Kwanzaa and Me

“Paley has learned the essential lesson, and from her little schoolroom in Hyde Park, she’s taught it to a generation of teachers and parents and caretakers of children around the globe. It is this: Take very seriously the things that children say, and take equally seriously the things you say to your children… Paley has poured what she’s heard onto the pages of eight remarkable books, the latest, Kwanzaa and Me: A Teacher’s Story. Each book tackles a single central question of classroom life—the racism, the stories, the gender differences, the children’s development, the outsider and the struggle to belong, the ethics, and the ways in which classrooms dismiss the differences, and thus the heart, of the children who make up their rosters… Along the way, and probably a good bit of the reason she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award in 1989, Paley has given all of us not just snapshots of the minds and souls of preschoolers and kindergartners but full-blown portraits of how they think, what they feel and the ways in which they imagine, complete with all the shadings and brush strokes that can be born only of a child’s most intimate, unguarded revelations.”—Barbara Mahany, The Chicago Tribune Magazine

“[Paley’s] message, conveyed with touching simplicity and never a heavy hand, is twofold. One component is to encourage people to talk to one another about race, and she is clearly a master of that. The second, more elusive, is what one of her colleagues calls ‘the other curriculum,’ which allows children to feel comfortable with their emotions and their differences… Every teacher and every parent should read this.”—David K. Shipler, The New York Times Book Review

“Paley has, once again, shown an uncanny sensitivity to what young people are interested in and meshed it with the needs of our society.”—Senator Paul Simon