A Quote by Megan Smith
I was lucky that science fair was mandatory at my high school in inner-city Buffalo.
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I went to an inner-city school in Buffalo. We had no money. But our teachers believed in hands-on active learning - there was a mandatory science fair, which was critical.
Harkening back to a story about my grandfather, I was lucky to attend a great high school in New York, Bronx High School of Science, which has produced more Nobel prize winners than any other high school in America.
I attended elementary school and high school in Mexico City. I was already fascinated by science before entering high school; I still remember my excitement when I first glanced at paramecia and amoebae through a rather primitive toy microscope.
I'm from the inner city of Buffalo.
Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.
Fortunately, I had cousins who lived in Buffalo and would often go to visit them, which I loved to do because I liked Buffalo as it was a big city. Even today, the bigger the city, the better.
I stopped going to high school when I met Big Pun, which wasn't the smartest thing. So I never got my diploma. When I went to prison, it's mandatory to get your GED if you don't have a high school diploma.
My dad didn't graduate high school. My mom is a high school graduate. My mom is a factory worker. My dad owned a bar in the inner city.
Like I always tell people, Buffalo is closer to Toronto than New York City. We an hour and a half away - that's the next major city to us is Toronto. Buffalo's connected to Canada.
I started out as a high school teacher in inner-city Chicago and realized quite quickly that my students weren't that motivated.
My main lucky number is 9. That was my baseball number in high school. My other lucky number is 3, because that's the one I wore before I got to high school and had to pick a different one.
I know from my own personal experience. I was bullied in middle school and high school and went through my fair share of hard times thereafter. Also, one of my really good friends committed suicide when I was in high school.
When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement. If a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score than a black student from an inner-city school, is it because she’s truly a better student, or is it because to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of “smart”?
When people talk about people being left behind - middle wages have not gone up for years, and we should recognize that, and there I think we need growth and skills - but there are these other people who have been left behind. When I say out loud, "Fifty percent of inner-city schoolkids do not graduate from high school," that is a national catastrophe. We should be ringing the alarm bells. It's not fair.
Teaching high school in an inner-city school is not an easy task. Every teacher is responsible for 150 teenagers. The amount of work is just mind-boggling. Remember, you're not just doing a job. You have these kids' futures in your hand; you have to inspire them.
I went to a really diverse and wonderful school in inner-city Pittsburgh, where all the various groups and types of people got along pretty great, and a lot of interesting stuff was going on all the time - and I still hated high school. It's just a rough, rough period in one's life.
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