Monica and Caroline's guest on Writers' Voices this week is Huston Diehl, professor of English at the University of Iowa and author of "Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School, 1970," published by the University of Iowa Press.

When Huston Diehl began teaching a fourth-grade class in a "Negro" elementary school in rural Louisa County, Virginia, the school's white superintendent assured her that he didn't expect her to teach "those children" anything.

She soon discovered how these low expectations, widely shared by the white community, impeded her students' ability to learn."