Search

How one rural teacher inspired empathy with pizza, stories and an open door.

White nationalism has come out of the basement and entered the mainstream. Would you recognize it if it came to your classroom?

Thanks to online spaces, bullying has never been easier. Here’s how you can intervene.

Justice: The Original world wide web

If you’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird, you might remember the scene in which Scout beats up Walter Cunningham in the schoolyard. It’s the first day of school and Scout’s teacher, Miss Caroline, is not from Maycomb. She doesn’t understand just how hard the Great Depression has hit the farmers of southern Alabama. So she innocently offers Walter a quarter to buy lunch in town. He refuses. As Scout explains he’s a Cunningham, and Cunninghams never take anything they can’t pay back. Every student at my school is eligible for free lunch this year, so they understand Walter’s situation. But what they don’t understand is “why other students get to go off campus for lunch and we don’t.”

It is Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. An African American woman boards a city bus downtown. She sits down in the first available seat. When white passengers begin boarding, the bus driver orders her to get up and surrender

We each have a part to play, a role uniquely ours each day. I’d raised my hand often enough and spoke about equity and LGBT rights during my years in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District to convince myself I was accomplishing the role I’d chosen when I decided to teach.