This morning I had coffee with a former student. These past weeks have been full of such encounters, some of which I described in my most recent blog. I won’t identify her or describe her work because the conversation was personal, and I didn’t get permission to share the details of our talk. I will say that she has accomplished things as a teacher that many would envy, but now she finds herself...

The hardest day of the school year for me was always the day  students left my classroom and headed off into the summer and the rest of their lives. I’m certain that this is a sentiment I share with every dedicated, committed teacher I’ve ever known. After spending all your working hours – and some of the sleeping ones too – planning, thinking and worrying about this community of...

When my granddaughter Dalia asked on her recent visit what I wanted to be when I was her age, my initial answer was that I had no clue, but I did confess to a secret desire to be a writer. (At age ten, she can’t imagine anything other than being a graphic designer.) Truth to tell, my writing aspiration probably didn’t surface until my teenage years when I had fallen hard for Dostoevsky, D.H...

Some of you who are my Facebook friends will have seen this memory from eight years ago which I reposted earlier this week. Just wanted the friends from so many different stages of my life to know that I’m a few weeks away from “retiring” from my current job with the Urban Teacher Education Program at the University of Chicago after 18 years. I’m really not retiring at all...

Around this time last year, I had serious doubts about whether I would ever be able to visit another school or classroom again, either because the virus would take me down or because my presence would create an unsafe situation for me, for kids and for staff. The arrival of the vaccines has brightened that dire picture considerably so today another barrier fell. I made my first visit to a school...