In Mrs. Tully's Room

Vivian Gussin Paley (1929–2019), a longtime classroom teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, was a MacArthur Fellow and winner of the 1998 American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Part diary, part pedagogy, In Mrs. Tully's Room captures Paley's four months in the presence of an extraordinary teacher who grew up in the delightful, reassuring tangle of her grandfather's tales and became, after so many frustrating years teaching in public schools, determined to offer children something she at one point dubs "home-porch-schooling." Storytelling lies at the heart of all things Mrs. Tully does. Loneliness, otherness, rudeness, conflict can all, she believes, be cured with a story. Kindness and community can be modeled and reinforced. Sorrows can be blown off, on languaged winds...In Mrs. Tully's Room is a loving portrait of an idealized place. It is the suggestion made, again and again, that even the youngest children can be shaped by metaphor, that they can grow toward their highest potential--individually and collectively--when stories shape their days.