Michael Copperman

Michael Copperman writes about teaching with an appealing blend of confidence and humility. In my experience, no teacher can succeed without both of these. As a teacher I always long to discover and develop every student’s unique gifts, and above all to grow alongside them. Copperman leans his full weight into the shoulder at the wheel in his two-year Teach for America assignment, then shows us how his failures are his greatest life lessons. He writes as a mixed-race Asian American, as a Stanford graduate, as a man of slight build that black kids in Promise, Mississippi call "Chinaman" and white folks in the Delta stare at with suspicion.

He confronts his own privilege as a Stanford graduate, and the racism ingrained in Promise’s poverty and unequal education system. Most of the black Mississippi fourth-graders of his classroom come from impoverished and broken homes, but rise above stereotyping as imaginative boys, bookish girls, enthusiastic, shy, and sometimes tragically brilliant and angry in Copperman’s individual portraits of them. I feel privileged as a reader to know their stories through his work, and inspired as a teacher to turn my doubts into challenges.… (més)