In my third year teaching, one of my courses was on-level US History II. The demographics of the school were similar when it came to the size of the black population, roughly 5 percent of the school. We’ve seen a doubling of the Latino population, and a huge increase in the Asian population in the …
Continue reading “Recounting Another One of My Failings: Race in the Classroom”
If you’re white, there’s a good chance you’ve either felt tweaked by particular phrases you’ve heard or perhaps just wish that some anti-racist crusaders would choose language that didn’t cause the white people that need to be reached to react defensively. I’ll state my thesis up front (which is how I teach my history students …
The class of 2005 seems to have been filled with students who I never had in class but had a great relationship with. Gavin Johnson appeared in several Unplugged and Variety Shows, and once did me the great honor of performing a Tom Waits song I had chosen for him. We’ve been Facebook friends for …
Continue reading “Tuesday Talk… with Gavin Johnson, HHS 2005”
Marshall Curry’s Academy Award-nominated Street Fight (2005) is a fascinating documentary about two subjects: Cory Booker’s underdog 2002 mayoral campaign and the corruption of the incumbent mayor Sharpe James. Its svelte 83 minutes speedy by as the viewer gets swept up in Booker’s charisma. If the viewer has little to no knowledge of Booker, it …
This is a reprint of an essay I published in my Rutgers University magazine called CONJECTURE in February 1993. The events of the last two weeks cast my mind back to the riots after the death of Rodney King, and letters my friend Greg Pardlo and I exchanged on the subject while he was in …
Somehow another week just zipped on by and the end of the tunnel has a lot of light. There are only seven days left of school, and yesterday I essentially finished the US I History curriculum. I’m hoping to put together some materials for next week that address some of what we’ve been living through …
There are some educational reformers who think multiple choice summative assessments should be done away with, but I’m not one of them. Those reformers think it should be solely used for formative assessment, and while there are some reasonable arguments there, I don’t think in the field of social studies it’s practical to give solely …
In the course of my time at Hillsborough High School there have been about a dozen or so vice principals and principals. They have had varying degrees of comfort making announcements over the public address system. Some like my all-time favorite administrator Joe Adochio avoided it like the plague. If you ever heard his voice …
There’s simply no way I can have a weekly editorial blog (that’s my Wednesday theme if you hadn’t noticed) and not comment on what’s been happening the last week. Although perhaps, I should resist that particular construction. I need to talk about what’s been happening the last year, the last decade, the last four centuries. …
Although Mr. Quigley and I have yet to meet, we’ve been friends via Facebook for two years now, bonding first over our mutual irritation about a fellow AP Government teacher’s perspective about the 2016 election. Liam, as his friends call him, has been a trusted sounding board and ally. I admire his openness, passion, and …
Fenster on Education