merica's on-going push toward self-improvement (p. 125).
Paradoxically, the best and worst of teaching skills are integrally related to the gifts and flaws embedded in any given teacher's personality. One of the bonuses of juxtaposing Sizer's, Welsh's, and Kidder's studies of the teaching profession is that each work illuminates most precisely at those junctures where it depicts teachers obviously struggling to overcome their anger, prejudice, sloth, and despair. Zajac aims to overcome her own prejudices toward the Puerto Rican culture by availing herself of the Kelly School's Easter trip to the "Isla del Encanto." Travelling with her husband and son over spring break, she is struck by the island's incredible beauty and the warmth of its islanders. One of her major motivations for this trip is her own detective's quest. She wishes to determine whether someone like Alejandro, one of her former Holyoke students, would have been treated fairly as a "returning Puerto Rican child" (Kidder, 1989, p. 254). This extension of herself, expressed in an abiding concern for her students' total welfare, serves as her trademark, allowing Kidder to epitomize Zajac as one of America's invaluable but undervalued resources. Outside of the closed-in perimeters of her own beloved Holyoke, Massachusetts, a city which she has been unsuccessful in ever leaving for more than a brief respite, Zajac extends her own multicultural perspective while visiting Puerto Rico, the birthplace of many of her fifth- grade Kelly School students. Zajac's concern for Alejandro represents one of Zajac's pivotal poses, a worried concern for the ailing, troubled student. Zajac, like many of the teachers depicted by Sizer, Welsh, and Kidder, cannot leave her students in the classroom but labors to understand how familial and societal influences have shaped them.
Similarly, Welsh's world view is broadened by struggling to overcome one of his socially conditioned...