What Does It Mean To Be American? - Perdaily.com

What Does It Mean To Be American? - Perdaily.com

What Does It Mean To Be American?

Yesterday was my 63rd birthday and after spending the last 5 months writing posts for perdaily, I would like to reflect on why education reform is so important to me. When I used to teach history, I always started out class by having the students read the front page of the Los Angeles Times while I took the roll and did the our mundane classroom maintenance tasks. In confronting student reticence about the relevance of reading today's newspaper in a World or American History course, I would respond that if I could not connect what was on the front page of the paper to what we were studying, I would not have them read the front page of the newspaper anymore.

There were two stories that caught my eye this morning as I was having my breakfast, one was about a young woman in Afghanistan who had been murdered because she refused to be married to her cousin and the second one was about economically necessitated cuts to arts programs and threatened the very existence of programs like the Watts Towers Art Center. What could these two apparently unrelated stories have in common for me? Then it