She told me that every single day, me making that effort to go talk to her was what kept her from harming herself. I just think about that kid. What if I hadn't — what if I was so concerned with the content that I did not make the extra effort to make sure that she was okay?
I'm originally from Atlanta, Georgia. Inner city, poverty-stricken area. My sister and I are first generation in our family to go to college and to get our advanced degrees.
I think it was the first time that I realized how much impact teachers have. The experience that you give the learners in your classroom can change the paths that they walk for the rest of their lives.
I was an econ major. I wanted to work at the Boston Federal Reserve and go to the London School of Economics. But I graduated in 2009, and there were no jobs available, due to the housing crisis and Great…
I grew up in Oak Park in the 1980s. People were all about the melting pot. The idea was that everyone is the same and nobody looks different — we're all part of this collective homogenous blob. One of the…
Early on in my career, I was more afraid of talking to parents. But I had a principal who said, ‘If you're not calling them first with a positive, then when you call them with a negative, it's going to…
Teaching runs in my family. The bell was my grandma’s. She was the last teacher at a one room schoolhouse in Cold Spring, Wisconsin. Because she was the last teacher, they gave that bell to her. She wrote on that…
I'm not sure what I would do if I weren't teaching. Sometimes I think maybe architecture, because it's math and I like design. But I have a memory from second grade, when they talked about jobs – things you want…
My mom taught for 30 years. And after I went to grad school she said, ‘Why don't you get some experience in the city schools?’ I did it, and I haven't left. You get really attached to the work and…