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A boy told his teacher she can't understand him because she's white. She didn't mince words.

"We are responsible for the future of this country."

Photo by John Pike. Used with permission.

Emily E. Smith is no ordinary teacher.

Fifth-grade teacher Emily E. Smith is not your ordinary teacher. She founded The Hive Society — a classroom that's all about inspiring children to learn more about their world ... and themselves — by interacting with literature and current events. Students watch TED talks, read Rolling Stone, and analyze infographics.

She even has a long-distance running club to encourage students to take care of their minds and bodies. Smith is such an awesome teacher, in fact, that she recently received the 2015 Donald H. Graves Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Writing.

It had always been her dream to work with children in urban areas, so when Smith started teaching, she hit the ground running. She had her students making podcasts, and they had in-depth discussions about their readings on a cozy carpet.

ethnicity, responsibility, empathy, teachers, studentsTeaching in a racially and ethnically diverse world.Photo by John Pike. Used with permission.

But in her acceptance speech for her award, she made it clear that it took a turning point in her career before she really got it:

"Things changed for me the day when, during a classroom discussion, one of my kids bluntly told me I "couldn't understand because I was a white lady." I had to agree with him. I sat there and tried to speak openly about how I could never fully understand and went home and cried, because my children knew about white privilege before I did. The closest I could ever come was empathy."

Smith knew that just acknowledging her white privilege wasn't enough.

She wanted to move beyond just empathy and find a way to take some real action that would make a difference for her students.

She kept the same innovative and engaging teaching methods, but she totally revamped her curriculum to include works by people who looked like her students. She also carved out more time to discuss issues that her students were facing, such as xenophobia and racism.

And that effort? Absolutely worth it.

As she said in her acceptance speech:

"We studied the works of Sandra Cisneros, Pam Munoz Ryan, and Gary Soto, with the intertwined Spanish language and Latino culture — so fluent and deep in the memories of my kids that I saw light in their eyes I had never seen before."

The changes Smith made in her classroom make a whole lot of sense. And they're easy enough for teachers everywhere to make:

— They studied the work of historical Latino figures, with some of the original Spanish language included. Many children of color are growing up in bilingual households. In 2007, 55.4 million Americans 5 years of age and older spoke a language other than English at home.

— They analyzed the vision of America that great writers of color sought to create. And her students realized that our country still isn't quite living up to its ideals. Despite progress toward racial equality with the end of laws that enforced slavery or segregation, we still have a long way to go. Black people still fare worse than white people when it comes to things like wealth, unfair arrests, and health.

— They read excerpts from contemporary writers of color, like Ta-Nehisi Coates who writes about race. Her students are reading and learning from a diverse group of writers. No small thing when they live in a society that overwhelmingly gives more attention to white male writers (and where the number of employees of color in the newspaper industry stagnates at a paltry 12%).

— They read about the Syrian crisis, and many students wrote about journeys across the border in their family history for class. The opportunity particularly struck one student; the assignment touched him so much that he cried. He never had a teacher honor the journey his family made. And he was proud of his heritage for the first time ever. "One child cried," Smith shared, "and told me he never had a teacher who honored the journey his family took to the United States. He told me he was not ashamed anymore, but instead proud of the sacrifice his parents made for him."

Opportunities like this will only increase as the number of children from immigrant families is steadily increasing. As of 2013, almost 17.4 million children under 18 have at least one immigrant parent.

Smith now identifies not just as an English teacher, but as a social justice teacher.


Smith's successful shift in her teaching is an example for teachers everywhere, especially as our schools become increasingly ethnically and racially diverse. About 80% of American teachers are white. But as of last year, the majority of K-12 students in public schools are now children of color.

As America's demographics change, we need to work on creating work that reflects the experiences that our students relate to. And a more diverse curriculum isn't just important for students of color. It's vital for everyone.

As Smith put it, "We, the teachers, are responsible for instilling empathy and understanding in the hearts of all kids. We are responsible for the future of this country."

This article originally appeared nine years ago.

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Are you guilty of 'boomerasking'? Why this common conversation faux pas makes you less likeable

And no, it has nothing to do with boomers.

Photo credit: Canva

A hand coming through a blue wall holding a boomerang.

You might have never heard the term “boomerasking” until now, but you’ve almost certainly experienced it…and might have even done it yourself. And no, this has nothing to do with boomers asking why folks can’t pick themselves up by the bootstraps. In fact, this conversation faux pas can be committed by any age group.

Boomerasking is when someone asks a question, only to bring the focus back onto themselves, ala a boomerang.

Example: you ask “how was your day?” to a friend. Your friend responds, “fine, I got some deals at Costco,” and you reply, “well my day was great, I found $100 on the sidewalk, and someone complimented my new shoes!”

Essentially, you didn’t pose the question to really listen to your friend’s answer, but rather to talk about yourself. That’s boomerasking in a nutshell.

boomerasking, conversation tips, social skills, how to talk to people, psychological studyTwo people talking.Photo credit: Canva

But according to new research from the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, there’s a bit more to glean from this. For starters, researchers broke boomerasking down into three categories:

  • “Ask-bragging” - when someone asks a question only so that they can one-up the answerer and brag about themselves
  • “Ask-complaining” - when someone asks a question for the sole purpose of venting their story of a negative experience onto who they asked
  • “Ask-sharing” - when someone asks a question followed by sharing something neutral that probably only the asker finds interesting, i.e. weird dream

The study also found that most participants admitted they had both experienced boomerasking and had been guilty of it themselves, so it’s likely that we’ve all done our fair share of asking only to share a bit about ourselves.

@6girldadreviews Boomerasking? #boomerang #conversationalambush #dadjokes #conversation ♬ original sound - 6 Girl Dad Reviews


And granted, this impulse isn’t completely self-serving. Researchers noted that really, it’s simply the result of two conflicting natural human desires: one, to be responsive to others, and the other, to share individual experiences. They also shared that some participants thought prefacing a long conversation about themselves with a question posed to another person was the considerate way of making conversation feel more balanced, since it’s not entirely about them.

boomerasking, conversation tips, social skills, how to talk to people, psychological studymedia1.giphy.com

In all these cases, boomerasking backfires, and instead only makes the question asked seem insincere, according to the study. To combat this urge, researchers suggest two main things:

1. Ask questions that you are unable to answer yourself, which prevents the possibility of boomerasking, because you have nothing to contribute.

2 Use responsive listening techniques, with verbal cues like affirmation, validation, and repeating and/or reformulating what a partner has said. You can still ask questions, just make sure not to shift the focus away from the other person.

Healthy conversations, which are vital to us all, require a bit of give-and-take. Plus, appearing polite doesn’t have nearly as much weight as showing genuine interest in someone else. So the next time you find yourself wanting to share something, maybe just be clear about that. And if you do ask someone about their day, listen.

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Merit-based pay for teachers is a ridiculously absurd idea, and insulting to boot

The idea that schools should be run like businesses fundamentally misses the goal of education.

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Education isn't a business, and teachers don't need merit-based incentives to do their best work.

In the ongoing question of how to educate the masses in the modern age, some ideas are worthy of serious consideration and some are not. Merit-based pay for teachers falls in the "not" category.

Entrepreneur and previous presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy has been making the rounds on news programs advocating for merit-based pay for teachers. Ramaswamy claims that "pay for performance" is what businesses in the private sector do, and says, "There's no reason we shouldn't be running our public schools in the same way."

Oh yes, there are many reasons why we shouldn't be running our public schools this way.

1. Things that are not businesses should not be run like a business

Businesses are businesses. Governments are governments. Schools are schools. The idea of of running any of those things like any of the others is just silly, no matter which way you try to do it. Imagine saying a business should be run like a school or a government. Makes no sense, right? Having been both a teacher and a business owner, I can tell you that educating children and running a business are night and day endeavors, and what applies to one has nothing to do with the other.

The goal of a business is to make money by providing consumers a product or a service. The more money you make, the more successful your business is. That's a pretty simple equation with simple definitions. The goal of a school is to make sure that children and teens gain the knowledge and skills they need to enter the adult world and be a functioning, contributing member of a society.

But what does that entail? And what does "educate" even mean? Who decides what skills and knowledge are necessary for the masses to have, and how do we go about making sure each child and teen learns those things? These are questions education specialists have been asking for centuries, and the answers aren't cut and dry. Education itself is complicated, and measuring education is even more so.

2. Measuring "merit" and "performance" of teachers is incredibly complex

Let's say we were going to go ahead with merit pay for teachers. How do we measure it? How do we determine what makes someone a high-performing teacher vs. a low-performing teacher?

In a business, we have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)—measurable things we keep track of to see how we're doing. A KPI might be a quota or a percentage of growth or something else numerical that can be put into a spreadsheet and charted to see performance or progress.

What kind of KPIs would teachers have? Number of lesson plans? That's going to vary by teacher and subject. Number of hours spent teaching? That's already predetermined. Quality of teaching? Based on whose methodology or subjective perspective?

We'd have to use measurements such as student test scores, grades, or other assessments to which we try to assign numbers, which are already controversial in and of themselves. Tying teacher "merit" to those student scores is inherently problematic for several reasons.

3. It ignores inherent advantages and disadvantages in different schools and districts

Tying teacher pay to student outcomes assumes a good teacher = good student test scores/grades and bad teacher = poor student test scores/grades. But people who actually have experience teaching hundreds or thousands of kids will tell you that's not how the math works out. There are incredible teachers who bend over backward for their students and pour their entire heart into teaching whose students struggle to perform well on tests or get good grades. And there are teachers who don't have to make a big effort because they work in wealthy districts where parent involvement and resources means students will almost assuredly score well on tests regardless of the quality of teaching.

Schools and school districts vary by degrees that would probably shock most Americans if they saw the discrepancies. It is patently unfair to reward teachers who live and work in districts where students have every advantage, from the latest technology to private tutors, and punish those who work in districts where families struggle just to put food on the table and students have to navigate the perils of poverty while trying to learn.

teaching, classroom, teachers, merit pay for teachersEducation is as much an art as a science.Photo credit: Canva

How to best measure student outcomes is already a big question mark in education. Tying them to teacher pay as a measurement of "merit" just adds another unnecessary layer of complexity to it.

4. It incentivizes the abandonment of disadvantaged students

If you're a teacher and your pay is tied directly to student outcomes, where are you going to want to teach? In a school district in a wealthy district where parents have the means to pay for tutors, high property taxes ensure schools are well-funded, and kids have plenty to eat? Or a school district where kids come to school hungry, parents may not be as engaged, and schools struggle to get the resources they need? Which student outcomes are going to mean a better paycheck for you as a teacher?

Merit-based pay means well-off school districts with higher student scores will get more teacher applicants, and can therefore be more selective, and will therefore perpetuate high student outcomes even more.

5. It incentivizes 'teaching to the test' and discourages other learning

Some student learning is easily measurable with a standardized test and some is not. Math? That's easy to measure. Rote memorization of facts? Sure, test it. But how well a student understands historical implications or grasps lessons learned through literature studies or are able to appreciate a work of art or can apply what they've learned to real-world situations? Those things are a lot harder to standardize or measure. Teaching is an art and a science, and teachers know that learning growth is neither a linear process nor a purely numerical one. There's so much progress that teachers can see that a test can't measure what gets lost when test score "outcomes" are overemphasized.

And what about grades? For many subjects, grades are subjective, so if teacher pay is tied to grade improvements, that's just asking for grades to be even more subjective. Even if merit-based pay for teachers resulted in improved test scores or grade measurements on paper, that doesn't mean the quality of teaching or education has actually gone up. It just means the focus has shifted to measurable learning, often to the detriment of equally important learning that's harder to measure.

Ramaswamy has said that merit measurement would also include things like parent feedback and peer assessments. But those kinds of assessments are wildly subjective and rife with gaming potential.

6. It's insulting to the majority of teachers who are already doing their best

There will always be teachers who are willing to work in lower income districts because they love kids and they love teaching and they're doing it for the good of humankind. In fact, I'd say most teachers fall into the category of doing it for the love of the work, which is also why merit-based pay is ridiculous. The merit-based pay idea is based on an assumption that most teachers aren't already doing their best. Teachers want to be paid what their work is worth, not compete for who gets better pay based on measurements they only have so much control over. The idea that throngs of teachers are just phoning it in, and that they'd only work harder or perform better if there were some kind of merit-based incentive to do so, is insulting.


I'm not claiming to have all the answers to improving education in the United States, but the idea that educator performance is the primary problem is a claim made by people who have never set foot in a classroom as a teacher. There are lots of solutions that can and should be tried, but merit-based pay for teachers isn't one of them.

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Teacher courts 'controversy' by admitting that students need to be told their reading level

She says students need a "reality check."

via Canva/Photos

A teacher showing her students their grades.

The results from 2024’s National Assessment of Educational Progress found that the slide in American students' reading abilities has only worsened. The percentage of 8th graders with “below basic” reading skills was 33%, the lowest in the exam’s three-decade history. The percentage of fourth graders “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, 40%.

“Our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which gives the NAEP exam. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

A big reason for the drop was the disruption in education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but educators are looking to see if there are other causes behind the drop in competency. “This is a major concern — a concern that can’t be blamed solely on the pandemic,” Carr said. “Our nation is facing complex challenges in reading.”

@amber.mariee44

Please give your feedback I can’t tell if this is a good idea or not #teacher #teachersbelike #teachertok #teacherlife #teachersoftiktok #highschool #literacy

Alarmed by the drop in reading scores, a high school teacher named Amber, who goes by @Amber.Maree44 on TikTok, is considering telling her students the grade level in which they read in hopes that it will motivate them and give them a reality check on their performance.

“I'm starting to think that we need to be more straightforward with students about their progress and where they're at academically,” Amber said. "I think they need to know what grade level they're performing at."

Amber’s perspective may also be helpful to parents. A 2023 study found a massive chasm between how parents think their child is performing and how they are compared to grade-level standards. Nearly nine out of ten parents thought their child was at grade level, while about half were below grade level nationally.

students, teachers grades, amber teacher, literacy rates, declining scores, american educationA teacher talking to a student about grades.via Canva/Photos

“I'm hesitant to do this because I know that we don't want students to feel bad about themselves, and I know that we don't know that we don't want to discourage students by showing them their deficits. So I think, for a lot of students, having a real reality check like that where it's like, 'Hey, you're in high school. but it looks like you're reading at a fifth-grade level,' I think some students need that in order to push themselves to actually try in school."

Amber’s suggestion runs counter to some in education who believe that if children are told they are below grade level, it will discourage them from reading. This may further deter their progress, and it is far from an imperfect process to determine where a child is with their reading skills.

students, teachers grades, amber teacher, literacy rates, declining scores, american educationA young girl reading a book in school. via Canva/Photos

Amber believes that a big reason why 54% of adults cannot read at a fifth-grade level is because no one told them, so they don’t know they need help improving their reading skills.

To combat the literacy crisis, Amber was considering having her students take an online literacy test to determine their grade level; she doesn’t need to know the results because she already knows where they are from previous tests. Then, so no student feels singled out, she can have a dialog with her students who have fallen behind about how they can improve their skills. This approach is a happy medium where student learn where they are without being shamed by their teacher and are given some options for enhancing their skills.

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