Blogs on High (9-12)

School's out. Politics is in. Five months of presidential political combat lie ahead. So I'm psyched to revisit the challenge of effectively educating kids to be active participants in our democratic processes. I plan to post a number of columns over the next months that focus on student voice, the teaching of democracy, civic engagement and political literacy. I'm hoping some of you will join the discussion and toss in your two cents.

As an inner-city elementary school teacher for 34 years, I made up and tested my original curricula in emotional intelligence, character education, values clarification, writing, reading, thinking, creativity, poetry and vocabulary. Call me an educator, developer, researcher and experimentalist in the classroom.

"Your clicks have consequences," says Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet. Johnson writes about the impact of consuming a poor information diet, "unhealthful information deep-fried in our own preconceptions."

As a junior in high school, I was finally able to enroll in the photography class. Offered only every other year, this was the only time the course was available to me (it was not open to freshman), and since there was only one section, the period three class was my only shot.

So, when my guidance counselor pulled me into his office on the second day of school to tell me I had to drop photography to take a more college-friendly Spanish class, I knew my opportunity was lost. This was in 1988, five years before Mosaic was introduced to the world, seven years before Netscape made the World Wide Web available to the masses, and a decade before virtual schooling was an option. Unless I could find a private mentorship, my only access to formally learning photography was period three during my junior year of high school and, since I had to take Spanish, that was no longer an option for me.