Another Band-Aid

I know that it may seem harsh to critique programs that try to do well by someone’s child/school/community, but there’s something bothering me today. It goes beyond the embedded patriarchy of “mentoring underprivileged children” and even past the ultimate conclusion of “we (mentors) got more from this than the young people” (by truly experiencing a [...]

Sept 30th YPAR

In the beginning of the class we talked about the movie Waiting for Superman, in which 5 families, 3 from NY and 2 from California, of diverse backgrounds (I think 1 daughter was Mexican, 2 African American families, 1 male and 2 female, and 1 Caucasian student) were tracked along their journey of competing for [...]

Planting Seeds

As I prepare to release my college success guide, Higher Learning, and continue developing online resources to support it (for students, college access and support counselors, teachers, parents, etc., available at learnhigher.com), I’ve been reflecting back a lot on the lessons that I’ve learned over the years, and the work that I’ve been a part [...]

Making Good Teachers

Saw this clip on CNN’s site. Worth watching. A few observations: Again, light shines on the charter movement. Which leads to… We can’t underestimate the importance of school leadership and school culture. A dynamic teacher in a traditionally underperforming school will have an extremely difficult time in their individual classroom space if the school is [...]

It would look like that afternoon.

I begin with Peter Murrell, a most striking quote from “Culture, Cognition, and the Community of Achievement”: The life force of pedagogy is not determined by policy or principles, but by practices. It matters not that the faculty of an under-performing urban school decides to be “multicultural” or “antiracist” as a matter of principle or [...]

Some Thoughts on a Perfect School

When B posed the question “what would a perfect school look like” in class, I was initially stumped. Actually, I, to some degree, still am. A flurry of thoughts and ideas rushed through my head all at once. The intersection where theory and practice meet is a busy one, and even when treading carefully, there [...]

Fieldnotes, Part 1

10/24/2009 http://www.megavideo.com/?v=EINA9FOK – Clip starts ~49:30 mark. Today marked the first meeting of the 11th grade major seminars, and thus our first collective attempt to link theory to practice. Prior to the first class meeting, we prepared a complete course syllabus and bulkpack for the fall semester, providing a survey of the required readings and [...]

My Observations of Ase Week 1 & 2

Ase attempts to provide an atmosphere of enthusiasm of learning for the children of West Philadelphia and other neighboring schools.  Ase’s intentions are evident in its goals for the upcoming year: build a family, eliminate the “you are not a project” mentality, expect a certain level of depth in terms of the contact between kids [...]

The Gap Between Theory and Practice

Today in class, we talked about our first days at Ase and what we carried away from the experience—the most marked common thread between all of us was the sense that things didn’t go exactly as we had planned in one way or another. Whether that meant that we confronted issues we didn’t expect to, [...]

Separate Schools, Separate Worlds

Working two jobs, already enrolled in five classes, and preparing to apply to grad school, I thought a sixth class was the last thing I needed this semester. However, the first chapter of The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools changed that. The class itself touches upon [...]