Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

With a new afterword. 'The best book on teachers and children and writing that I've ever read. No-one has said better so much of what so badly needs saying'xc2xa0-xc2xa0Philip Pullman Kate Clanchy wants to change the world and thinks school is an excellent place to do it. She invites you to meet some of the kids she has taught in her thirty-year career. Join her as she explains everything about sex to a classroom of thirteen-year-olds. As she works in the school xe2x80x98Inclusion Unitxe2x80x99, trying to improve the fortunes of kids excluded from regular lessons because of their terrifying power to end learning in an instant. Or as she nurtures her multicultural poetry group, full of migrants and refugees, watches them find their voice and produce work of heartbreaking brilliance. While Clanchy doesnxe2x80x99t deny stinging humiliations or hide painful accidents, she celebrates this most creative, passionate and practically useful of jobs. Teaching today is all too often demeaned, diminished and drastically under-resourced.xc2xa0Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Mexc2xa0will show you why it shouldnxe2x80x99t be. xc2xa0Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2020

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her poetry collection Slattern won a Forward Prize. Her short story xe2x80x98The Not-Dead and the Savedxe2x80x99 won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. Her BBC 3 radio programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature, and an anthology of her students' work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim. In 2019 she published Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, a book about her experience of teaching in state schools for several decades, which won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing; and in 2020 published How to Grow Your Own Poem, which Hollie McNish described as xe2x80x98the best book Ixe2x80x99ve read about how to practise writing poetryxe2x80x99.