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    All Day: A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids at Rikers Island
    Unavailable
    All Day: A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids at Rikers Island
    Unavailable
    All Day: A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids at Rikers Island
    Audiobook9 hours

    All Day: A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids at Rikers Island

    Written by Liza Jessie Peterson

    Narrated by Liza Jessie Peterson

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    ALL DAY is a behind-the-bars, personal glimpse into the issue of mass incarceration via an unpredictable, insightful and ultimately hopeful reflection on teaching teens while they await sentencing.

    Told with equal parts raw honesty and unbridled compassion, ALL DAY recounts a year in Liza Jessie Peterson's classroom at Island Academy, the high school for inmates detained at New York City's Rikers Island. A poet and actress who had done occasional workshops at the correctional facility, Peterson was ill-prepared for a full-time stint teaching in the GED program for the incarcerated youths. For the first time faced with full days teaching the rambunctious, hyper, and fragile adolescent inmates, "Ms. P" comes to understand the essence of her predominantly Black and Latino students as she attempts not only to educate them, but to instill them with a sense of self-worth long stripped from their lives.
    "I have quite a spirited group of drama kings, court jesters, flyboy gangsters, tricksters, and wannabe pimps all in my charge, all up in my face, to educate," Peterson discovers. "Corralling this motley crew of bad-news bears to do any lesson is like running boot camp for hyperactive gremlins. I have to be consistent, alert, firm, witty, fearless, and demanding, and most important, I have to have strong command of the subject I'm teaching." Discipline is always a challenge, with the students spouting street-infused backtalk and often bouncing off the walls with pent-up testosterone. Peterson learns quickly that she must keep the upper hand-set the rules and enforce them with rigor, even when her sympathetic heart starts to waver.
    Despite their relentless bravura and antics-and in part because of it-Peterson becomes a fierce advocate for her students. She works to instill the young men, mostly black, with a sense of pride about their history and culture: from their African roots to Langston Hughes and Malcolm X. She encourages them to explore and express their true feelings by writing their own poems and essays. When the boys push her buttons (on an almost daily basis) she pushes back, demanding that they meet not only her expectations or the standards of the curriculum, but set expectations for themselves-something most of them have never before been asked to do. She witnesses some amazing successes as some of the boys come into their own under her tutelage.
    Peterson vividly captures the prison milieu and the exuberance of the kids who have been handed a raw deal by society and have become lost within the system. Her time in the classroom teaches her something, too-that these boys want to be rescued. They want normalcy and love and opportunity.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateApr 18, 2017
    ISBN9781478975021
    Unavailable
    All Day: A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids at Rikers Island

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    Reviews for All Day

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    • 5/5
      Liza Peterson does a valuable job, one that many would consider thankless. Peterson teaches teenagers incarcerated at Riker's Island. Her class is a rotating cast of characters. Her students are awaiting trial, transfer, or their eighteenth birthdays, when they will be sent elsewhere. Peterson has minimal resources and is held to state standards that have little meaning inside the prison environment. In all of this Peterson believes in her students. She tells them they can always be better, and she lives it. She recognizes the traumas that have dominated her students' lives, but she still holds them to high standards. She teaches her students through subjects that speak to their experience, like black history. By all accounts, Peterson sounds like a great teacher. The kids are clearly connected with her. I was sad to discover that Peterson had left her position at Rikers. The environment and the commute had been wreaking havoc. And this speaks, of course, to the bigger problem of getting good teachers into environments that most need them. The environment at Rikers is stifling.This is also a book about problems in the prison system. Probably most readers inclined to pick up a book such as this are aware of and sensitive to the numerous issues in the American prison system. This memoir illustrates some of the ways in which the prison-industrial complex is brutalizing kids. Many of the kids Peterson teaches are terrified. They appear tough, because tough is necessary to survive. Under that thin exterior, however, they are kids, who are terrified of their environment. This book shows how the prison system is damaging society more than protecting it. Highly recommended for those interested in education and the justice system.
    • 5/5
      The cover caught my eye, the young woman is flaming red and with her chin held up high. In this case the cover gives you some insight into the book. Liza Jessie Peterson is foremost an artist but she had to face reality and get a steady paying job to keep on living. Her best opportunity was teaching at Riker's Island a prison that included young imprisoned youth, mostly 16 to 18 years old. She accepted and subjected herself to a deadening schedule of getting up at 4:30 a.m just to get to the prison. When she got there, she had face unusual stress. With guards standing by in the hallway, and a group of students who were ready to challenge the teacher on the first day, she had to be tough and draw her boundaries first and later she concentrated on what a lot of people in prisons do not get. She had to win their trust, both she and they were angry but she was determined. She had to teach them to to use the inspiration of Obama becoming president that year for anything is possible, to get them started on getting committed to some part of education, to recognize the tremendous amount sorrow, abuse or violence that they had already received as young individuals.Also to realize that they can still contribute to society, it is not too late. She inspired them with music, poetry,posters, history of black leaders, especially those who had been in prison and made a contribution to society.For the details of how she did this, you need to read the book. The jail language is different and she provides "Rikers Rug Rats Slang" in the front of the book. It is a bit gritty but this book will teach you a lot about people.I received this Advanced Reading Copy by making a selection from Amazon Vine books but that in no way influenced my thoughts or feelings in this review. I also posted this review only on sites meant for reading not for selling.