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Feast for 10, a children’s book by Cathryn Falwell, recently found its way into a lesson at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Cooperative Nursery School. The book, focusing on counting skills, follows a family through the

Summer is the most violent time of year in urban areas. Some cite hotter temperatures, while others point the finger at out-of-school teenagers. No one factor is to blame, but it makes sense to provide opportunities for young people while keeping them off the streets. Summer service programs can help.

One of the surest ways to motivate students to not only write, but to write with passion, purpose and power, is to make sure they have an authentic audience. This means they must write for somebody other than me, their teacher. Students must know that there is power in their words and that they can be heard.

Religious topics have long been a touchy subject in public schools and none of them touchier than atheism. For young people though, the taboo surrounding unbelief appears to be disappearing. Recent surveys have found that younger Americans are the least likely to be religious. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, 29 percent of 18-29 year olds are religiously unaffiliated, compared with 15 percent of the population as a whole. And a 2006 Pew Research poll found that 1 in 5 young people said they have no religious affiliation, nearly double the proportion of the late 1980s.

We often talk about the teachers who change our lives. We hold them dear in our hearts, conjuring their images and words of wisdom in our dark hours. They continue to guide us throughout our lives, whether they know it or not. What few talk about is the students who change teachers' lives. Yup. It happens that way, too.

I'm a middle school English teacher. If any of my former teachers are reading this, they will (a) be shocked I'm entrusted with our future generation, (b) question what happened to the character-education movement, or (c) ask how I made it past high school.When I was a student in middle school, life seemed to be an endless maze of getting to class on time, getting homework done on time or trying to fit in somewhere. There was the added problem of not wanting to wear my Coke bottle-thick glasses. It didn't help my self-image knowing every night I had to attach my braces to a medieval torture device known as headgear. To this day I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy those awkward middle school years of being laughed at, picked on, and socially lost.