Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

I think that the greatest compliment a teacher can pay a colleague is to say that he would want his or her own child in that...

In the mid-1990s, the school district I work for informed all the high schools that they were no longer allowed to teach basic math. No student could study anything lower than Algebra 1. Math teachers who challenged the ruling, who asserted that many of their students still could not perform...

Whenever I read about public schools that are not doing right by their students, I think those children should be home-schooled. And when I talk to students, at the school where I teach and elsewhere -- like when my basketball team is on the road and I chat up the...

When I return to work on January 7, students and I will debate the viability of gun control. It is always my goal to apply the study of argument to issues of the highest stakes and the gunning down of first grade students and their teachers and other staff in...

Designing lessons around Thanksgiving, at least in inner-city Los Angeles where I teach, has for a while been out of fashion.

I used to try in my own ironic, subversive way -- having students read about the politics of hunger (Margaret Atwood's short story, Bread, for example) or having them...

Teaching irony is always easy at an inner-city public high school -- and it has never been easier.

Just last year, one of the very best teachers in my school was laid off because there isn't enough money in the system to pay for all of our teachers anymore. But...

I had a friend, years ago, who interned for a now famous "investigative" TV reporter. The reporter was putting together a story about people freezing to death in their New York City apartments because their landlords had failed to fix broken furnaces and he asked all the interns to find...

At least once a year, one of my students asks me if I'm a Republican.

I am not. In fact, I have never voted for a Republican in any election, though I have considered it at times -- and so I might be offended by that student's assumption -- namely,...

Has the great education reform machine has fallen asleep, ignoring perhaps the greatest impediment to learning (one that is all-too-often, unfortunately, right in front of us)?

Many of our most vulnerable students must endure volatile home lives and perilous streets to get to school and sit in overcrowded classrooms. We...

In the early 1980s, I was having breakfast with some of my new in-laws. One of them, Uncle Joe DaSilva, was a watch-maker. He had a little shop in a strip mall in Hempstead and he was contemplating his future. At one point he held up a $5 Casio watch...

It has been 20 years since I began teaching high school in South Los Angeles. Twenty years of the noise, the grit of unwashed old classrooms, the darkness of windowless half-lit buildings, 20 years of gun-shots, lock-downs, helicopters hovering above while we fight battles on behalf of ill-prepared students whose...

So this is the time of year when I always get asked to give students a D instead of an F.

Usually they make the request with a smile, like they are kidding, but I know that they are actually hoping.

I am referring to counselors, administrators, sometimes even...

I am amazed every spring at how tirelessly our administrators and our testing coordinator and our teachers (including me) convey to students to urgency with which we will be giving them the California Standards Tests.

These are high school students and so they know their scores don't affect them...

For years now, so-called education reformers have sought to measure what we have already known, that children of privilege, children with educated parents and/or strong family support and the enrichments that is the most powerful kind of education, tend to know more and have sharper academic skills that children of...

So-called accountability measures seek to compel incompetent or unmotivated teachers to be effective -- or to replace them if they can't or won't improve -- but anyone close to an actual classroom knows that the best teachers are the ones who compel themselves to serve their students and for whom...

When I read about the battle over so-called ethnic studies in Arizona and elsewhere, I am reminded of my own personal struggle against ignorance.

It began the day I was born and continues to this day.

I think that I am not alone in this struggle.

There is just so...

I work in a school district that has been shamed by sexual predators posing as teachers and the cumulative failures to prevent or stop them. Last week LAUSD teachers were required to participate in a training -- the second in two weeks, third of this school year --...

When I began teaching fulltime, back in the early 90s, our school dismissed students at noon every Friday afternoon in order to have meeting time. The stated purpose was collaboration -- teachers were to use these two hours each week to devise ways to integrate curriculum and innovate instruction so...

A former student of mine, now a police officer and one of my volunteer assistant basketball coaches, disappeared a few seasons ago for several months. When he resurfaced, he told me he had been assigned suddenly by narcotics to go undercover as a student in a local high school (he...

As I read about prison over-crowding and the inability of our states to pay the bill for incarcerating so many humans, I am reminded of the children who have passed through my classroom on their way to jail and the lessons I've learned from them.

Much has been made of...