I Am A Pencil Summary

I am a Pencil by Sam Swope is written from the teacher’s experiences with becoming an elementary school teacher in Queens, New York. Swope writes in a perspective of the teacher; where he guides the students’ writing, confronted their realities, and encouraged them to put their full effort into their success. When reading the preface, it explained that his students came from twenty-one different countries and spoke eleven different languages. He explains that the majority of the students came from Latin America, ten of the students were Asian, one student was Turkish, one student was Egyptian and half-Croatian, and a half-Bosnia-Herzegovinan girl. Swope organizes the novel in chronologically according to the projects the students were assigned. Like all classrooms, there are ups and downs that affect the students’ learning habits and difficulties. Just by reading …show more content…
There is a line you can’t cross with them; you can be stern and their friend, but with a balance. I want to be able to encourage my students the way Swope did. He didn’t let the language barrier or their differences get in the way of wanting to inspire his students as much as possible. Swope allows readers to picture life in a diverse urban elementary school classroom, and he freely expresses the amount of care he has for each student. He inserts parts of different written pieces into the novel, bringing other authors to life alongside his own.

Swope presents a largely diverse classroom experiences, hopes, struggles, and the challenges and joys that working with a diverse world holds for teachers. I Am a Pencil shows a personal look into the experience of a write who struggles with the constraints of the children’s life circumstances, the realities of public education in a large, underfunded urban system, and the limitations of being one person trying to make a difference in his students’ lives and “fascinating world” of