Like so many Americans, I watched the images of the abandoned streets of Wu Han as if they were as relevant to me as photos of astronauts on the surface of the moon. The stories of people quarantined in their homes, unable to travel, worried about their dwindling supplies of toilet paper, resigned to watch the death toll rise from the Coronavirus were unsettling, but still remote...
One of my favorite moments in the cycle of our lives in the Urban Teacher Education Program at the University of Chicago came during orientation week when we devoted an afternoon to introducing our students to a series of clips from a variety of teacher movies – domestic and foreign, documentary and fiction. The idea was to generate a conversation about how the media portrays teachers and how...
It’s been almost six years since I retired, a retirement in name only. My whole professional life has been lived in and around schools, as a teacher at many different grade levels, a school director and a teacher educator. And my school prowling continues. I’m on the boards of schools and educational organizations; I have volunteered for a mentoring program that helps Chicago students stay on a...
That lovely evocative title is not my creation. It belongs to a book by the eminent psychiatrist Robert Coles, celebrating his 90th birthday this year and, to my mind, insufficiently remembered and celebrated. Coles is one of the most prolific writers of his generation. I often joked that he seemed to write...
(Note: I know some of you are going to be intimidated by the length of this piece. I try to mix the lengths of my postings, but some stories need space to breathe. This one unfolds over twenty years, so it takes a while to tell. The good news is that it’s a story, not a scholarly study, and I’ve tried to tell it in the most engaging way I know how. After reading my earlier piece about...