Yo Mista!

I'm back.  It's been nearly a year since I've last written on Yo Mista!  A lot has changed personally. Yet nothing has changed professionally. And I guess that's why I've been so uninspired to write.  Over the last year, my professional life took a backseat to my personal life. When the dust settled, I realized I didn't want to write  Yo Mista!  anymore. I still felt passionate about my work, but I was somehow uninspired. My day-to-day at school over the last year hasn't changed. I still teach over-age, at-risk students at an alternative high school. Everyday, crazy shit happens in my classroom. Everyday, a student either feels supremely connected to me and my content or feels without direction and completely out of touch with education. My students and I still keep each other on our toes. The only problem is, I'm getting jaded.  This is my fifth year of teaching at-risk youth and I'm getting tired of seeing students arrive to school hig...

Carlton is an Algebra student of mine who I have a hard time imagining as an "at-risk teenager." He's bright, incredibly sweet, and has a good heart. If he wasn't enrolled at an alternative high school like mine, I would've never believed he lived a tough life or made really bad decisions from time to time. Despite Carlton's past, he seems to have recommitted to school this year, although there are times when he will disappear off the face of the planet. His absence streaks last anywhere between two days to two weeks. When school resumed after winter break, I didn't see him for six consecutive school days. He wasn't traveling, nor was he in jail, he was just "buggin' out." Carlton takes my class very seriously when he's present, and as a result, usually avoids eye contact with me when he returns from his disappearing acts. "Carlton! Heyyyyyyy mannnnnnnn, how's it... how's it going, buddy?" I ask with a gigantic s...

Nikhil Goyal is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the education world. In the TED Talk below, Goyal calls for an education revolution. His beliefs and thoughts seem to echo with education reform activists Sir Ken Robinson, Diane Ravitch, Alfie Kohn, etc.  So what's different about this guy vs. the others? We've all heard this "call to change the system as we know it" before. Well, consider this: Nikhil Goyal is a 17-year-old high school senior. We need more students like Goyal if we really want to transform the system. Question/conundrum: how do we effectively develop other students' critical thinking skills to Goyal's level and beyond with our current and outdated education system? 

Children react and cope with crisis in different ways. Some act out, others harm others, others harm themselves, the list goes on. From the onset, I coped by dreaming: I yearned to be a superhero and often fantasized (and still do) about having an alter-ego and going off to save strangers. I wanted to save people I didn't even know, probably because it was so much harder to save the people I already knew, like my dad. It was much easier to swoop in and swoop out. When I was younger, my disguise was perfect: nerdy, straight-A 2nd grader with parted-hair and black-rimmed glasses. I remember when my dad would go on his violent streaks, my mom and I would spend a lot of time together locked in my bedroom. She watched TV and guarded the door, and I played pretend with my Superman action figure after I finished my homework. The interesting thing was, when I played with that Superman action figure, I wasn't a spectator witnessing Superman's heroics. I was the action figure; it ...

A friend of mine shared this video with me; she said it reminded her of what I do. Take a look, it's pretty inspiring. Created by Tragedy and Hope , the video is narrated by the late philosopher Alan Watts. I might just show this to my students first thing Monday morning. You know, instead of test-prepping.

"One of these days, Karl is probably going to stab me outside of school," I admitted to a co-worker as we left for the day. My co-worker smiled, but looked concerned, as if she couldn't tell if I was being my usual comical self. "What do you mean?" she asked. "I don't know, with the kind of shit I say to kids sometimes, I'm surprised it hasn't happened already. These guys need tough love, so we have to play teacher and parent. A kid like Karl, for example, is not hearing what he needs to hear at home. For him, that means unfortunately he has to learn principles of life and algebra in the same classroom." We continued talking as we walked towards the subway station. Karl and a handful of other students suddenly stepped into view across the intersection and began approaching us. My co-worker stopped mid-conversation and gave me a concealed look of panic, which made sense since I'd just confessed I wouldn't be surprised if Karl ...

In the world of teaching at-risk teenagers, the odds of students achieving what we in 21st century America define as "success" are slim-to-none. For many of my students, college is simply not a realistic or relevant next step, although that's what educators like me are conditioned to believe students should be striving for. We hold these unrealistic and unfair expectations and are then shocked when year after year, familiar faces disappear and become names on paper. And eventually those names become statistics. Something is very wrong with this. In my first year of teaching, I couldn't believe teaching at-risk students was like investment banking: a numbers game. Teachers worked their asses off, giving 110% everyday, but ultimately we knew the return rate of success was slim. In banking, we'd pitch merger ideas to a plethora of clients, hoping one would bite. Eventually someone would like an idea, and all of of our hard work would transform into a lucrative dea...