Journal of a Black Teacher

In 2023, you’re either on board or off track.  (Note: This is a snippet from chapter one of The Justification of Splitting Minneapolis and St. Paul Public Schools Districts in Half  - By Don Allen (2023).  1. All the bad stuff about education is perpetual; it had NOTHING to do with the death of George Floyd or the COVID-19 pandemic.  2. Parents realized in real-time during distance learning that if an educational construct (5-12 Twin Cities Public Schools) could not maintain a policy to save the children during this time of reactionary buffoonery, where is learning really happening?  During the pandemic (2020-21), many of my students in secondary had their babies in my (our) classrooms. In the photo below, the child is six months old; the father is in grade 10, and the mother is in grade 9. Let me make it clear: adults failed these children, and it’s not the fault of the young parents when the local education system continues to fail them. The parents, forced to live as adults (yes, a

January 11, 2023 My institution, Hamline University, a small liberal arts college located in St Paul, Minnesota, has been in the news lately. The New York Times ran an article leading with the headline, “Prophet Image Shown in Class, Fraying the Campus.” The article reports on an incident that occurred on our campus in October, where an adjunct instructor, teaching a class in art history, showed an image of the prophet Muhammad to a class attended by a number of Muslim students. And when a Muslim student objected to its showing, to quote the Times, the adjunct “lost her job.” Various so-called stakeholders interpreted the incident, as reported in various media, as one of “academic freedom.” The Times went so far as to cite PEN America’s claim that what was happening on our campus was one of the “most egregious violations of academic freedom” it had ever encountered. It begs the question, “How?” Because Hamline University is now under attack from forces outside our campus, I am taking t

Note: While this piece is fictional, the art is real-life. " Police killed a Black Army veteran outside his home. His family wants answers"  (Griffith, 2021) NBC News .  Not knowing he was born both a success and a target, 23-year-old Army veteran John-Terry Lucine returned home from the service ready to live his life to the fullest, unaware of what could happen to an unarmed man in today’s society. Life, so he thought, awaited him.   By Don Allen -  All Rights Reserved.       T he Army was great. I did my three years – got out, came back here. Captran County is hot, filled with people running from one side to another. Suburban neighborhoods with names like Mars, Lunar One, and Apollo have popped up out of thin air. This is the big city, not the city I left three years ago.       Momma put me to work right away. She asked me to get some paint and fill in the letters on the old wooden mailbox out front of the fence. It had been weather-beaten while I was gone, and the family n