When One Day of Peace Just Isn’t Enough
The beginning of the school year is always filled with excitement, but this year our school initiated a project that is still taking on a life of its own.
My school, Scarsdale Middle School in Westchester, New York, embarked on a journey to bring peace and empathy to our school culture. The school celebrated International Day of Peace, which was established by a United Nations resolution in 1981.
Acknowledging the Bigotry Within
A couple of nights ago, I took my daughter to Chuck-E-Cheese, a tradition of ours when her other mother is out of town. We play skee-ball to win long rows of tickets that we later exchange for plastic toys and stickers. We play — it’s our way of lessening how much we miss the Mom who’s not with us.
This particular evening something besides the blinking lights of games caught my eye, though.
Viva Dolores Huerta! Viva Chicago!
I just returned from Chicago where SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance film, Viva la Causa, was shown to over 800 of our closest friends.
“Your Child Will Be Placed in Level ...”
During the fourth week of school, the form came home, stuffed into my daughter’s backpack:
Your student scored a XX on his/her DIBELS literacy test, administered this Fall/Summer. Based on this score, your child will be placed in Open Court Level XYZ [with] TEACHER A...
Gay Children’s Books
I teach classes on children’s literature at a university in California. I always say that, although I’ve been teaching now for 30 years, what I really want to be when I grow up is a children’s author. It’s a genre that we teachers love and spend a great deal of time specializing in because we want to thrill our students with a passion for reading so that they too will become lifelong readers. Students love this class for that very reason. That is, until I get to the topic of contemporary children’s books that have non-normative gender roles as a subject.
