Teacher Study Guide & Plot Synopsis

Teacher Plot Summary

Preview of Teacher Summary:

In "Teacher," Sylvia Ashton-Warner recounts some of her years as a teacher of Maori children in New Zealand. The years of her teaching career that are covered in this autobiographical account take place at Fernhill School in Omahu, New Zealand, where her husband Keith Henderson serves as headmaster at the same time. Through her many years of experience in teaching Maori children, especially The Little Ones,who are the five-year-olds in the classrooms known as the Infant Rooms, Sylvia learns that the children benefit most from a teaching approach she terms as organic teaching.

Sylvia becomes a strong advocate of the organic method of teaching which allows the inner vision of the child to emerge and flourish by basing learning techniques on the child's strengths and on the words and terms which are most familiar to him because they originate from his own culture. Sylvia grows to realize that the...
(read more)