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    Racist or Anti-Racist?

    I’ve had the issues that I discussed yesterday at the
    forefront of my mind since then. I hope that I can continue to maintain the
    urgency I feel to actively dismantle racism.
    On the plane ride home, I struck up a conversation with a
    pilot who was sitting next to me. He was reading a book about astronomy, and so
    we chatted about the stars. I recommended visiting the observatory outside of
    Marfa, TX. I explained that my favorite part was lying down and watching
    different constellations pointed out with the laser pointer. He shared that he
    had purchased his own powerful laser pointer for astronomical reasons. When he
    first
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    The Time for Anti-Racism Is Now

    The news about the legalization of marriage for all hit me by surprise and with an overwhelming
    sense of relief. It’s about time that we extended the basic right to marry to
    all humans. How in the hell did we let it take so long?
    More than 20 years ago as a teenager, I remember developing
    a social conscious and thinking about how ignorant we were going to seem as a
    society through the lens of time. I considered gay rights to be the most urgent
    civil rights issue of our time.
    And then I started working at schools in low-income
    communities with primarily children of color and I realized
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    Why I Opt-in and Support Standardized Testing

    Growing
    up, I always took standardized tests. Every year, our teachers would say, “Get
    a good night’s sleep and eat breakfast in the morning. You have a test
    tomorrow.” And that was it.
    I
    happened to start my career in education right around the time when this
    approach to standardized testing completely shifted under the pressure of the
    No Child Left Behind Act.
    As
    an educator for the past 16 years, I’ve seen a lot of bad things. When I taught
    in a Title I school in rural Louisiana where more than 90% of children lived
    below the federal poverty line, the principal kept a paddle on her wall and
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