NRU, lemons and lemonade

We are needing some lightening up of the NRU around here...
[little did I know when I started collecting these pieces just how badly I would need the silver linings]

Here is one piece that almost got included in the education round up -- but I wasn't feeling despairing or snarky about it.  It tells about a restorative justice program in schools in Oakland (mostly), but it's in the NY Times ...go figure.  In any case, it demonstrates that children, no matter how much they upset you, should not be "throw aways" because we can reach them, if we try.

I am including this piece in this lemonade from lemons roundup, even though it might seem more lemony than we usually like lemonade to be ... it demonstrates the hard work it takes, the stakes at play and the reality of helping these first generation college students towards their goals.  Here is a taste of why it is, indeed, lemonade:

"The model reverses ideas about how to best serve students whose parents haven’t gone to college. Gone is knee-jerk vocational tracking. Gone is the thinking that students must master all the basics before taking on more challenging work."

 In some ways, it is the perfect counterpoint to the piece on community colleges (in the last ed nru) that demonstrates the danger of lack of progression when the program focuses on putting students into remedial classes "to catch them up."  Ok, in fact, that piece elided all of that information -- but if you go through the scorecard, you can start to get the picture, despite the attempts to obfuscate with graphics.

There are those that are complaining (still) about Obamacare -- particularly about the shortage of primary care physicians that will be needed to meet the needs of providing care for all.  Let's set aside that these are the same folks who have been complaining about people using emergency rooms as primary care.  Here are some folks that are doing something instead of complaining -- now, that is making some lemonade from lemons.

You probably need to squint at this piece (or whatever is the equivalent of squinting in listening) to understand the lemon/lemonade connection, but it was just too interesting a piece to pass up. This graduate student talks about what you see in Chinatown (Los Angeles) in the windows, on the signs, etc., that demonstrate the *code switching* in terms of culture in this neighborhood.  Full disclosure: I love almost anything that deals with downtown LA -- which I recommend to anyone visiting LA ... walk around it, take it all in... it really is the heart of LA.  Much more representative of the Southland than Beverly Hills or even Hollywood.

I don't know how I missed this story about the Newtown families deciding where to send the gifts they received as part of the outpouring by people around the country.  There is nothing more lemonade from lemons than this kind of generosity and connection.

 I love that this was not just student initiated but also mostly student-run Relay for Life.  I believe we don't give young people enough space to do what they would like to do for others.  However, would it have hurt the writer to include the barest minimum of detail on the teacher the students were honoring with this event?

This is the way things will change ... the young people taking it upon themselves to act.  All those protestors should take a page from this book.

Poverty doesn't have to mean low academic achievement, this family is a testament to that fact.