a category unto itself

Posted By:
Rebecca

the interrupters

19
October

“You can judge, but that’s not what we do in science.” -Gary Slutkin, M.D., CeaseFire Executive Director, Professor of Epidemiology and International Health at University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health   A few weeks ago I saw the documentary The Interrupters (trailer below) at Nashville’s independent movie theater, The Belcourt.  The documentary [...]

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in Commentary, Education, Social | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

Wangari Maathai

26
September

I am forever grateful that Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan woman who founded the Green Belt Movement, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004; not only because she was so deserving but because it led me to become aware of her extraordinary life.  She died yesterday at 71, but her legacy does and will live on. [...]

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in Education | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

filosofia

31
August

Last week, Feministing posted this article about women studying and working in academic philosophy, and it struck a chord in me.   I had to forward the link to a few high school friends, see, because at our high school we were lucky enough to have access to a logic course and a philosophy course [...]

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in Education, Social | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

hardly education

17
January

Last semester, while discussing culture wars in American education, my professor told the story of her NYU professor friend who spent a few years teaching middle school social studies prior to pursuing his doctorate.  During a lesson on Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a student brought up that King had been unfaithful to his wife [...]

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in Commentary, Education, MLK, Social | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

another disenfranchise

10
March

Too often intellectualism has been treated as the mark of a schizophrenic–of someone whose thought processes are divorced from reality.  But also too often have intellectuals refrained from truly translating their theory into practice, supporting the anti-intellectual’s case by default. I often express the more poetic side of my nature in my free time, but [...]

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Posted By:
Rebecca

equity

1
November

Here’s the link to a recent story on NPR about a recently opened charter school in New York City called The Equity Project (TEP).  They’re allocating their public funding to pay their teachers $125,000/yr while the principal earns $90,000.   People may not get into teaching for the money, but that’s exactly the problem, so let’s [...]

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in Education | Comments (0)

Posted By:
Rebecca

teaching

18
August

In honor of the beginning of a new school year, here is an essay I wrote upon my resignation as a teacher, and a different resignation as someone whose ideal job is to teach.  Our city is experiencing a strikingly high murder rate this summer–disturbingly high, and guess what?  Blame for our society’s ills belongs [...]

Posted By Rebecca | Posted in Commentary, Education, Social | Comments (0)