Today, I walked into a high school where I am not an employee. Where I have no classroom, no agenda on the board, no lesson plans, no books, no exit slips, and no first-day-of-school icebreakers, because I am no longer a high school English teacher.

I quit...

Since the repeal of the 18th Amendment, we've given up on alcohol. Let me rephrase: we've given up on making it a healthy, sustainable part of our American culture. We've merely accepted it as some sort of necessary sin. But after vacationing in Sonoma and Pasa Robles, CA, my thinking...

Imagine if we could turn the Chick-fil-A outrage toward organizations that matter more. As I watched gloating, bloated zealots queue up for chicken as they never would on Election Day (thankfully), I thought to myself, "How many of them have LGBT children under their roofs, struggling to find themselves, not...

When I first heard about the Colorado shooting, I was immediately brought back to the seventh grade. Columbine. Even though it was hundreds of miles away, I remember clearly sitting on a new couch from Walmart, watching the news, and crying. During college, on my twenty-first birthday, it was Virginia...

Bullying has become our latest cause célèbre. Lady Gaga came to Harvard to start her youth-empowerment foundation, festooned with hats that bullied the air for space. It Gets Better videos have proliferated (except from our centerfold senator, Scott Brown). But the prism through which we view the problem -- the...

The trouble with schools is they always try to teach the wrong lesson (thank you, Stephen Schwartz). As English teachers, we so often devolve into discussing books that we teach, rather than students, or even ideas. Science teachers struggle to cover "content" that, like my freshman biology class, is a...

I was born a Protestant Christian. I'm not one today, by most considerations. But I don't consider myself an authority on the subject; my distrust of religion runs deep.

I was baptized in a Presbyterian church. My parents were married by a Baptist preacher (and divorced by lawyers -- Baptist...

During Boston Pride this past weekend, I had a lot of conversations about Gay Pride in general. Many well-meaning, highly-educated people asked, "Is this something that we still need?"

Yes. Now, more than ever, we need pride and Pride.

I've never really thought of Joan Rivers as an inspirational figure....

I hate the phrase "urban education." What we are really talking about is how to teach children without money. Without opportunity. Kids with problems. And it's all anyone is talking about nowadays. The central question is this:

How do we help kids be successful in school when they have a...

More teachers should be politicians. Let me explain.

Growing up in North Carolina, my senator was Jesse Helms. And Lauch Faircloth -- probably doesn't ring a bell. Oh yeah, and John Edwards. Maybe you've heard of him.

So when I moved to Massachusetts, I was thrilled to have Ted Kennedy...

After spending all year trying to get 18-year-olds to care about Anglo-Saxon poetic devices, 12th-grade English teachers secretly, in the depths of their hearts of darkness, look forward to the Senior Prank.

Senior Pranks reminds us that what we teach our students is, in the scheme of their lives, relatively...