When I posted about how political and media labels of “good” and “bad” schools are significantly misleading—more about race and class than the actual quality of the schools—…
Source: The Truth about “Good” Schools
Formal Schooling and the Death of Literacy
My privilege is easily identified in my being white and male, but it is the story of my life that better reveals my enormous privilege established by my mother when I was a child. I entered formal …
“Please—a little less love, and a little more common decency.”
I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, “Please—a little less love, and a little more common decency.”
Slapstick or Lonesome No More!, Kurt Vonnegut
I was a public high school English teacher for almost two decades in the rural upstate of South Carolina.
My first years were nearly overwhelming—as they are for most beginning teachers. And I would concede that much of that struggling could easily be categorized as classroom management challenges (although having five different preps, 15 different textbooks, and classes as large as 35 students certainly didn’t help).
Yet, then and now, as I approach the middle of my third decade teaching, I tend to reject the terms “discipline” and “classroom management” because they carry connotations I cannot endorse.
First, framing classroom management as something separate from pedagogy, I believe, is a mistake. In…
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I Don’t Belong Here: My Otherness, My Privilege
The Politics of Teaching Grammar
The pronoun/antecedent debate about “they” has continued at the NCTE Connected Community’s Teaching and Learning forum—mostly by advocates of prescriptive grammar.
That many English teachers continue to beat the drum for prescriptive rules is troubling—as I noted earlier when calling for descriptive grammar and conventional awareness. Troubling on one level since prescriptive grammar is solidly refuted by linguistics and the history of the English language [1]; troubling on another level since one staunch defense of the rules posted at the forum by an English teacher included a dangling modifier—highlighting that prescriptive grammarians often by necessity are themselves picking and choosing which “rules” to emphasize (an ironic type of descriptive grammar).
Another post called for ELA teachers to “hold the line with pronoun – antecedent agreement” because “[w]hile I think that grammar is a reflection of society, this is really about singular vs. plural. It is not a political platform.”
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Why Do the Privileged View Equity as “Hard Work”?
Let’s start with this: Privileged people in the U.S. embrace what amounts to a lie—that success is mostly the result of effort, notably that education is the key to success.
However, the evidence is overwhelming that being born wealthy trumps effort (including educational attainment) by people born into poverty and especially by black and brown people regardless of socioeconomic status.
White, wealth, and male privilege remains the most powerful combination in the U.S.
Let’s also note that formal education, instead of eradicating inequity, often works to reflect and even expand the equity gap for impoverished, black, and brown children [1]. And “other people’s children” experience much harsher disciplinary policies in those schools, such as zero tolerance, that reflect and perpetuate race and class inequity as well.
And it may be that the root of this disturbing gap between what the privileged claim and the reality of being born and living…
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High Cost of White Denial
At-Risk Students, Bad Teachers, Failing Schools: Our Blinding Accusatory Finger Pointing
Questions of science, science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart“The Scientist,” Coldplay
The absolute greatest gift of being a teacher by profession is accumulating throughout your career the young people gifted you by your classroom.
A few days ago, I was having lunch with a former student and current teacher, Ali Williams, who teaches English at a majority-minority, high-poverty high school in the school district that serves the county where I teach.
Among the ramblings of our nerdfest, we talked about language, about the challenges of trying to be a good teacher, and about the fields of psychology and sociology, a tension that has more and more fascinated me over a thirty-plus years career as a teacher.
For anyone who doesn’t know Ali personally or who has never spent time at her school or with her students (I have had several teacher candidates placed…
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We Can, and We Must
I remembered it had been one of Mother’s pet ideas—she was always voicing it—that in the long run one gets used to anything.
The Stranger, Albert Camus (Trans. Stuart Gilbert)
Pamela Cantor offers her medical perspective to the education reform debate that tends to focus on high-poverty schools disproportionately serving black and brown children:
The argument that says we can’t fix education until we fix poverty is a false one [1]. We can’t fix poverty or the other adverse events of children’s lives, but we can “fix” the impact of stress on the developing brain. In fact, we have to. We can and must teach schools and teachers how to do this now.
Lurking beneath the good intentions of this charge, however, is the false dichotomy of fatalism that is common among a wide range of education reformers.
For children living in poverty—a stressful and toxic life of unjust scarcity
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Projects for the New Paradigm 