It made no sense to see him. He wore the leather coat he used to wear, an 8-ball on the back. Maybe this happens when you don’t acknowledge death.
As a person of Jewish heritage I can’t be silent about a genocide. Jews aren’t the only people who’ve been threatened with annihilation.
I’m trying to be a good teacher, listening carefully to my students so I can make the ten-thousand micro-adjustments in what I’m presenting to them so they will feel how much I really want them to learn.
I can choose to motivate students by manipulating their fear of grades or I can subvert their ideas about grades and inspire them to learn because a good human being becomes a better human being when they are learning for real.
Clueless about west coast Whiteness, for sure. For my anxious mother, this meant I needed her singular brand of watchful encouragement to grow into a whole person, a whole woman—and to be taught some street smarts for life in suburban Palo Alto with its unfamiliar patterns and pitfalls.
I scroll down and am stunned to see a large ad sponsored by The Jewish Agency for Israel featuring a former student who is going to share his “powerful story of strength, sacrifice, and service” fighting as “a lone soldier” for the IDF.
I was in my late teens, off to college up north. I’m hoping you’re rid of M for good, my mother said. But he wanted to move north with me, and begged me to move in with him, that we would go to school together. Me, desperate to be a solo act. The look on his face when I turned him down, unforgettable.
Is his name really Colt Gray? The name sounds like fiction. Glancingly, I looked at pictures and a white woman’s face comes into my mind with the age 53. A … Continue reading →
A student at Patrick Henry High, Oakum
asserted he didn’t give a shit about Marse Robert,
Stonewall Jackson, Beaux Beauregard, or any
of them fancy Southern boys
They say there is a me
who is beautiful but I
snub her in the chalk-dust
hallways, on the bronzed
fields.
The slaves in the dark hold of the ship cannot climb out or go back to where things went wrong. There’s no light, no voice of comfort, just chaos and darkness where they have to find their own peace without the kindness of others.
In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night … Continue reading →
Rightwing tries to ban history of “social strife” in the United States, so students teach them a lesson Hundreds of students from high schools across Colorado’s Jefferson County school district … Continue reading →