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The Sun Interview
School’s Out
An Interview With John Taylor Gatto
The first thing I discovered was that the types of learning that are measured by standardized tests are not real learning at all. To do well on a standardized reading test, for example, does not mean that you read well. There are approximately 150 categories of information that a complex passage of reading delivers, and the standardized test covers approximately six of those categories over and over again.
September 1995
Fiction
Girls
Besides teaching sixth- and seventh-grade English, I’m also homeroom teacher for the entire seventh grade, which consists of forty-nine girls who are impossible to tell apart as they all appear to be named Lisa and wear identical outfits — white blouses, green skirts, green knee socks.
June 1998Poetry
Truant
Our high-school principal wagged his finger / over two manila folders / lying on his desk, labeled with our names — / my boyfriend and me, / called to his office for skipping school.
June 2017Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Parade Day
Today is the National Puerto Rican Day Parade. I am watching it on television in Brooklyn while the Puerto Ricans are parading up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
February 2020
Poetry
Memorial Day
I was impatient / as you selected / the flowers / one at a time / for the bouquets: / the peonies, pinks, / and coral bells / you had grown.
January 1999Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Wrong Imam
If we could have been inside his heart, if we could have been offered transportation from our Jerusalem to his heaven, this is what we might have absorbed: Abkar was not leading us in prayer. He was talking to God while we happened to be behind him, squeezed in so tightly we could hardly find places for our foreheads on flawless plush carpet.
December 2017
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Passover Questions
I feel defined by loss, my shape delineated by the absence of those who used to surround me. The invisible membrane of love that held us together for so many years has become stretched, attenuated by time and space and death. But when I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still feel my son and my mother.
April 2007
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Exegesis Of Eating
And thou shalt treat the food that touches thy lips with reverence, in recognition of the labors and traditions of thine ancestors, and in communion and fellowship with those to whom thou art tied with bonds of blood and love.
June 2002
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
For A Future You
I drop by on a Saturday. Your mom lets you answer my knock on the apartment door. The cap of your gastrostomy tube is outlined against your unicorn T-shirt.
August 2020
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