An education blog recently published an open letter to new TFA corps members that is causing quite a stir. Here’s how Katie Osgood begins her message:
Dear New TFA Recruits,
It is summertime, which for those of you newly accepted … Read more
Not long ago I heard from a Houston high school teacher that my novels The Knife and the Butterfly and What Can’t Wait had gone “viral” among students. It wasn’t that a teacher was requiring kids to read the books; … Read more
“That could be our town,” I heard people saying on Friday as the tragic events at Sandy Hook Elementary began to come to light. “That looks so much like my son’s school,” one mother said in the doctor’s waiting room where … Read more
The husband and I just finished reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and it has sparked lots of good conversation about our priorities for the food we put onto our–and our son’s–plate. That’s a conversation … Read more
I’m in the middle of living something new: writing hungry.
I’ve always seen the idea of the starving artist as an unnecessary cliché, but I’m as close as I will likely ever be to living it. (I certainly hope this … Read more
Who else is thinking about race in fiction AND has battled evil garden invaders?
The answer is…. Justine Larbalestier* (psst, that asterisk means “see memorial footnote below”)! On her blog this week, she has a great post about handling race… Read more
I haven’t read it yet, but I plan to get my hands on a copy of the June 25 Time magazine because the cover story is close to my heart: the plight of young illegal immigrants who contribute in countless … Read more
Today is Juneteenth, the commemoration of the actual emancipation of slaves in Texas and other parts of the South on June 18 and 19 in 1865, which came considerably later than the official end to slavery (January 1, 1863). On … Read more
You know about the segregation of black school children in the Jim Crow era, but do you know how it affected the Mexican American community?
For my third novel, I have done a lot of research about the experiences of … Read more
I don’t teach high school anymore, but I can’t break the habit of looking for companion texts for books (my own and other). A while back, this description of The Pregnancy Project came across my screen via the School Library Journal… Read more
