Philosophical Perspectives: Another Great Day with a Class That is Just Making the Semester a Joy

It's always much more fun to teach when all the stores have bulk Halloween shenanigans readily available and easy to grab. I can provide a metaphor for my teaching really quickly, and after I handed back all the educational autobiographies this week, today's class was all about gaining new perspectives: summon Jane Addams, John Dewey, Dianne Ravitch, Jonthan Kozol, Pablo Freire, and the wonderful reporting of Nikolle Hannah Jones who was featured in 2015 in This American Life, beginning with "The Problem We All Live With."

Note: All of us have 60-minutes in our lives to listen to this radio show (which is what we did yesterday in class). The reporting is excellent, and the journalism amazing.

The Problem We All Live

I've written about the show before and as I told my students, every time I listen to it again, tap the books on my shelves, and maneuver in and out of school, the reality simply gets me angry. Fear is the undoing of the United States. We need to be aware of that.

Yesterday, we discussed a lot of reading, we shared educational outliers, we listened to the show, and then I entertained a fishbowl so students could share their thinking.

Of course, my releasing of 23 pairs of goggles into the classroom setting helped us to lighten the mood some, even when the conversation was heavy, challenging, and extremely frustrating.

We talked to bring forward alternative, perhaps agentive perspective on what we might do to make educational opportunities a whole lot better. They are abysmal...we know this.

Yet, I have a crew this semester of urban, suburban, and rural students. They are from private schools, religious affiliated schools, international schools and public schools Some are first-generation high school graduates and others are 4th-generation college students.

They all talked. They shared their voiced. They read and heard about the inequities in American schooling systems and they united on wanting to do something about it. They are armed with their own knowledge and I take pleasure knowing that their perspectives will be what guides the next generation.