Category: Teachers

William Joiner Institute Writer’s Workshop

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30th Annual Writers’ Workshop Festival and Celebration – June 26th – June 30th 2017 Applications are still open for the 2017 William Joiner Institute’s 30th Annual Writers’ Workshop Festival. Study with award winning poets and writers and participate in a writer’s community like no other! Writers with diverse interests and backgrounds are encouraged to apply. Space is limited, apply today! This year’s Writers’ Workshop Festival will celebrate 30 years of community and creative responses to war and continue our tradition of focusing on the intersections of writing, war, social justice, and peace making. Workshop faculty include Vietnam and Iraq veterans Read More …

REPOST: When Public Goes Private, as Trump Wants: What Happens?

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The New York Times recently published a series of articles about the dangers of privatizing public services, the first of which was called “When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers.” Over the years, the Times has published other exposés of privatized services, like hospitals, health care, prisons, ambulances, and preschools for children with disabilities. In some cities and states, even libraries and water have been privatized. No public service is immune from takeover by corporations that say they can provide comparable or better quality at a lower cost. The New York Times said that since the 2008 financial crisis, Read More …

Sleeping While Screening

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Often when we write about our teaching, we discuss what works well in the classroom. Today, however, I want to reveal a consistent problem, a disappointment really, that I have encountered when using documentaries in my basic writing classes at Kingsborough Community College: Too often when I screen documentary films in class, my basic writers fall asleep or otherwise disengage from the viewing experience in some obvious manner. At first glance, this problem might seem pretty mundane. After all, my students lead tiring lives and probably do need a chance to rest. But I don’t want to let my students Read More …

“Do You Miss Teaching?”: Notes From The Other Side

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“Do you miss teaching?” That’s what people ask, almost invariably, when they hear that I’m retired. This has been going on since I quit 15 years ago at age 67. Usually I hesitate before responding. Why the hesitation? I enjoyed teaching, and was very good at it. That sounds immodest, but I assure the reader that it’s true. Former students still write that the courses I taught strongly influenced, in a positive way, the direction of their lives. Of course, this makes me feel good. Yet I retired voluntarily at an age when I was still learning, still getting excellent Read More …

B. Traven’s “Assembly Line”: Teaching Exploitation

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Yesterday I returned to teaching after four years of retirement.  I am teaching two sections of Writing Through Literature and using the excellent anthology Literature and Society (editors Pamela Annas and Robert C. Rosen, both of the Radical Teacher collective) which groups the literary genres of poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction under such themes as Money and Work, War and Peace, and Varieties of Protest, making it considerably easier to teach literature from a progressive left prospective. Not having taught this course in well over fifteen years, I am curious if or how the political understanding of my students may Read More …

Inclusion At What Cost?

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The current protest movement in Israel—similar to but also different than from the much more urgent, anguished, and even bloody revolutions now sweeping the Arab world—brings into focus for me a dilemma that affects my teaching. For the protesters the question is whether to “depoliticize” the mass movement in order to draw in as many people as possible by focusing on broadly shared civic demands: housing, healthcare, and education. This strategy assumes that once you get people active in one cause they may expand their activism to causes that previously seemed out of bounds, notably Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Read More …

Solidarity With Wisconsin: A How To Guide

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To my out-of-state and international friends who want to know what to do: I recommend you do your own phone banking or mass emailing event. With a little review online you can find out the names/numbers of Wisconsin state GOP senators and Assembly reps who are supporting this bill. You can also find out which ones are in danger of recall. Then, you can have your callers explain to the legislator’ staffers on phone or in email that you consider the Wisconsin state line a PICKET LINE. No more dollars into Wisconsin. No more purchasing of Wisconsin products. Publicity ALL Read More …

Update on the Wisconsin Labor Fight

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As I write to you from inside the Wisconsin State Capitol, the jubilant cacophony of tens of thousands of peaceful protesters both inside and surrounding the building is echoing off the walls.  People have arrived on this Saturday from all over the state of Wisconsin – firefighters from Eau Claire and Green Bay, teachers from every corner of the state, steelworkers, iron workers, municipal workers, police, teamsters, nurses, graduate students, and their friends and families.  Solidarity caravans of people have come from Illinois, Washington state, Iowa and elsewhere to support the people. All have descended upon the state capital of Read More …

Radically Teaching That “It Gets Better”

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As a critically queer librarian in a vibrantly gay urban setting, out and proud for as long as I can remember, I sometimes forget how important simple acts of recognition can be. Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project is a poignant reminder, and a wonderful opportunity for GLBTQ adults to send messages to young people struggling with issues of sexuality and identity. By recording simple videos and uploading them to YouTube, folks living happy gay adult lives can tell young gay people–whose suicide rates are shockingly higher than among their straight peers–that life really does get better. A pair of Read More …

Bite the Rich Man’s Hand That Feeds Us

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation plans to spend $3 billion in the next few years on K-12 education.  It had assets of over $30 billion at the end of last year, and presumably a lot more where that came from–Bill Gates’ bank account.  Warren Buffet, his fellow trustee, is the second richest man in the US.  Maybe their visible hands can feed our struggling schools just the diet they need. Or maybe not.  The July 10 cover story in Bloomberg Businessweek (“Bill Gates’ School Crusade”) notes that the Foundation spent “hundreds of millions of dollars” starting in 2000 “to Read More …