Brandon Spars

What drew me to Kathleen Corley’s book, The Magical Place We Call School was the resonance that the title had with the subtitle “Creating a Safe Space for Learning and Happiness in a Challenging World.” The title of the book, taken as a whole, contained both the words “place” and “space,” and they both referred to school. School was both a “magical place” and “a safe space,” or at least that is what to aim for. In the last blog about Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village we examined that...

I had texted Katy Mangan, one of the two hosts for the monthly Do Tell Story Swap, to tell her I was going out of town for the June virtual story swap. Over the past eight months Katy and Vicky Ness had taken over my responsibilities as the Zoom Host while I was dealing with my career change from high school to college teaching. Nothing could have prepared me for the text I received a day later. It wasn’t from Katy. It was from her beautiful daughter, Lucy, who, I believe, lives in England...

Originally I set out to write a blog about leaving my job as a high school instructor. I was going to focus on my personal experience and heartbreak, but as I began to write, I found that there were issues much larger than myself at stake in the field of education. My experience was indicative of large changes that have been taking place in the landscape of schools in general. I use that word “landscape” intentionally because when we try to describe some of the more abstract concepts about...