Dear 15-year-old self,
The first thing to know is that high school, and everything that comes after it, is impossible to get right. When you’re a kid you don’t have to be anything except what you are, a kid. But when you’re an adult, or training to be one, all aspects of life seem to become concerned with trying to be a certain way: sufficiently cool, successful, independent, respectable, charitable, productive, original, normal, healthy, sexy, or whatever else you currently are not. This impossible goal is the great joke of human life that I will try to explain in this letter.
In high school, this mostly means one thing: don’t try to be cool. You will not be cool until your late twenties. It isn’t actually possible to be cool in high school—all high school students are hopelessly...
Lifestyle
Dear 21 Year Old Pastry Intern:
I understand that putting macaroons together by hand for 8 hours a day is not exactly what you had in mind when you decided that baking was fun and enrolled in culinary school.
I’m sure you had dreams of turning the pastry game on its head, really shaking things up. Maybe start your first bakery somewhere in Manhattan, and after a year of world record sales, you franchise it out. Then the real “Martha Stewart” money starts rolling in.
But, that’s not what happened, is it?
nstead, you are back living at home, working for minimum wage. Sometimes you get to make buttercream. Most of the time though, you stand in one place, putting little French cookies together. Fun, right?
So today, when you decided that calling me an asshole in front of the...
2,540
To My Future Stepmom,
My parents are divorced and I am totally pissed about it. I don't actually know this right now, and won't realize it until I am in my mid-20s, but trust me, I am freaking pissed.
So you over there. Yes, you -- the one who has fallen in love with my dad. I need you to know that in my mind, you are an uninvited guest.
I don't want you here. Even though I tell everyone that I am okay and that I don't care about the divorce, I just want my mom and dad back together! Unfortunately for you, you may or may not get the brunt of this anger. Because like I just said, I don't want you here.
Before you get upset, you need to know that this has absolutely nothing to do with you and everything to do with them. I know you are a nice person.
Because I know that I don'...
2,510
Dear Tun,
Umar Al-Khattab stood up and said “O Muslims, straighten me with your hands when I go wrong”, and at that instance a Muslim man stood up and said “O Amir al-Mu’minin (Leader of the Believers) if you are not straightened by our hands we will use our sword to straighten you!”. Hearing this Caliph Umar said “Alhamdulillah (Praise be to Allah) I have such followers.”- World Heritage Encyclopedia
My name is Addin Aiman. I was born in 1995 during the period when you were leading the country into prosperity. I am writing this letter to highlight one of the flaws of you have, Dr Mahathir, the same as what you did to Tunku Abdul Rahman while Tunku was still the Prime Minister. Eventhough you are an ex-prime minister, you have still gotten the hegemony in deciding the fate of the...
2,989
Dear Educators:
When Educational Leadership asked me to write an article for this issue, I almost said no.
I surprised myself. I'm a writer, a blogger, and an English teacher by trade, and I never say no to a request to write. I hadn't realized how painfully I felt that the trajectory of U.S. education had skewed in the past 10 years.
In the face of the failure of funding for public schools, damaging teacher evaluation policies, stultifying infatuation with high-stakes testing, and continued national myopia regarding the influence of economic inequity on our students, to write about how to help teachers "put on a happy face" felt ludicrously peripheral.
I believed, finally, there was only one way to do this with integrity, and that was to test my own experiences and ideas in fire. I...
2,520
To Chancellor Dennis Walcott, David Coleman, Merryl Tisch, and McGraw-Hill Publishers:
First, I’ll mention that, since the discussions of the Common Core Learning Standards came to the fore, I’ve had a plethora of chances to immerse myself in the new vision for a quasi-nationalized education paradigm. In NYC, as usual, education policy makers feel the need to set the standard for the nation, from Bloomberg’s mayoral control dictates to the plethora of interim, field-testing, and high-stakes standardized assessments from third grade onwards. On the surface, one might think I’m at the forefront of the work done around the Common Core.
Yet, my earlier concern about the chaotic approach to transforming education via the Common Core concerns me still.
We can obviously start with Dr....
2,440
Dear Ms. Dusbiber:
We don’t know each other, but I’ve been in your English teacher shoes. The other day, I read the Washington Post article that mentions how you no longer want to teach Shakespeare because of your “own personal disinterest in reading stories written in an early form of the English language that [you] cannot always easily navigate, but also because there is a WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better speaks to the needs of [your] very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students.” I have to call foul on your assertion for many reasons. Here’s why.
If you truly believe that your students can’t navigate their way through Shakespeare, then you aren’t giving them enough credit. Your students are young, enthusiastic, intelligent, and...
5,610
Dear 9th Graders,
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving break, Ms. Bech and I came into class exhausted. We had spent the night before staying up late to hear the non-indictment announcement in Ferguson. We knew Tuesday’s lesson was about the justice system and conversations about race in America, but we had to figure out how to incorporate this latest news. We wanted to provide you with the information and time to process. We wanted to make sure our facilitation helped you all have a voice in the conversation.
The conversation you ended up having Your discussion of the non-indictment by the grand jury in Ferguson energized us and made us proud to be your teachers. First, we reviewed the terms. We went over the role of grand juries and defined (and learned how to pronounce) “...
2,580
Dear Darren Wilson,
This letter is not about guilt and innocence or legal proceedings that have taken place in the past or may take place in the future. You and I may not have a great deal in common, but one thing we do have in common is that we have both been raised in a culture that has influenced our responses to people of color. We’ve been conditioned through media and by the people around us, possibly even our own families, to have automatic responses about people who just so happen to be of a different race. We can deny this all we want, but the truth is neither one of us will ever truly understand what it’s like living in a different skin and we should both be sensitive to that.
A lot of people are expressing opinions about you right now, and regardless of what my own...
2,384
Dear Mr. Wilcox, Mrs. Fretwell, and Editors:
I am writing to ask for your advice on how I might go about getting married. I’ve just learned that, as an unmarried woman, I’m at increased–one might say terrible–risk for sexual assault. Since I’m also the mother of a small child, I’d like to make sure I minimize the risks to myself, and to my child, as quickly as possible, and according to your op-ed of June 10, the best way for me to do that would be to get married. The subheadline even proclaims that “#yesallwomen would be safer with fewer boyfriends around their kids.” [Note: the original subheadline actually read “the data show that #yesallwomen would be safer hitched to their baby daddies.”]
Clearly you have the data on your side. Indeed, you’ve convinced me with your links that...
2,763