Search

No Child Left Behind is plunging many English language learners into the educational mainstream — and sometimes getting them in over their heads.

Culturally responsive curriculum is a critical element in reversing poor academic performance in students of color.

red·skin \ˈred-ˌskin\(noun) usually offensive : American IndianNote the “usually offensive” — a warning from one of the more neutral arbitrators of American English, Merriam-Webster. “Redskin” is a pejorative term, and should be used with caution, if at all.

Teaching Tolerance director Kelvin Datcher ponders the legacy of Brown v. Board.

Like many, if not most, I had a rough first year as a teacher. I was 21 years old and full of passion and desire but little else. I had survived student teaching on the Navajo Reservation for six months, but arrived on the other side of that experience with much to learn. I was teaching two-hour blocks of seventh-grade history and English. I was struggling on almost every level in almost every area.

Have you ever walked in the same hallway every day -- or driven from point A to point B -- without remembering how you got there, who you passed, or what you saw?

It’s not that hard to stick out in middle school. The unspoken code of social conduct is unyielding and inflexible. Anything outside of those narrow parameters is weird, and weird makes kids uncomfortable.

Consider the humble lunch as one of your most powerful teaching tools. From the first day of school, Ricky was one of my most difficult students. Defensive, angry, and sensitive, this 7-year-old was constantly putting up walls and “testing” the adults in charge to see if we would respond to his needs. With the lack of a guidance counselor or a full-time school psychologist in the school, I knew that I had to find a way to connect with him, or we were going to have a disastrous school year.

Each spring, at the start of baseball season, fourth-graders at my school connect with Shorty, a character from Ken Mochizuki’s book Baseball Saved Us. Shorty’s a Japanese-American child who plays baseball on a makeshift field in an internment camp during World War II. Mochizuki’s consummate read-aloud story encourages a fired-up discussion in the library. Students talk about the inequities and intolerances foisted on kids and adults alike. It’s the kind of lesson that I thoroughly enjoy teaching, year after year.