Advice to not cast pearls before swine makes sense, but so does treating others like the people you want them to be, trusting they'll honour your faith.Ĭhanging times is evident throughout this story, which still comes across so modern, although it took place almost eighty years ago. It's really cool to read how he draws the best from each of them. Rather than tailoring his lessons to their supposed standard, Braithwaite makes it clear to the students that he expects them to raise theirs to meet his, which he assures them isn't too high because they are intelligent young men and women. But he accepts the challenge with energy and enthusiasm, because he's delighted to have a job at all. As far as the ruling powers are concerned, Braithwaite, being a coloured man, is second best for them just as they, the dreaded rebels, are for him. The senior class in question is a bunch of delinquents from the wrong side of the tracks who are disillusioned enough to keep flouting authority.

His position turns out to have a higher turnover than a Harry Potter DADA teacher, because his predecessors have a history of walking out on the spur of the moment. Every! Single! Time! Braithwaite grows to resent the people who so callously and unfeelingly deny him a right to earn a living.Īt last he's interviewed and accepted for a school teacher job at the daunting and dubious Greenslade Secondary School. With a Science and Electronics degree behind him, he applies for some engineering positions for which he's highly qualified, but potential employers keep deciding against him on sight because of his skin colour. Rick Braithwaite is an ex-RAF pilot who came out of the War with honours. But the actual book on which it's based is a real mid-twentieth century classic. That's probably because of the movie starring Sidney Poitier, which was released in 1967 and set around the same time as far as I can recall.

This is my choice for the Book by an Author of Colour category of the 2020 Back to the Classics Challenge. The action takes place in the mid forties, which astonished me because I imagined it was the sixties. The modern classic about a dedicated teacher in a tough London school who slowly and painfully breaks down the barriers of racial prejudice, this is the story of a man's integrity winning through against the odds.

To Sir, With Love by E.R. Braithwaite