We teach the wrong lessons about World War II. I don’t understand how this happens since in a lot of classrooms it is six weeks or more as a unit and in some classrooms is about half of the material. World War II is not significant because of the battles that were fought. It is
There has been a lot of confusion about this issue, so I am going to be using my personal experience to illustrate my point. The following is the list of reasons why school was difficult for me, my family and my friends. 1) When you don’t have enough to eat it is hard to learn.
This isn’t something I’ve talked a lot about except with a few friends back home and with my parents, but I want to talk about it now. When I am in a room of only white people I get extremely uncomfortable. I am white. The first time in my life that I experienced this was
I hear a lot of rhetoric about how education is my generation’s Civil Rights issue. It’s a nice thing to say and hear and it makes elite graduates feel good about their two year commitments. And the thing is, I won’t use the rhetoric because of what it says about affiliations, but I do agree
The first thing that shocked me about Stanford was the amount and variety of food. I’d go into the dining hall and struggle to make a reasonable dinner because I had never had so many choices before and then listen to my classmates complain that the salad bar and copious amounts of fruit was not
I am very protective of my students. I feel like a Mama Grizzly Bear and I feel like that about all of them. I call them “my kids” and I don’t even want to have my own kids. I love teenagers, I really do. I find something to love, something that is beautiful about each
Teaching is hard. It is so much more difficult than anything I have ever done. I fail at it constantly. We ask our teachers to be brain surgeons. We give them a group of kids that is completely random, a set of standards that rarely make sense, ask them to teach kids important life skills
I am notorious for many things, one of them is keepin’ it real. I am a pretty big fan of keepin’ it real. Keepin’ it real means being really honest about the world as it exists. I strive for honest and kind, sometimes, because I am human, I fail. Most people who have been through
I am going to do what I always do in these conversations and state my credentials from the get-go. I am going to do this because I am white. And because I am white, and grew up extremely poor in an urban area where I attended some of the worst urban schools in the state
Because underneath my adorably dressed Stanford veneer is still the 14 year old who thought it was highly amusing to torture stupid teachers and who has seen every episode of South Park, I spent most of STEP getting myself into trouble and thinking it was fun to summarize every single class with a smart alleck