‘Culture’ Archives
The Beauty of Service Learning: What Are You Doing?
One of the new buzz terms, especially in the emerging world of charter schools, is the idea of Service Learning Projects. SLPs are generally projects undertaken by students where they identify a need in the community and address it through community [...]
Analyzing Ignorance: Confronting Students With the Meaning Behind Music and Writing
One thing about urban education is we are always struck by what the students don’t know. Some teachers take it immediately to heart and quickly dismiss the students themselves—write them off in the first few weeks as lost cases and spend their [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Parent Outreach? Not in an Educational Landscape of Opposites
Oprah’s Teacher of the Year, Ron Clark, has an article on CNN.com today about the drawbacks of parental involvement. He gives examples of teachers and even principals who are leaving education because they are so annoyed at having to deal with [...]
One From the Vault: Teaching Against Culture
As I'm ramping up to start blogging full time again, I came across this one in the Teach4Real vault. I don't know why I didn't run it in April, it probably had something to do with STAR testing and wanting to pluck out my eyes with all the number [...]
Latino Boys in the Red White and Blue
For the next month I am going to celebrate one year of blogging with some of my greatest hits. Here is one about Northern California gang colors that explains just how difficult it is to be a Latino kid in the good ole' red white and [...]
Tightening the High School Dress Code
LZ Granderson recently wrote an article on CNN about girls as young as 6-7 wearing push-up bras, and thong's in Wal-Mart's Junior department that say "Who Needs a Credit Card?" It is a great read that asks a great question, namely: These young girls [...]