Publisher's Synopsis
"On his first day as a substitute teacher, Cinque Henderson was cursed and yelled at by a class of 11th graders. One kid openly threatened him. Cinque, not wanting trouble, called the hall monitor, who escorted the student to the office. But five minutes later, the office sent him back. He carried a note that simply read, "ok to return to class." That was it: no suspension, no detention, no phone call home, no picking up trash after school, no sidebar conversation with the office to figure out how they could intervene. In the generation since Henderson had gone to public school in a poor black town in the rural South, the world had undergone dramatic change. Sit Down and Shut Up: How Discipline Can Set Children Free, part memoir, part jeremiad, is a passionate and personal analysis of that change, the story of Henderson's single year as substitute teacher in some of America's toughest schools. Henderson found that the culprits for the f
