Posts Tagged ‘gangs in school’
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 [...]
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 [...]
Dope Lessons for Urban Students: Figurative Language BATTLE
You are about to witness high schools students battling. But don't worry, it won't be them actually punching each other in the throat, like what you can find on YouTube simply by searching the name of your high school followed by the word "fights." [...]
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 [...]
Greatest Hits: Accepting the Fact That Nothing Will Change

After a year of blogging, I'm posting some of my most popular posts here at Teach 4 Real. With the middle class disappearing as we speak, I thought this REAL assessment of the state of education is particularly timely. At some point we all need to [...]
Teach4Real Greatest Hits: My Boy Arthur Who Can’t Pass Algebra

After a year of blogging, I am posting some of my favorite pieces. I just re-read this piece on a former student of mine, and it is just as heartbreaking to read as it was to write. Unfortunately, this situation is happening again this year, over [...]

