Arkansas to Los Angeles and Then Back Again
As a beginning teacher back at the dawn of the Internet era I had my students at Berendo Middle School in Los Angeles, California email students in Mrs. Gray’s English Class at Pinkston Middle School in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Not a terribly imaginative assignment, but for the time it was very cutting edge. I think I had had an email address for only a month or two when I thought this "keypals" assignment up. My students loved writing to students on the other side of the continent, and the senseless shooting of nearby Los Angeles teacher Alfredo Perez gave the communication drama.

I had a rough stay in the rough neighborhood where Berendo Middle School is found, but I remember clearly this class of special sixth graders all these years later. They wrote me this "one last thing." Career-wise, it was a start. I did my best.

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CRESCENT RISING
The Divided Realm:Islam at the End of the 20th Century
As opposed to Berendo where I was pretty much left to “sink or swim,” Milken invested serious time, money, and attention to my professional development. In 1998 they paid a consultant to fly from New York to LA to train myself and several other Milken teachers over two full workdays on “webquests.” I got intense training on Bernie Dodge’s project-based curriculum, Grant Wiggins and his “essential questions,” and then Milken paid me a $2,500 stipend that next year to develop and teach a webquest. They also paid other teachers to do this, and we met periodically at night to give each other support and get feedback -- this is what I call “professionalism,” and neither before nor after have I ever seen that level of support and quality control from administration in public school.

I worked long and hard on this webquest, and the lessons I learned in developing and teaching this project I never forgot. It was a crucial step in my development as a teacher. So many years later, I am still proud of this unit – teaching Islam (and Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, among other topics) to Jewish middle school students in Los Angeles two full years before the events of September 11th 2001 brought these topics to America’s full attention.

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Brave New World? Or Slouching Towards Gomorrah?
I designed this project immediately after I joined the staff to help found Foothill Technology High School in August of 2000. FTHS was created as a project-based school focusing on technology, and every single 9th grader completed this project and thereby signaled a new way of teaching in the “new school in town.” We made the local newspaper with it, and I was co-winner of the Impact II Disseminator Award and Ed Lyon Award for Excellence in Education for this project.

This was one of the highlights of my early career – or my entire career, for that matter. I am still proud of it.

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Mustapha Mond's Department of Propaganda
Growing up with the school, in 2001 I started the first honors class at Foothill. This was a special 9th grade English class full of ambitious students who grew academically as I grew professionally -- the school began to acquire a serious reputation for academic excellence in the process. I build a 9th grade curriculum comparing and contrasting contemporary technological society with fictitious future dystopias as illustrated by George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World -- and this project was undertaken after completing the latter novel.

This project was the vehicle by which I learned to edit digital video – a talent that paid huge dividends professionally over time.

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Little Book of Life Instructions
I tweaked a unit taught by a former colleague at Milken and gave it a technology application in Life’s Little Book of Instructions project. Not terribly ambitious academically, it allowed students during the difficult months of “Farch” to have a hand’s on ability to link Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” to their own lives.

Perhaps it is more a middle school than a high school assignment, but then I was mandated to teach that middle school-level (in my humble opinion) book by Lee to high school freshman so it makes sense. A good idea which allows for creativity and creates a link between home and school for students, but it does not ask for much high-level reasoning. Alas.

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