Articles

Every marking period I contact the parents of my most remarkable students to tell them how great their kids are. I do this for a few reasons. Too often, my attention is consumed with kids who need refocusing, redirecting and all the other IEP-mandated practices teachers do anyway. But mostly I contact the remarkable students because I’ve noticed that the kids who do good work often go unacknowledged.

Today’s conventional wisdom is that English language learners (ELLs) need to master English as quickly as possible. Everything else is secondary. If these students remain fluent in their primary languages, good for them. If not, no big deal.

The first time I met Donnie (not his real name), he was wearing a green dress with gold trim, had shoulder-length hair, and wore glasses frames with no lenses. His hair was matted and he was covered in dirt. His eyes were bloodshot and filled with tears. He would not speak to me for the first 20 minutes. And then, in a flood of emotion, he began to tell me his plight.

New evidence of the bullying crisis in our schools appears daily in news reports and blogs. For some students, verbal harassment, cyber-ostracism and physical abuse are as routine as turning in homework. That’s particularly true for students who are—or simply perceived to be—gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (LGBT).

Michael needed help. He was in the dress-up center trying, with little luck, to shimmy a shiny turquoise mermaid dress over his head. Clearly he had no clue what he was doing. But the look on his face told me he really wanted to wear the frock. I walked over and helped.

As a fourth-grade teacher, sometimes I feel like the social director on a cruise ship. On the playground, I try to match up students with peers. “Why don’t you go and see what Alanna is doing?” Or sometimes, “It looks like Daniel and Hunter are having fun playing tag—let’s practice how you could go and ask them if you can join in.” Then in the classroom, I pair students up to accomplish tasks. “Melanie and Jorge, you’ll be working together to read for science today.”

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me." I was sitting outside on the playground bench wiping the tears of a child when this proverb came to mind. It isn’t true, of course. Nancy was a second-grader going through an evaluation process to help us understand why she couldn't read. Kayla was one of her classmates. As they were climbing the ladder of the slide, Kayla yelled out, "Nancy is retarded!" Ouch. Words can break our hearts.

U.S. public schools are not branch offices of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That’s the message the Obama administration sent out in a letter to the nation’s school districts last week.

“All these kids … you must be brave,” said the man in hiking gear. After a sunny but cold day on the beach punctuated by a trudge through sandpaper wind, I was plodding downhill with the stragglers from my hiking group. The more energetic among them galloped to the end, past the curious hiker.

May 31 marks the anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Here's why this history must be told.