Stories

“How’s school?” friends and family asked me, all year long. I gave my typical response, “Always interesting!” But the truth? School, this year, was beautiful, heartbreaking, fulfilling, exhausting, predictable, unpredictable, disheartening, inspiring, messy, and marvelous.

As we head into summer, I’m so excited to read that tall stack of books that’s been waiting for me. And I’m encouraging my fourth grade students to get to the library and build their own summer collection.

From the first day they stepped into their classrooms, educators have made personal sacrifices to help their students succeed. Whether they were purchasing school supplies with their own money or spending time outside of work writing up lesson plans, they did it with few complaints because for them, teaching was their calling.

Amid COVID school disruptions, research has shown that for most students across the U.S., recent learning gains have been lower-than-typical in math.

As an educator, I know how important it is to look at growth through the lens of test scores and data-driven academic goals. But I also know, in the wake of yet another school tragedy, that my students need me to focus on their growth in a different way.

“Do you know what you’ll be if you do this?” my husband raged at our then-16-year-old son, “You’ll be just another Black man without a high-school diploma. Why are you acting like a rich, white kid? You are not a rich, white kid!”

Crystal Jewell’s 11-year-old has salsa on the mind. “My daughter has been taking a photo each week of our salsa garden growing to log its progress,” she said of the new hobby her daughter picked up at Remake Learning Days Across America’s “Salsa Time!” event in northwestern Pennsylvania in April.

Last Friday evening, in Birmingham, Alabama, parents, guardians and friends sat under sparkling rows of string lights, waiting in joyous anticipation for the Magic City Acceptance Academy’s inaugural graduation ceremony.

Nineteen second, third, and fourth graders and at least two teachers are dead (as of this writing) after a gunman entered yet another school with another automatic weapon designed to do only one thing: kill.