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...
The summer between high school graduation and my freshman year of college, back before teen-agers were casualties of unemployment like everyone else, I worked alongside my father in the Garment Center in Manhattan. He had approached his boss in the women’s coat factory that had employed him for many years as a sewing machine...