When thinking about medicating children, I often recall a New York Times article by Alan Schwarz that begins: “When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall.”
All posts by clare hammoor
Normalizing assault
A middle school girl carelessly used the phrase ‘sexual assault’ in a class I was teaching last week. Startled by the presence of this phrase in the classroom outside of a specific context, I was struck by its placement in children’s vernacular by our current political circus. When ‘sexual assault’ becomes a commonplace phrase of adolescence (much in the way ‘gay’ was before its reclamation), young people become desensitized to its seriousness. Young girls are not discovering their own subjectivity, instead, its possibilities are being foreclosed around them.
Queer (critical) pedagogy
How is queer pedagogy different from critical pedagogy? What delineates a queer pedagogue from a critical one? Are the categories mutually exclusive?
Being a good citizen
What does it mean to be a good citizen? To be a citizen at all? Who gets to designate this status and what are its benefits?
Agency 101
In Haitian parents’ understanding, the goal of schooling is to instruct as well as to provide an éducation, the French word referring to providing children not only with reading, writing, and counting abilities, but also with moral guidance, a sense of civic duty, and interpersonal skills (Doucet, 2011).
Americans often purport to hold a very different view of education than the one Doucet highlights in her explanation of Haitian parents’ understandings. We are often inundated with fears of Sharia Law being taught in our classrooms right after evolution, climate change and sex education. Let alone a critical American history. These issues are often silenced in large and small ways across our public curriculum. A lack of discussion does not disappear these critical issues. Instead, its silence indicates complicity in the status quo.