Some Kids I Taught And What They Taught Me

Kate Clanchy

Kate Clanchy, a prize-winning poet, wants to change the world and thinks school is an excellent place to do it. In this interactive event based on her candid, funny and moving new book, she invites you to meet some of the kids she has taught on her 30-year career, and to celebrate this most creative, passionate and practically useful of jobs.

Some Kids I Taught And What They Taught Me

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 ‘Inclusion Unit’, 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 doesn’t 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. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me will show you why it shouldn’t be.

‘Clanchy doesn’t dodge the hard knocks, but what comes through from her personal stories is the transformative power of good teaching.’ Tom Gatti, Economia

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