Category: Education
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Making Reading Basics a Little Easier
A student’s age didn’t matter to Mary Jane and Lizzie when they taught freedmen in Mississippi. Kindergarten-age children through adults flocked to the new schoolhouses to learn to read. They were so motivated that some local whites began to fear that the blacks might become more educated than their own children! But it wasn’t easy.…
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Diary Entry: Wednesday, January 24, 1866
Last night we had quite a shower of rain, and this morning the weather is cool again and remained so all day. I had fifty scholars at school today, suffered with the headache considerably yesterday and last night… -Mary Jane Edwards, writing in Jackson, Mississippi…
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Capturing a bracing winter in haiku
The click of her leash. The squeak of the garage door. Brutal wind whips past.
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Searching, again
“Who are you?” an elderly woman demands as she peers up into my face. I have never met her. A middle-aged man shrugs apologetically, “I should know you, but I forget your name.” I’ve never met him, either. Barely making eye contact, a young person nods at me and shoves a folded paper my way,…
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Where has all the passion gone?
“Not everyone thinks the way you do,” a friend and coworker once told me. I suppose it was meant to rein in my higher-than-average expectations of myself and others. But as I think about how doomscrolling, social media, and AI are infiltrating, perhaps hijacking, the lives of young people today, I can’t help but think…
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What’s in my bouquet of beliefs?
I hope my students never fully know. My bouquet of beliefs may set on my teacher’s desk, for all to notice, in front of where I plan my lessons and confer with scholars, where it brightens my day and eases my stress with the beauty of its unique blossoms and verdure. But it is not…
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It’s the pronouns, again.
Our identities are being taken away, one pronoun at a time. I’m not talking about the gender-based pronouns. During the last few years in the classroom, I just stopped using gender-based personal pronouns for fear of getting them wrong. I resorted to first names when I could remember the new ones, or just “you” as…
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I confessed today
It was the trip to the retirement home that triggered it. Mom had been feeling a little punk lately, so I got her an 18-pack of variety Gatorade. Rather than carry the awkward box and a shopping bag upstairs and across the wing to her apartment, I decided to use one of the cute mini…
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Was it ever so simple?
It’s Graduation Season: I see my former students and colleagues as I make the rounds to a few select open houses- of those daring, outstanding students who braved sending an invitation when they know it’s not my thing. “Are you glad you’re not teaching anymore?” “Oh, yeah. Things are so different. Even in just a…
