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Should Students Get to Evaluate Teachers? I Think So.
The debate about evaluating teachers is heating up. It isn’t heating up in any kind of real discussion by those who want to become president—they’d rather focus on whether or not to build an oil pipeline through one of our largest water [...]
All Those Damn Kids Have Cell Phones Though, Don’t They?
My uncle is a Republican. He says he is a Democrat, but then begins defending rich people like they are going to be thrown out of their houses and begin starving any minute now. This is common Republican reasoning—defending people who own most of [...]
An Interview with Editor-In-Chief of Red Ochre Lit, Mimi Ferebee, on Matt’s New Novel “The Darkness Inside Me is Sparkling”
***Interview with The Darkness Inside Me is Sparkling author Mateo Amaral***from the December Issue of Red Ochre Lit: A JournalMimi Ferebee: Mateo I am thrilled to have you as our interviewee this month. It’s been a pleasure getting to [...]
Making Education Look Good
When you ask a classroom full of high school students who wants to be a teacher, they start laughing so hard it’s almost impossible to bring the class back to order. “A teacher?” They cry. “Why would anyone want to be a teacher?”And [...]
Redefining HIGH School
To say marijuana is a problem at my school is a gross understatement. There is a tree next to the gas station across the street from campus where students smoke weed almost every morning at 7:30 AM. I drive by and see groups of wannabes huddled in [...]
REALITY: Punching a Teacher not an Expellable Offense
I’ve been writing this blog for over a year and a half now. I originally started writing to bring light to the REAL face of education in this country, specifically the broken, pale, drawn face of our low-income public schools. Today’s entry, [...]
America’s Real Immigrant Problem
I was recently talking to a teacher from another district who has more undocumented students than my district. His high school has a larger Latino immigrant population, and therefore his students face obstacles in their everyday lives most people [...]
Teaching SLAM Poetry Using Occupy Anger
I am in the middle of a Slam Poetry Unit, and I cannot think of a better way to teach it than by using the Occupy movement to teach social justice. Let’s be honest, Saul Williams, Mos Def, Russel Simmons, and the other founders of Slam Poetry and [...]
Khan Academy: What’s the Big Deal?
On Friday, Jeb Bush held a National Summit on Education Reform here in the Bay Area at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. Fittingly, not a single teacher was in attendance—although quite a few were outside picketing the event with members of the [...]
Crowd-Surfing on Field Trips
Part of any good college-going program at the high school level is the field trips. Time and again, the kids that actually make it to college point out the field trips as being an important motivator by allowing them to see first-hand what college [...]