They Don't Like Me

"Jane Katch offers us a rare gift, the insider's view of her remarkable classroom as she and her children struggle to understand what is fair and just in the explosive arena of those who intimidate and those who feel intimidated. The children do not lack urgent issues to debate: Toby's desire to roar and Zoe's fear of being roared at; Noah, urged to reveal his fears, then scorned for his vulnerability. Mrs. Katch has entered these dark waters before, as a child, but now the children help her figure out how to paddle through to islands of safety for everyone, the tormentor and tormented. In her vivid and honest narrative of classroom life among the young, we are given a reliable map of the moral dimensions of the teacher's art."

--Vivian Gussin Paley, author of The Kindness of Children and You Can't Say You Can't Play

Under Deadman's Skin

"Under Deadman's Skin" offers a close examination of the daily interactions of the young children in Katch's care, told through careful observation, most often in the children's own words. As a book, it is compelling for its spare prose and sensitive dialogue with children. As a social document, it acts as a map for all those people -- teachers, parents and politicians -- who would like to understand why children do the things they do. - Amy Bemfer, Salon.com (complete article/interview)

"Katch, a teacher, relates her day-to-day observations of five- and six-year-old children, increasingly enamored and engaged in violent play-acting. Over the course of a year, Katch watched children reenacting violence from television and movies and even creating a game called Suicide. She engages parents, older children, and other teachers in her efforts to record how students are acting out violence and how to reduce violent influences on children. Katch struggles with the need to allow children to creatively vent their feelings but to curb a growing fascination with violence among some children. She examines changes in children's behavior from the index-finger guns and "bang-bang" of earlier generations to graphic and gory violence acted out on playgrounds today. Katch intersperses her classroom accounts with remembrances of sessions with the late Bruno Bettelheim, famed for teaching emotionally disturbed children at the University of Chicago."

--Vanessa Bush © Booklist. American Library Association.

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