School Climate & Safety

The Absolute Best School Climate Blogging (This Week)

By Ross Brenneman — September 20, 2013 1 min read
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Compassion, homework, and a bullet tax—here’s what you might have missed this week in news and thoughts related to student engagement, school climate, and the world that affects them.

1. “A year later, adults in Steubenville still aren’t very interested in having a productive discussion about rape culture. They’d rather talk about how they’ve been repeatedly burned by the media.”

Katie J.M. Baker, of Jezebel, reporting on life in Steubenville, Ohio, a year after the prominent rape case

2. “It’s a Catch-22—reading builds compassion, but until you have the kind of compassion engendered by reading, you don’t want to read.”

Alexandra Petri, of the Washington Post, on the problems with men not reading, or claiming not to read, or being generally immature and sexist

3. “One teacher had already vomited multiple times this week and had nose bleeds. Another teacher’s doctor told her that she should not work at our school because the heat could trigger life threatening asthma attacks.”

—Chicago elementary school teacher Sarah Chambers, on surviving heat waves in Chicago

4. “America is more lethal to itself than it might otherwise be because of the mass availability of guns. People kill people, with guns. No really, guns kill people. That’s what they’re for, and they do it well.”

—Kinja commenter Midwestballadreview, on one approach to gun violence that might reduce mass shootings like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

5. “Year after year, I watched students get low grades in my class and fail standardized tests, blaming them instead of questioning my own methods.”

—Teacher and professor Mark Barnes, on how he saw homework leaving his students disengaged

6. “I hardly complete a year’s worth of material as it is; a year without any homework at all seemed like a disaster in the making.”

—English teacher Jessica Lahey, responding to Mark Barnes with her reservations about letting homework go

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A version of this news article first appeared in the Rules for Engagement blog.