In searching for my next project, I surrounded myself with books on teaching, teachers, and classroom life. Many of these books I had read more than once and each time in the re-reading, I learned something new. I re-learned not because I was dense the first time I read the book but simply because I had accumulated experiences since the first time I picked up the book. And that is what happened in re-reading Philip Jackson’s Life in Classrooms (1968). Rethinking my experiences over decades in classrooms pushed me again to learn anew as I read those gracefully written chapters–beginning with the “Daily Grind”–into further reflection.
Like myself, Stanford University professor, Elliot Eisner, former student and colleague of Jackson at the University of Chicago said about that initial chapter: “Who can forget ‘the daily grind’? Who can forget the importance of students learning how to delay gratification? Who can forget the aroma, or should I say odor, of a place that smells of stale milk and that leaves chalk dust on your sleeves?”* I certainly have not.
In just 177 pages of text, Jackson took what he had seen in a handful of elementary schools and blazed a trail for subsequent generations of school and CONTINUE READING: Life in Classrooms and Philip Jackson | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice