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"I just don’t know what to do about Jordan," confessed Mary, whom I’d just met. I don’t know if she was confiding in me because I teach English or because that’s just what one does at a nail salon. “Last year, he spent hours filling his journals and talking about being a writer when he grew up. Now he hardly writes at all. He says he’s not any good at it.”

Body image ideals, like race and gender, are social constructs that have grown out of a combination of history, politics, class, and moral values. One need look back only a few generations, or across cultures, to see

This piece accompanies the Teaching Tolerance article "Opening Doors on the Border."

One recent November, a discussion about plants as a food source led Cowley's first-grade class to talk about hunger. The class decided to bake pies and cookies to deliver to a local church's Thanksgiving dinner for

This interview with teacher Lisa Weinbaum accompanies her Teaching Tolerance article "'At Risk' of Greatness."

It is Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. An African American woman boards a city bus downtown. She sits down in the first available seat. When white passengers begin boarding, the bus driver orders her to get up and surrender

On the arid flatlands near the small town of Delta, Utah, 140 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, the scorching summer winds whip dust through the dry brush, and winter cold freezes the ground under a blanket of snow. In this forbidding landscape lie remnants of an American tragedy -- an internment camp that housed over 8,000 Japanese Americans behind barbed wire and armed guards during World War II. Named for a barren nearby mountain, the camp became known as Topaz.

I distinctly remember watching the very first space shuttle blast off on April 12, 1981. I was 8 years old, and I watched it while eating breakfast before school. Awe-inspiring, everyone talked about it for days. I recall watching the astronauts board the shuttle that morning and wondering, “Where are the women astronauts?”

“But nobody here listens to me,” Saul lamented as he tried to explain why he was in my office yet again this week. “I don’t know why I even bother to come here.” His refrain is a familiar one in my large, suburban high school. I have a feeling it’s a familiar one in high schools across the country. Our kids are crying out to be heard, and unfortunately, those cries often result in disciplinary referrals.