Welcome!

Welcome to my blog about teaching! About a year ago I joined Teach For America, a non-profit organization dedicated to eradicating educational inequity in the United States. As their website states, 13 million children in this country grow up in poverty. Only half of those will graduate from high school, and those who do graduate will, on average, read at an eighth-grade level. This staggering injustice is why I decided to go into teaching.

My own tiny piece of the struggle to provide all students with 'the opportunity to obtain an excellent education' has been unfolding in an Oakland elementary school since last August. I teach in one of the worst-performing schools in California. Its families are all low-income and its students are overwhelmingly English-language learners. I have the privilege of working daily with the bright, bubbly second-graders of Room 10. My class is bilingual, meaning my students received all Spanish-language instruction in kindergarten and grade 1, and this year is the transition year -- part English, part Spanish -- before they move into all-English instruction next year.

I hope my posts will help the public understand a little more about the achievement gap, the situation of immigrants, teaching, poverty ... or at least the little slice of these enormous issues that I see every day.

Hi!