Teacher stories, interviews, and videos related to high school.
I was in high school at the height of the AIDS crisis. And as a 13- and 14-year-old, I would sneak away into the city to meet up with this group of people, mostly gay men and Black women, who…
My family is from a small village in Guanajuato, Mexico. My dad had been coming to the United States since he was 15 to provide for his family. My mom was hesitant to leave her family and friends, but she…
I remember being in a conversation with my mom in high school — I don't know if we were driving somewhere, or just talking in the kitchen. But I remember her telling me that I was ‘a real people person’…
When I was a teenager, I had summer jobs as a custodian. It paid pretty well. So when I got to college, even though I was working as an office assistant in the pharmacy department, I decided to look for more hours cleaning schools. I figured I could do that until I got my degree in communications.
It's hard to view my career in stories. Maybe it's not even my story. Maybe it’s the story of my dad. I grew up in South Chicago. My dad was a preschool teacher. And everywhere we went, it was like, ‘El maestro, el maestro!’ And so that made me a celebrity by extension: la hija del maestro.
We had a discussion in class one day where we talked about code switching — where we talked about the power of language and the language of power. We talked about how the purpose for communication is to be understood, and if you're doing that, you're doing just fine.
I just love that she had that moment of feeling like a kid, and not feeling like she's carrying anything... And hopefully she remembers that forever, 'cause I will.
When you remove your children from this arena, you are not only stopping them from hearing other points of view, but you are stopping others from hearing your child's point of view.
Students have so many things that they have to do, both academically and non-academically, and I think it gets very easy for adults, whether they work in classrooms or not, to not have empathy for what students are going through developmentally, emotionally, academically.
One of the differences between learning from an AI program and learning with a teacher in a dialectical manner is that you don't have that empathy, connection, dialogue. All of our kids have so much potential and deserve for someone to have high expectations of them and to help them improve and grow, whatever that means for them.