To the first boy I every truly cared about; you had been my best friend, the only person I had in the entire world. I had grown to trust you in a short period of time because I thought you cared. When we went to elementary school I realized how little you actually thought of me. You took my trust for you and used it against me. The pain, the abuse, I took every single blow because deep down, I thought that you cared. I thought that if I waited, you would soon realize how much you cared for me back. You invited others to play in your little game; "Who could make the loser cry first." I never really saw the fun in that game. A hit to the arm, a kick in the shin; it was all just a game to you, and then when the final bell rang, you would be my friend again. I treasured the times when you...
Education
Dear Teacher,
Thank you for helping me learn. I love to go to school. When I go to school, I notice that you give me a smile. You say, “Hello,” in a gentle voice. That makes me feel happy.
I need help focusing in class. My brain sometimes flops. Sometimes I feel tired and I don’t know why. Sometimes I get distracted when people move around. Lights and noises sometimes distract me. I like it when you turn off the lights. You should use a gentle voice.
I work a lot. I feel like I am working all the time. Hard work makes me feel tired. I need a break to walk around.
You should always tell the truth. One time I had a teacher who liked to say, “Good job.” I tested her. I gave her wrong answers. She kept saying, “Good job.” She was not telling the truth. When I make a mistake now, you...
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Dear Missionaries of the World and Laborers for the Gospel,
Recently, those of us serving in FOCUS’ national office took a day-long retreat, where the priest’s reflections addressed an issue that seems to plague every laborer in apostolic work. It resonated so deeply within my own experience that I felt compelled to share it with you here.
No ministry is immune—whether in the Congo or in the college dorm, in youth ministry or the priesthood. I cannot tell you how much I wish I had guarded against it over the years—and done so with much more vigilance. I paid a high price, and I don’t think I’m alone.
And so, it is in all gentleness and sincerity that I write to you, my brothers and sisters in the field. In our labors for the gospel, this is the easiest way to lose our souls...
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Dear Michael
Thank you for your lecture here at the RSA a couple of weeks ago. It was eloquent and robust and sparked some fascinating debates face to face and on-line. We didn’t have much time for discussion on your visit but you kindly offered to try to respond to some questions posed through my blog. I am taking up this offer today, hoping to catch you before the summer break. I know from the conversations on my blog site that your response will be of great interest to many people.
Your speeches give a very strong sense of the direction in which you think teaching and learning should travel. Below I have identified seven different aspects of this shift of focus. I appreciate your commitment to parental choice and school diversity, but, as you recognised when we last spoke, if the...
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Dear Freshman:
Welcome to college!! Here’s your first lesson: College is not a stepping-stone to life, but an exciting part of life. College is your first professional position! Your instructors are your new bosses, as well as your teachers, your collaborators, and your mentors. Let me explain the implications of your new position as a college student, and this new way of thinking about college:
Your official job title is “College Student.” Although this sounds a lot like “High-School Student,” it is very different. For example: In high school your teachers shared some responsibility for making sure your assignments were completed and for saying in class everything that would be on tests. As a “college student,” you now have full responsibility for completing your assignments,...
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Dear America,
I’m sorry. You entrusted me with your children, and I have failed them. Please know that I had the best of intentions. I didn’t want to leave a child behind. I wanted to help them win this race to the top. You asked me to test them, and I tested them. I gave them choices: A, B, C, D, and sometimes even E. I didn’t just test them though; I spent hours showing them how to test, and I prepared them for that by quizzing them. My quizzes and tests were rigorous, too, just like you asked.
I have to be honest with you, though: my heart wasn’t in it at first. I had this ridiculous idea that art and music and drama and activity breaks would help my students grow. Maybe it was all those years of allowing my students to be creative. To think, I once had my English class produce a...
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Dear Professor Høj,
I was struck by a recent paper published in Environmental Research Letters with John Cook, a University of Queensland employee, as the lead author. The paper purports to estimate the degree of agreement in the literature on climate change. Consensus is not an argument, of course, but my attention was drawn to the fact that the headline conclusion had no confidence interval, that the main validity test was informal, and that the sample contained a very large number of irrelevant papers while simultaneously omitting many relevant papers.
My interest piqued, I wrote to Mr Cook asking for the underlying data and received 13% of the data by return email. I immediately requested the remainder, but to no avail.
I found that the consensus rate in the data differs from...
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Dear Educators:
When Educational Leadership asked me to write an article for this issue, I almost said no.
I surprised myself. I'm a writer, a blogger, and an English teacher by trade, and I never say no to a request to write. I hadn't realized how painfully I felt that the trajectory of U.S. education had skewed in the past 10 years.
In the face of the failure of funding for public schools, damaging teacher evaluation policies, stultifying infatuation with high-stakes testing, and continued national myopia regarding the influence of economic inequity on our students, to write about how to help teachers "put on a happy face" felt ludicrously peripheral.
I believed, finally, there was only one way to do this with integrity, and that was to test my own experiences and ideas in fire. I...
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Dear newbie graduate students,
To all of you about to start on the exciting, confusing, rollercoaster-of-emotions path of graduate school, I’d like to share some advice and lessons I’ve learned (and am still learning!) during my own experience as a graduate student in biological sciences.
Own your project
Graduate school is going to be vastly different from your undergraduate experiences. As an undergrad, you most likely helped out on another person’s project, running a few PCRs here, taking population samples there. You were a helper of sorts, learning a little of this and that as you went along. It was a great opportunity to get your feet wet in research. If you worked in a lab after your undergraduate studies, you probably had more responsibilities but most likely were still an...
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Dear Colleagues:
It is difficult for me to express the depth of my feelings about the heroic actions of our country during World War II. Our veterans and our allies prevented the extermination of my people.
I often wonder what my life would have been like had I lived in another country or another time; being Jewish, I could have lived a life of horror and helplessness. I am safe and free because of the spirit that moved this country to act. That spirit is best expressed in the founding documents of our nation, an immovable commitment to liberty and human dignity, a willingness to shed our blood when those rights are threatened.
It is with this in mind that I write to address recent concerns regarding the new framework for the College Board’s AP® U.S. History course.
I want to...
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