Jan 12, 2006 08:48 PM
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(Updated Jan 12, 2006 08:49 PM)
When a woman refuses to sit next to him on a bus , Braithwaite gets saddened and angered by her prejudice. He had hoped for a more enlightened attitude now that he was in London specially now that the war was over.
When he starts teaching in an unruly East End School the reaction from there was no different. Very slowly but not without much difficulty some barriers are broken down. He does everything from subjecting his students to shame to wrestling with them ... enlightening them and at the end falling in love with them.
After finishing college he enlisted as a Royal air force pilot in England. As he states in 'To Sir With Love' he was ready to die for his country in the times of war.
However being demobilised at the end of the war, he is denied an appointment at
interviews after interviews because of his colour.Realisation of this fact strikes him a hard blow. As he says himself :
'' I had just been brought face to face with something I had either forgotten or completely ignored for more than six exciting years - My Black Skin ''
After almost eighteen months of desparation and unemployment , he decides to try his hands on teaching for that was a field which really needed men of intellect.
He is posted to one of the worst schools of East End of London. To his dismay he finds out that 'his charges were an unruly disruptive group of fifteen year olds who stand cockily on the threshold of adulthood' .
He had somewhat a haughty attitude towards his pupils and it was made pretty clear right in the begining of this autobiography where he mentions 'how superior he was , both intellectually and physically , to the disappointing English'.
'' They reminded me somehow of peasants in a book by Steinbeck : they were of the city but they dressed like peasants, they looked like peasants and they talked like peasants.''.
Braithwaite displays a great aptitude as a teacher ... but there were lessons he himself had to learn as well ... like those in humility and patience. This is illustrated when the mother of one of the boys ...the only mixed race boy in the class , dies .... the pupils make it clear that although they are prepared to raise a collection for a wreath but no one was ready to deliver it because knocking at the boy's door might be seen as ''fraternising with the coloured''.
After learning of this angle he comments ...
'' It was like a disease , and these children whom I loved without caring about their skins or their backgrounds, they were tainted with the hateful virus which attatcked their vision distorting everything that was not white or English.''
To Sir With Love is a true story of a dedicated teacherwho turns hate into love, teenage rebeliousness into self respect, contempt into consideration for others - The story of a man's integrity winning through against all the odds.
