Wednesday started out like any other; I left my house at 7 am to drive to my school campus, where I teach bilingual early childhood special education. Out of nowhere, I burst into tears. I thought to myself, I don’t know if I can do this anymore. Not just today. I don’t know if I can do this any day,…
Tag: social-emotional learning
What If We Radically Reimagined the New School Year?
Monday night I sat on my back patio staring up into a rare, starry Chicago night. I squinted and made out each point of The Big Dipper and then turned to see what I decided was Mars, twinkling in the distance. My partner and I sat in city silence, wrapped in a perfect, nearly unrecognizable temperature-and-breeze blanket. For an hour…
City Year Offers Schools A Research-Backed Guide to Plan for Next Year
Recovering from COVID-19 gives us a special chance to think creatively and collaboratively about how we catch students up academically while simultaneously supporting their social and emotional well-being. City Year near-peer mentors can play a key role in helping students recover.
Webster Elementary’s Khalid Oluewu
Chicago Public Schools graduate Khalid Oluewu, now principal of Webster Elementary in North Lawndale, likes to offer his own story as living proof of what is possible for his own students. Growing up in a low-income, Nigerian-American, single-parent home in Uptown, Oluewu learned responsibility very young. As a student at Arai Middle School (now Uplift High School), Oluewu got his…