Tag: education
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Memoir: a lunchtime intervention (1972-73)
By year two of our lunches, I’d become conversant with the riches of the district’s media collection accessed through her authority: endless filmstrips and 16mm history and science films.
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Memoir: Caught professionally off-guard (1987)
My first year of high school teaching was in the all-boys Fenwick, where I taught English and coached the Speech and Debate teams. I’d brought speakers from the community to my classes –war veterans, businessmen, and controversially, an atheist and a communist–to broaden the boys’ minds about the outside world. While the Fenwick fathers indulged…
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Memoir: Rest in peace, Brenda. You never gave yourself away (1978)
Those lyrics described the way you lived your life–with bold individuality, yet also compassion–revolutionary subversion alongside radical acceptance.
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Memoir: a path not taken (1979)
There are moments in which we decide with huge consequence. One such decision was when I declared that I would no longer be a “Pre-Law” major in my freshman year at college. Why had I thought “Pre-Law” a good choice? In my Junior year of high school, my mother and I decided that a legal…
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Reflection: on having left the Ed-Tech party too soon
This morning I was helping my neighbor, a recently immigrated Spanish-speaking man, prepare for an upcoming licensing exam. To find specific information about his job site, I suggested he call a colleague. He kept the phone on speaker and I heard her advice: “Just Google it,” she told him, explaining that Chat GPT had gotten…
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Memoir: Back to School (2023)
Ah, those two weeks in late July or early August, mesmerized by steady waves on the southeast shore of Lake Michigan, the soft cry of hovering gulls, clouds gently morphing and moving across blue skies by sweet summer winds. Precious downtime. Time for me and my family to just be. And then, “When do you…
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Memoir: Lessons learned about delivering lessons (1986-88)
Yesterday I conversed with a young teacher at the start of her first year teaching high school French, something I did many years ago, before I switched to just English. She asked, “What have you learned about how to teach adolescents? Any insights, or ‘lessons learned?’” I shook my head and told her how embarrassed…
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Memoir: the education of a toxic male, 1966-72
I met Kevin when my family moved into the south Oak Park home across the alley from his family, I was five, and he a year younger, and over the next six years or so we were constant playmates outside of school. A clever kid, Kevin was a natural athlete, who spurred my growth as…
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Pity that poor monster, the un-adapting older teacher
On a basic level, the hesitance to get wiki-with-it is natural. People fear what is foreign–it keeps species alive, etc. And unless he gets training in it, the un-adaptive older teacher will fear what he is ignorant of, what he has not himself positively experienced. And yet the tendency for older educators to feel threatened…
The Wikiness 