaching in Today's Classrooms

In There with the Kids: Teaching in Today's Classrooms

David Korbin, David Kobrin. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $19.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-395-50083-5

A professor of education at Brown University offers a valuable and entertaining course in pedagogy following two fictional teachers in realistic classroom scenarios. A young woman new to high school instruction and a man long familiar with the elementary classroom are composites of teachers drawn from the author's observations as supervisor, researcher and participant in teacher education programs. Their experiences highlight the constantly changing interpersonal relations in the classroom and demonstrate that personal enjoyment, even when students' behavior is directly challenging, is part of a teacher's stock-in-trade. As we follow students reacting to Petrarch's love sonnets or, variously, wrestling with the concept of plane in a fourth grade geometry lesson, we see disparate management and pedagogic styles and personal motivations in operation. Kobrin's analysis of each approach and his perceptions on the teaching/learning relationship make this a useful resource for prospective teachers as well as others concerned with what should go on in the classroom. (Jan.)