Reading Whitman in Manhattan: Teaching, Poetry and Hunter College High School

From the Introduction:When a book is in our hands, it lives or dies. That is the work. We read, we think, we write. We carry the load, we handle it, we sweat. That is the work. We can all do it. This book offers a sense of what work is in a certain time and place. This is a book of essays and poems, poems by a teacher and by his students, it is not a book about how to teach or what is wrong with education. But it raises a challenge. It extends a hand. Look at what these students do. Look at what it means to be among them. Listen to what that asks of us. Look at the city, the place, in which this happens. It is a place not unlike your own.