Pat’s Polemics

A cautionary tale is part of new teacher orientation: third day of class a kid shows up after the teacher has carefully accounted for the (Continue Reading)

On the Rachel Maddow show the guest host, Melissa Harris-Perry, interviewed two young people who survived Hurricane Katrina and went back to the city and (Continue Reading)

Considering a post to flteach citing an article in NEA Today re the school to prison pipeline. I responded describing how Deasy stated that just (Continue Reading)

Reading Diane Ravitch’s blog every day gladdens my heart that so many people are onto the phony reform movement. When I went to my son’s (Continue Reading)

So important for our teachers to understand, but it’s buried on p. 29 of McWhorter’s The Missing Spanish Creoles: “In Creolophone communities, authors such as (Continue Reading)

“Teaching was a brave choice for Forten and other young black women and men. Before the Civil War, antitax southern state legislatures actively resisted the (Continue Reading)

Some years ago, I was invited to a TGIF with an administrator, and three other teachers, two of them women. They had a couple of (Continue Reading)

Picture a 30 something teacher, his school years behind him, confidently assessing his students. He has Black students and finds himself wondering why they frequently (Continue Reading)

How can linguistics help us understand the education process better? In the early 70s, William Labov tore down the edifice of cultural deprivation as an (Continue Reading)

On flteach there was a thread on discussing race and ethnicity in the classroom. It was started by a teacher who was concerned that a (Continue Reading)

I thought a while about writing this but I hope that by being so personal, I can get a discussion going among us about how (Continue Reading)

At my current school, one kid stands out. Everyone knows him. He is doing AP Latin (with me). He does everything, incl sports. He’s very (Continue Reading)