Teaching While White
Raised by intelligent, socially conscious parents who taught their children the fact that discrimination against black citizens in America was real and your job as a white citizen was to do better, was a good start. That was the reality of my upbringing in a farmhouse outside of Princeton, New Jersey in the ‘60s and ‘70s. My father, a professor of English at Rutgers actively supported black faculty denied tenure based on their “radical” ideas and my mother worked within the black community in Lawrenceville as an architect who designed affordable housing and advocated for the black community. Brought up to see race as a fundamental issue in this country and racism as a scourge in the world I had no choice but to push back.
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How to Teach Writing to Teenagers and Everyone Else
I like weird kids, angry kids, sad, bad, and perfect kids. I was searching for a learned quote from an “expert” in adolescent writing—how to teach it—and recognized I’m an expert. But I don’t have a degree in linguistics or psychology or reading. My master’s is in fiction writing. However, I have taught writing to writers for 30 years and most have been young adults, many of them struggling with college admission essays. In college I taught creative writing and freshman composition and in high school I taught AP Literature, AP Language and Composition, Creative Writing, Critical Thinking, and Honors at every grade level and non-honors at every grade level.
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How to Change or At Least Consider It
When is the last time you changed a habit, opinion, or a decision? Why is change so hard? Oddly, some people pride themselves on never changing. Recently I attended a middle-school reunion of many years and encountered four women dressed in white pants and black shirts who acted snobby. The mean girls of middle-school had morphed into the mean girls of middle-age. We relish change in the early part of our lives, growing taller, starting high school, learning to drive and other, less concrete stuff like the first time we disagreed with a parent or a teacher or a friend, not to be disagreeable but because you had your own ideas and opinions. Good writing is all about change, finding a way to describe and detail a before and after. “Once I didn’t care about race but now…”, “Once I thought they were exaggerating the effects of climate change, but…” “Once I thought old people were boring but now…”
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