Each Passover, Jews around the world celebrate and reflect on the holiday’s meaning through a festive meal called a seder, which literally means order. Although the focus of the evening is meant to be the retelling of the Hebrew slaves exodus out of Egypt, there are a lot of additional discussions. One part of the […]
Search results
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, Instructional Strategies
Talking About Brussels (and Ankara, Lahore…) With 3rd Graders
Wednesday morning as our daily morning meeting came to an end, one of my students raised her hand. A quiet, thoughtful girl, she wanted to know if our class would be doing something in response to the terrorist attacks in Brussels. In the winter after the Paris attacks, we had put together a “peace party” […]
Posted inFeatured, Instructional Strategies, Social Justice
5 Ways Teachers Can Fight the Power
Reflections from the annual conference of New York Collective of Radical Educators Before I even sat down for my first workshop at the 2016 New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) conference, I knew I would be leaving reinvigorated. The keynote speaker of the seventh annual NYCoRE conference, themed “Fight the Power” was Dr. Bettina […]
Posted inCommon Core, Elementary School, Social Justice
Social Justice Test Prep?
I teach at a school in New York City where approximately 50% of students “opted out” of state exams last year. I’m proud to be a part of a school community where families are using their power to send a message to our state policymakers and lawmakers about the overuse of standardized testing. That said, […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Uncategorized
Harper Lee's Impact on My World
In early 1998, I sat in my Honors 9th Grade Literature Class with several of my friends. So far that year, we had already discussed our summer reading, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, read works by Edgar Allen Poe, and play-acted Romeo and Juliet. Now, we were going to start a book that […]
Posted inUncategorized
I Just Left #ECET2 and I am…
I just spent the last two and a half days in San Diego with hundreds of educators from across the country. I attended break out sessions on social justice and “managing up”, and listened to some pretty phenomenal Ted talk-style speeches, all as part of Elevating and Celebrating Effective Teaching and Teachers’ National Convening. Not […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Featured, Opinion, Parents
Winning Back Public Opinion, One Conversation at a Time
For teachers, Christmas and holiday break is probably getting old – if only because of the discussions had with others. Typically these things go negative pretty quickly, since the general public has delved into a disregard for educators through simplified generalizations as lazy (“must be nice to have the summers off”), union-thug (“must be nice to […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education, Social Justice, Uncategorized
Race and Your School: Why Educators Must Read Between the World and Me
Why Educators Must Read ‘Between the World and Me’ “No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of ‘personal responsibility’ in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of ‘intention’ and ‘personal responsibility’ is broad exoneration. Mistakes […]