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Cultural Sensitivity Keeps Students Engaged

A young language arts student teacher directed her class to “close your eyes and imagine what your characters might look like.” I was observing her second-ever presentation to one of the classes where she would practice-teach for the next few weeks. “Details are very important in descriptions,” she continued, “but you can’t write about them if you can’t see them. Maybe you want to write about a beautiful young girl. Think about the details. She’d have big blue eyes and long blond hair, and her hands would be slender and delicate.” As she spoke, I watched her seventh-grade students. They represented the lower-middle-class school’s racial and ethnic mix pretty well: About half of them appeared to be Hispanic, almost a third could be considered African-American and the rest looked Caucasian. I didn’t see a blond hair or a blue eye among them. Most also had round, soft bodies.
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Why Can’t We Be (Digital) Friends?

While working on a project for class, a student of mine casually mentioned the names of some of my relatives. When I looked up in horror, he rattled off all of the towns in which I had ever lived. I was shaken. How did he get all this information about me? Simple. He had an app for that.
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Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes

I broke a toe recently. Woke from a deep sleep, ambled around my apartment for just a few moments and then thump! I hit my foot on a piece of furniture. As I hobbled around in the days that followed, lost in the effort of just getting about, I thought “this is what it must feel like to be old.” And then—“this is what it feels like to have a disability.”
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Tracking Derails Diversity

The first day of my second year of teaching, a third-grader walked into class, saw another student and punched him in the nose. He didn’t say anything or give any indication that he was going to do this. It just happened. After cleaning up the blood and redirecting the class, I asked the attacker why he wanted to punch someone else. “He’s Mexican,” he said. “He don’t belong in my class.”