It’s hard to believe that I’ve been retired for more than ten years. The first six years didn’t feel like retirement because I almost immediately constructed a schedule that, intentionally, represented an act of denial. At least three days each week, I was in classrooms, most of which belonged to graduates of UTEP, the teacher education program I helped found. In addition, I fulfilled a long...
In the early years of The North Kenwood Oakland Charter School (NKO) we didn’t have any graduating class yet. We had started our upper grade enrollment with fifth grade, so it wasn’t going to be until Year 4 that we could end the year with a graduation ceremony. So, in the interim, my wonderful teaching partner Lou Bradley and I created a Rites of Passage ritual which students could participate...
Back to Books Reading is such a central part of my life. I can’t believe that I haven’t written about books for quite a while, so here goes. When...
As I was wrapping up the second of two postings about the contents of my long-ignored archive, I had a profound insight, the kind that pulls together many seemingly disconnected strands of your life story. Years ago, I was thinking about my strange journey from psychologist to teacher when I suddenly realized that I had been on a consistent path all along; I was just using my preparations to be a...
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a dive into my archives to revisit the work a colleague and I did in one of the early anti-poverty programs in Mississippi. At that point, my impression was that the archive consisted entirely of the manuscript of an unfinished book about that experience. That dive has been a lot deeper than I anticipated, and I’m finally coming up for air. It turns out the box...