Search

The problems of rural schools are often invisible to the public and policymakers. The solutions may be found in the communities themselves.

Rural educators face just as many challenges as urban colleagues when it comes to helping children of color. But there are tools to help them.

I decided to show a short You Tube video clip in class the other day. It’s a montage of scenes of men crying from various movies complete with cheesy background music, a song Don’t Cry Out Loud. I used it to open a discussion about how stereotypes put unnecessary limitations on people.

For more than 20 years, Teaching Tolerance, based in Montgomery, Ala., has worked to help educators embrace the diverse classroom. We strive toward bias-free schools. We advocate acceptance, respect, equality and safety for all students.

A few years ago, a picture from The Roanoke Times became the fodder for emails and blog posts. It spread across the Internet in a matter of days, eventually ending up on late-night network talk shows. It began as part of a simple and obscure local news story about road construction. In the article, a pregnant woman in her 30s wondered what effect the high decibel sounds of jackhammers and earth-moving equipment would have on her unborn child. What made this conjecture so worthy of scorn and mockery?

If you’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird, you might remember the scene in which Scout beats up Walter Cunningham in the schoolyard. It’s the first day of school and Scout’s teacher, Miss Caroline, is not from Maycomb. She doesn’t understand just how hard the Great Depression has hit the farmers of southern Alabama. So she innocently offers Walter a quarter to buy lunch in town. He refuses. As Scout explains he’s a Cunningham, and Cunninghams never take anything they can’t pay back. Every student at my school is eligible for free lunch this year, so they understand Walter’s situation. But what they don’t understand is “why other students get to go off campus for lunch and we don’t.”

When my daughter pulls hard on the heavy glass doors of the Martin Luther King Jr. Laboratory School and races upstairs into her fifth-grade classroom, she is living my dream.

A middle school history teacher reflects on how neutrality won’t work in the face of bigotry, xenophobia and fearmongering—and what that means for his classroom practice.

Many students are constantly tied to their phones. As educators, we can tap into that interest—and students’ curiosity and desire for entertainment—to show them gateways to a wider worldview.