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...
My parents never owned any of the places they lived in. From the time they came to this country they lived in tenements in New York City. When they married, a favored migration route of the day brought them from the Lower East Side to the newly developing residential neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Real Estate developers are masters of branding so the neighborhood they landed in was called East...
When I encounter certain astonishing events in our natural world, I ask myself “What would a Martian make of this?” At the top of my list is the way trees drop their leaves in the fall and suddenly stand bare against the sky. Equally magical is the spring releafing. That latter process has been complete for some weeks now but I can still remember my surprise driving down our street one day...