In this autobiographical narrative, the author recounts her experiences teaching the novel "Always Running" by Luis Rodriguez with her English classes at a high school in a gang-heavy area. When she first started teaching, this teacher struggled to engage students. One particularly disruptive student requested to read "Always…

Many people have ideas about what it means to teach in inner-city schools, but they are often off the mark. This essay explores the challenges, beauties, and complexities of working in an alternative/transfer school in New York City, with a population that is at very high risk for dropping out. Through individual portraits of students, the author…

As part of the Small Schools movement in Chicago Public Schools, a high school dedicated to African-centered education was chartered. The virtues of Ma'at and the Nguzo Saba, otherwise known as the seven principles of Kwanza, were the foundational principles of the school and were to be integrated into all of the practices and policies of the…

Given the way that student, teacher, principal, and school testing and accountability measures are currently leaning, it is understandable why a child's moral development sometimes gets less attention than her aptitude in algebra. Yet even with nearly all major accountability incentives heaped upon the tests in math and English, there are still…

This article shows the process through which one teacher and a group of eleventh-graders worked to create spaces for democratic education in a hierarchically organized New York City public school that is heralded as a model of success under current reform initiatives. In response to student resistance to a required unit on Tim O'Brien's novel, The…

The article is a personal account of my engagement with some recent neuroscientific theory put forth by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (University of Southern California) about the integral relationship between emotion and cognition. Specifically, the research suggests the necessity of engaging students on an emotional level in order to thoroughly…

Why do I do that to myself? As a secondary English teacher, I want desperately for my students to pursue their own interests in their writing, but then I am stuck negotiating topics that push the envelope (read: make me uncomfortable): suicide attempts, cutting, abusive boyfriends, and drug use. When a student noted on his submission that it had…

This article describes a psychoanalytic consultation model to an independent grade 7-12 school that offers a practical and efficient approach to improve school climate. This model may stand alone or complement other approaches, and it can be implemented in both independent and public school settings. It focuses not only on "at risk" students,…

Adolescent willing and desiring is pervasive in mainstream American culture. The result is that America's youth is drowning in itself, in the immaturity, impulsiveness, and pastlessness of our dominant culture. Listening to the voices of youth caught in this crisis, and drawing from the observations of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Erikson, Baldwin,…