Teachers - General & Miscellaneous - Biography, Criminal Psychology, Adolescent Psychology & Psychiatry, Psychology of Education, Criminal Rehabilitation, Juvenile Corrections, Teenagers - General & Miscellaneous

Crossing the Water

Name: Crossing the Water
Author: Daniel Robb
ISBN: 9780743202381

by Daniel Robb

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Overview

Off the coast of Cape Cod lies a small windswept island called Penikese. Alone on the island is a school for juvenile delinquents, the Penikese Island School, where Daniel Robb lived and worked as a teacher, not far from the mainland town where he grew up. By turns harsh, desolate, and starkly beautiful, the island offers its temporary residents respite from lives filled with abuse, violence, and chaos. But as Robb discovers, peace, solitude, and a structured lifestyle can go only so far toward healing the anger and hurt he finds not only in his students but within himself -- feelings left over from the broken home of his childhood. Lyrical and heartfelt, Crossing the Water is the memoir of his first eighteen months on Penikese, and a poignant meditation on the many ways that young men can become lost.

Ranging in age from fourteen to seventeen and numbering up to eight at a time, Robb's students at Penikese have been convicted of crimes including arson, assault, and armed robbery. They are tough, troubled kids who are sentenced to the school by courts in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. During their time at Penikese, they live in a house together with the staff of four and share the responsibilities of living on the island -- chopping wood, cooking meals, maintaining and repairing the buildings, caring for the farm animals, and doing other chores. For many of the students, it's the first time they've experienced such a combination of discipline and freedom, or the kind of trust extended to them by the staff. And despite their resistance and sometime wildness, Robb soon finds that they have the capacity not only to confound but to surprise him, both with their insight and their vulnerability. In Crossing the Water, he renders the boys' voices and his life with them -- the confrontations, the rare epiphanies, the flashes of humor -- with great vividness.

Passionate, poetic, and deeply felt, Crossing the Water is a powerful and moving book, and the debut of a tremendously gifted young writer.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

For a year and a half, on a windy, remote island off the coast of Massachusetts, Daniel Robb taught and lived with violent teens. His participation in the Penikese Island School immersion program changed his life and his ideas about the ways delinquent children should be treated. This memoir, though almost poetic, tackles hard questions about how adolescents become troubled and how they can be cured.

Library Journal

In this inspiring memoir, Robb, a carpenter, writer, teacher, and a proprietor of a literary services business, recaptures 18 months of working with young offenders on the Penikese Island School off the coast of Cape Cod. Providing valuable insight into the lives of troubled boys while exploring an innovative form of convalescence, Robb writes with grace, honesty, and integrity about the challenge of growing safely into manhood. The main focus is on the inner transformation on what it takes for a delinquent young boy to feel like a valued and loved member of society. Candidly narrated with a great deal of compassion and thoughtfulness, this profoundly heartrending account is enjoyable to read and hard to put down. Recommended for social workers and those working with delinquent children. Samuel T. Huang, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Insights into the lives of troubled and often violent youths, by a young man whose own past has certain parallels with theirs. Robb, a teacher, editor, and sometime carpenter, takes a position at the Penikese Island School, a residential center for delinquent boys near Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where seven or eight boys at a time spend six months on a tiny (75-acre), isolated island under close supervision. While instructing them in grammar and introducing them to poetry, the author also teaches them about respect, responsibility, and the consequences of their actions. When not in the classroom, he works with them: repairing lobster pots and boats, chopping wood, building stone walls, and preparing gardens. Along the way, he slips in lessons about the workings of a pump, the migration of birds, and the concept of nonviolence. A close observer of his young charges' behavior (which is sometimes frightening) and their language (which is studded with obscenities), Robb looks for answers to the question of how these youths have become the violent, angry outsiders that they are. He comes to see them as outcasts, like the fearful Grendel in the Beowulf saga, having no elders to show them their place in the tribe and give them a sense of belonging. The introspective Robb also writes about his own abandonment by his father and ponders the question of whether he, so deprived, can ever be the elder a boy needs. Never entirely comfortable at the school, he was fearful not only of what the boys may do, but of what he may do in reaction. His leaving, when it came, was without a sense of closure and clearly with mixed feelings about his success. Graphic images of adolescent life, softened by avivid picture of the changing seasons on remote Penikese Island.