Grace and Courtesy

Often times, when you are making decisions in life, some incidences seem like an accident. But I've grown to learn that God is at the helm of your life; everything that occurs therein has a purpose. Learning about Montessori pedagogy is no exception. I'd recently come to New York City around 2015. Fresh out of college and growing antsy from the Midwestern lifestyle I grew up in, I was ready for the cultural saturation that I believed NYC could give me. I was living in the South Bronx and had recently finished a year of Americorps (City Year) as well as beginning (and being kicked out of) an accelerated teaching program. This would give me the opportunity to teach at the high school level while getting my Masters in education. It took a few tries before I was actually able to get that Masters...but that's getting ahead of the story.  At that point, my goal was to get a few years of teaching under my belt, find some back doors to getting into a graduate program without the di...

What is this hand holding onto?  From the earliest time that I can remember, there was an understanding that I had to be careful. My parents taught me to look sharply at my surroundings, at the media that I encountered--mostly on the television--and to act accordingly. On one level, I understood that when I went out into the world, I  represent my family name; it was important that I held that name in honor. But it wasn't until later that I began to put the pieces together--that one of the major reasons I had to be careful and do things differently was because I was a black person. I wasn't given "the talk" per se. There wasn't a specific moment in my teens where my mother and father pulled me to the side to remind me that, because of the color of my skin, if I were stopped by the police, there were certain strategies I needed to employ to get home alive. Honestly, I didn't have a lot of friends growing up and the opportunity to use the family car was limited ...

Great apologies  I have not been so diligent in getting out my blog posts and podcast episodes in a timely manner and I want that to change. If I'm really going to put focused, continual effort into this work, I think it's only right to walk in a state of discipline. This is an area of weakness that I have when it requires work that appears to only effect myself. Like many teachers, a strong motivation to do work comes from those it will effect, in my case the small children in my care. But when it comes to myself,  I have great difficulty staying motivated. But this is why we continue to grow, right? This blog/podcast is meant to be an intersection of Race, Christianity, and Montessori pedagogy. I'm often thinking about all of these things throughout the day and how they effect one another. But today I want to get a little personal and talk about how I began my journey of walking the path of the Christian. My hope in sharing this is to bring to light the work that God is d...