Articles

Want to engage students? Meet them on society’s newest public square.

Educators who can work around obstacles and recognize the promise of new technologies are making a difference.

I walked down the newly plowed row with my grandpa, feeling the warm, red clay on the soles of my bare feet and listened to his stories and words of advice. I held a tomato plant in my hands, the rich, black potting soil falling off of the small, vulnerable roots, as he knelt and dug a place for it in the garden. “Hey,” he’d often start, “here's something my daddy told me when I was little. ‘God gave you two ears and one mouth because He wants you to listen twice as much as you speak. If you do that, you'll learn something. If you don't, you won't.’”

Closing out our unit on the L.A. Riots, I asked my students to reflect on whether they thought a similar incident could happen in Oakland. Student opinion revealed an even split.Here’s what a few of the optimists had to say[...]

The Teaching Tolerance team had a confab earlier this week to plan ahead. Looking at a 2011 calendar, Sean Price, Teaching Tolerance’s managing editor, reminded me that the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War was fast approaching. Did we want to do something? My first response? Frankly, no. As a former U.S. history teacher, I suspected that the next four years will present an unending opportunity mainly for military history buffs to strut their stuff. We would, I suggested to Sean, better serve teachers by focusing on the themes that spoke to racial justice.

The time had come. It was Dec. 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on the Montgomery public bus. This act led to Parks’ arrest, ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott and ushered in the new civil rights movement.

My students are too young to remember the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Just four years before their birth, they refer to them as something from “back in the day.”But the themes of police brutality, poverty and racism are all too familiar. And most drew an immediate connection between the Rodney King verdict that sparked those riots and the 2009 fatal shooting of Oscar Grant. Grant was shot in the back by Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer Johannes Mehserle less than one mile from our school in Oakland.

This year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was clearly a disaster for the environment. But it has also been a disaster for people, and it did not affect everyone equally.

A new study proves what many already suspected: Your chances of getting suspended in middle school rise dramatically if you are black. The study, “Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis,” was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the home of Teaching Tolerance.

Computers and the Internet help rural schools bridge vast distances—both geographically and culturally. But the growing use of technology can create new problems as it solves old ones.