Falker, watching her draw, whispers, “This is brilliant. Or the best at anything”-is contradicted when Trisha is the object of praise: Mr. Falker’s implicit sense of fairness-“Right from the start, it didn’t seem to matter to Mr. Falker (complete with a classroom version of a “He who is without sin among you” scene) is mawkish. Falker and Miss Plessy had tears in their eyes.” The extent to which Trisha limns her own misery and deifies Mr. Although the perspective is supposed to be Trisha’s, many sentences give away the adult viewpoint, e.g., “She didn’t notice that Mr. A thank-you to a teacher who made a difference is always welcome, but this one is unbearably sentimental. Falker silences the children who taunt Trisha, and begins, with a reading teacher, to help her after school. She can draw well, but is desperately frustrated by math and reading. Trisha begins kindergarten with high hopes, but as the years go by she becomes convinced she is dumb. An autobiographical tribute to Polacco’s fifth-grade teacher, the first adult to recognize her learning disability and to help her learn to read.
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