Category Archives: teaching

The Prison-to-Prison Pipeline

No Excuses Schools: Bad Theory Created by Amateurs (tultican.com) It’s impossible to research the history of minority schooling in America without repeatedly coming face-to-face with how the reality of that schooling was far worse than even the popular misconceptions of it. Despite the “separate but equal” litmus test established in Plessy v. Ferguson in the nineteenth century, what few schools that did exist for African-Americans in the south were often so neglected that they were barely worth having at all. The idea that Brown v.…

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Never Really Ready

When I set up the schedules for my classes before the start of each semester, I always try to paint my plans with the broadest brush strokes possible. I have a few set activities I always do at the start of every semester to help acclimate students to my classes (and college life in general), and setting due dates for major assignments ahead of time is always a necessity, but I’ve always tried to be as improvisational of a teacher as possible, adapting to the…

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(Lack of) the Calm Before

Texas Parent Rips Off Teacher’s Mask in School Altercation (Newsweek via msn.com) Today is three years to the day that I left Colorado for Wisconsin, and I didn’t need one of my social media apps to remind me of that fact this morning, since this day on the calendar is always going to be special to me for that reason. What I did need reminding of, though, was that it was on this day last year that I asked my friends on that social media…

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White Skies

Fire and Smoke Map (airnow.gov) I didn’t require my students in my online classes last year to turn their video cameras on, not only because I don’t have a webcam (I left my old one behind in Colorado) and didn’t want to force students to do something I wasn’t doing myself, but because I’m a firm believer in students’ rights to privacy, especially in their own homes. Some of my students may have just logged into Zoom and gone off to another room to play…

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Dried Out

The West’s historic drought in 3 maps (cnn.com) One of the local news stories from this past spring that didn’t register on my radar as strongly as it should have was a prolonged fire advisory here due to lack of rain. There was actually flooding going on around here when I first came to Wisconsin nearly three years ago — so much so that the route I should have taken here from Madison was cut off, and I was forced to take a detour far…

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