Articles, essays, editorials, and meditations on T&W’s mission, “educating the imagination.”
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by David Andrew Stoler The girl from Queens is quiet and shy—one of the smallest students in her seventh-grade class, she is also hearing impaired and wears special headphones connected directly to a microphone that each of her teachers must wear… that is, when she gets up the nerve to remind them. Now, while her…
By J.D. Mader For six years, I was lucky enough to teach writing to at-risk, low-income youth in San Francisco. I worked at two Catholic schools, but for a non-profit named ACHIEVE. I was a shadow. I designed my own curriculum. I was able to work with students in small groups, not a typical classroom….
by David Andrew Stoler At night, when nobody else was awake, the two teenagers would send secret messages to each other: short bursts of text that they would wrap like little gifts in layer after layer of meaning. Gossip, intrigue, flirtation, the blossoming of young love…if their parents found out what was really going on—if…
by David Rosenthal HER GHOST It walks with her to school, floating on a pool of rainbow oil along the gutter floor. It darkens chain-link lace, foreshadowing the face of someone sleeping by a boarded door. It slides past broken panes, and crawls across four lanes of careless traffic on the boulevard, then jumps…
By Jennifer Bartlett As a poet, I find myself particularly sensitive to words. This is bit ironic as I have always thought of myself as someone who is quite blunt. When my son was young, I taught him that the bad words were not the swear words you might expect, but words like “retard,” “lame,”…
by Robert Hirschfield Teaching artist Karen Fitzgerald describes what it’s like collaborating with Richard Lewis. “He never says no to an idea. I don’t think he knows the word no. If you have an idea that’s out there, he’s totally willing to explore it. He tries to figure out how it can work with what…
by Robert Hirschfield Picking at the soil grains of my childhood play a little longer Richard Lewis, 83, left his door open for me. It is on the fourth floor of a strange old office building in Astoria, Queens that houses three funeral parlors and a museum. Short,…
by Greg Graham In an age when digital literacy is viewed as the holy grail of education, and when teachers are urged to jump aboard the digitrain or get run over by it, Heather Sellers is one of the few voices bucking the trend, extolling the benefits of writing the way human beings have written…
by Erika Luckert We rarely think of sports as a subject for poetry, and yet, when I speak to devoted sports fans or athletes about their passions, they invariably wax poetic. I recently taught a residency at a middle school where one of the most impressive poems was written by an avid sports fan, Julio….
During the 2011–2012 school year, Teachers & Writers Collaborative partnered with Children First Network 534—a Bronx-based grouping of 33 public schools—to provide twelve writing programs in eight middle schools in Queens and the Bronx. With generous support from the New York Community Trust’s “Beyond Teaching to the Test” initiative, T&W writers taught fiction, poetry, and…