Taught by America
Subtitle: A Story of Struggle and Hope in Compton
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: August 15, 2005
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9780807032725
Subjects: Educators; Multicultural Education; Education; Elementary Education; Poor children; Biography / Autobiography; Elementary school teachers; Education (Elementary); Personal Memoirs; Women; Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs; California; United States; Biography; Case studies; Children of minorities; Compton
First sentence: After I graduated from Yale in 1995 with a degree in literature, I joined Teach for America (TFA), an organization that places recent college graduates in underfunded, underresourced public schools where there are teacher shortages.
Description: "After graduating from Yale with a degree in literature, Sarah Sentilles, a Spanish-speaking twenty-two-year-old with almost no teaching experience, joined Teach for America and was assigned to a rundown elementary school in Compton, California - one of the toughest cities in America. In charge of thirty-six first graders in a classroom without books, Sentilles experienced her own kind of education. Taught by America is the story of the children Sentilles taught - but more than that, it's the story of one woman's change of heart and life."

"Through portraits of the children in her classroom, Sentilles relates a heartbreaking journey, as she learns about a failing school system, the true meaning of poverty in America, and the strength children exhibit when they're just struggling to survive." "Sentilles originally went into Teach for America as a break between undergraduate and graduate school. She fully expected to go back to school for her doctorate in comparative literature after a two-year teaching stint. But teaching the children in Compton changed her utterly, and she decided during her tenure to study for the ministry instead."--Jacket.