Dr. Edward Ricardo Braithwaite's story, "To Sir, with love" is a story about a teacher who begins teaching at a reform school in London.

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Dr. Edward Ricardo Braithwaite's story, "To Sir, with love" is a story about a teacher who begins teaching at a reform school in London. The author bases the main plot of the story on his own life when he was a teacher in a rough section of London. The plot and characters are believable throughout the story, their actions show them as normal students who rebel for different reasons, much like students do in the United States today.  Braithwaite kept the story believable and interesting. The students at the reform school had been kicked out of their other schools due to behavior. Most of the students were from broken homes. They either only had one parent or none at all.

The narration here is rather simple and going from the point of view of the teacher, the text is rather easy to understand and feel. The text can be logically divided into a two parts. The key in the first part of the text is rather dry and unemotional.

From the very beginning of the extract we see the description of the Friday morning, the “pre-recess” period. The author gives the headmaster a nickname – Old man. To describe the principal’s program our narrator uses such metaphor as “pet scheme”.  From his next words we see the description of this “scheme” as a program in which “Each child would review the events of his school week in his own words, in his own way; he was free to comment, to criticise, to agree or disagree, with any person, subject or method”.  From his next words can be seen a little irony, because “No one and nothing was sacred, from the Headmaster down, and the child, moreover, was safe from any form of reprisal”.  Then the narrator uses the large block of direct speech of the Headmaster – Mr. Florian. This block describes the motives of creating such a program, it shows us that Mr. Florian cares about his pupils and also tries to improve their writing skills. Of course one of the advantages of this program is knowing the children’s opinion and attitude to some people, things and processes.

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Then we see a little interest of the narrator to this program, it is seen in his anxiety in discovering his pupils estimation. The author uses here an idiom “to cut a figure”. The process of reading the comments he compares to “a mixture of relief and disappointment”, the children just mentioned that they have a new "blackie" teacher. He see two variants: either they imagined he would be transient as his many predecessors or he just had made so little impression on them. He unreasonably blames himself for this, thinking that this is his own fault.

The mood begins ...

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