Pat Conroy - The Water is Wide
With this his second book of non-fiction, Mr. Conroy relates his experience as a teacher to seventeen African American boys and girls on an island off the coast of South Carolina during the Vietnam war.
“Someone told me about Yamacraw, said they needed a teacher, that the teacher who had been there thirty-nine years was quitting, and they couldn’t get anyone else. This looked like the perfect opportunity for me to get rid of my do-gooder tendencies. And so I went to Yamacraw Island. They gave me a boat, told me “Good Luck,” and that was all they told me.”
“The first thing I learned when I got there was that fourteen of the seventeen kids in grades five through eight read below the first grade level. Five of the kids did not know the alphabet; five of the kids also did not know how to add one and one, two and two, things I thought rather basic in the eduction of most people. I also discovered that most of the kids have been trained to obey the whip and the belt and the hand. What they feared most was physical punishment. Everyone in my class was interrupted by the sound of leather on flesh from the next room. And these kids evidently had become accustomed to corporal punishment and they would learn only in response to corporal punishment. The thing I thought I had to do first was to not beat the kids but to let them know that education was fun.”
You might enjoy these other titles by Pat Conroy: The Boo, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, Beach Music, My Losing Season.
Also, check out these other Southern authors: Anne Rivers Siddons, Cassandra King, and Terry Kay.
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