My New Education Blog!

I just started a new education blog, just this morning, in fact. How many blogs can one person have? you might ask. Oh, just you wait. I'll have ten by next year!!!


For now, I have a bit of catching up to do, so besides transferring my previous blog posts about education from that blog to this blog, I will be blogging here fast and furious for the next couple of weeks.


I plan to update this blog much more frequently than I do my multi-purpose and food blogs, but the posts will be briefer than they generally are on the other ones. The purpose of this blog is share my ideas and the ideas of others about education, and while I do that on the other blogs, their purpose is more to develop my writing and to provide a place to self-publish pieces that aren't right for larger publications.


Rachel Levy, what makes you qualified to blog about education? you might ask.


Well, I have worked with children since I was a child: babysitting and being a camp counselor. I attended public schools in DC from prekindergarten tthrough twelfth grade.


After graduating from college, I taught for a year at a private Quaker school in Brooklyn, New York. Then, I got a master's degree in education with certification in Social Studies (grades 7-12) and ESL, which is a PK-12 certification. Then, I taught in D.C. Public Schools for two years, and then in Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia for five years. After that, I worked as an educator with a private non-profit social service agency at various Head Start programs in the Charlottesville, Virginia, area. Most recently, I taught adult-aged immigrants in Oakland, California. Now I work as  a writer, and one of my pet topics is, you guessed it, education.


Somewhere in all of that I became a parent to three children who collectively have spent two school years at a Jewish preschool, two at a secular Reggio Emilia-based preschool, one at a secular daycare-type center, 0.6 years (hopefully two total) year at a Montessori-based cooperative preschool, two school years in Oakland (California) Public Schools, two plus (lots more, we hope) years in Hanover County Schools in Virginia.


Education is my blood and the blood of the family I married into. My mother has long worked as a lawyer/education activist in DC, as a civil rights lawyer as well as with several community-based organizations. My mother-in-law is a nursery school teacher and runs her own community-based education activist group, in DC also. My father-in-law is a high school English teacher in DCPS (he was recently fired under the Rhee administration, but rehired part-time on an hourly basis to calm the uproar his termination caused in the Wilson HS community). Finally, my husband is a college psychology professor, with a specialization in cognitive psychology and an interest in how people learn.


All of this is not to say that I know everything about education because I certainly don't. I have some knowledge, some experience, and some opinions, but I try to stay open to learning more and to new ways of doing things. That being said, I advocate first and foremost for the practices and approaches that will make for the highest quality and most socially just education system possible.


Hopefully this blog can aid me in this journey. And if you wish to learn more about education, I hope it can aid in yours.