Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind

This book is full of good strategies, although not many of them were terrifically new to me. It's good advice that is much more difficult than the little vignettes make it seem to implement. Something about the author's tone is a little accusative, and made the non-strategy parts hard for me to get through. The author puts a lot of justifiable pressure on teachers to be the one thing that changes students lives. I get what he is saying, but at the same time recognize teachers need release too and making excuses is different from venting complaints about the odds stacked against us. Jensen leaves no room for that, and is pretty abrasive in his claim that kids are not the problem, you are.

I took a lot of notes, wrote down some strategies I thought might work with my kids, but at the end of the day, it didn't present me with the most achievable vision of success. He advises choosing one strategy and honing it until it's right, which I think is the best advice in the book.