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At my other job (Boys and Girls Club), I watched this movie. So it was great when it was an option in this class because it would be beneficial to anyone who works with kids. The movie does a great job of showing what some kids have to deal with before they even enter the school. The overall theme of acceptance is important. You just have to accept every kid as they are. It can be tough sometimes when I'm working at the Boys and Girls Club and notice which kids are the bullies. I try to watch out for the victims but you can't be everywhere. I was bullied when I was young and I instinctively dislike all bullies. So it is tough at work tolerating a kid who I know does awful things to his peers. But you gotta accept them. You have to build a relationship with the kids you don't like because they are young and don't know better. Instead of judging, you gotta help.

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I volunteered on Tuesdays and Fridays. On Tuesdays, I walked to the school (I live near by) and went to study hall. I would help out for first period of study hall. I helped out in every subject but I most often proofread or tutored math. I was always helping with math and I learned that a lot of the kids were struggling. Often, I would ask to see their practice problems and they wouldn't have them. What kind of math teacher doesn't do practice problems with their kids? Also there textbook was online and I hated that. Others would like that but the interface was slow. So I felt bad for these students because they were behind in math. Otherwise, I proofread all the time. I love doing that. Working with English is always a joy. If I did not want to be a history teacher, I would teach English. Plus, I love helping students refine their thoughts. They usually have great insights but they can't quite put it on paper. The only thing that can be depressing working with English is that kids get really upset when you suggest corrections. I was like that too, people are too sensitive about their writing. On Fridays, after first period, I would go and shadow Mrs. Johnson's World History class. My only gripe is that Mrs. Johnson would not have stuff for me to do at first. I was kinda pushy but I eventually got her to let me do more. Besides that, It was awesome watching Mrs. Johnson teach. I learned a lot (mentioned earlier). When I have a history class I will steal ideas form Mrs. Johnson: rap battles, travel brochures, poems, goofy documentaries, cool quizzes and a free form enviroment.

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In almost all our readings there was talk about forming relationships. Hands down this is the most important thing I learned volunteering. You have got to have a good relationship with students so they are willing to ask questions, ask for help, and participate in class. Kids just need confidence. The second most important thing I learned was preparation. Mrs. Johnson was always ready. She was always two steps ahead, foreseeing problems and heading them off. She knew the curriculum like the back of her hand. You have to be prepared and personable.  Also, I want to mention class size.  I think one of the reasons SPCPA is successful is that they have small class sizes.  It helps a ton.  Where I work (and also volunteer), at the Boys and Girls Club, there is usually a ton of kids.  In the summer sometimes it is me and 40 kids and it can get pretty crazy pretty quick.

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SPCPA has a J-term. They let kids have January off and get them to help with a production.  This gives them field experience in their field.  This is awesome.  I think one way to make schools more interesting is to have hands on learning like this.  You could do it with trade schools and stuff too.  Need more of this instead of the traditional, dry old way.

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This is something that has upset me since I read that article in class by Dipti Desai. I noticed all the textbooks, computers, and programs schools have to pay for and thought that it is so ridiculous people make money off this. I get that students should have the newest and best stuff but I don't like how it's such a big business but whatever someones gotta make money or no one'll do it.

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It was great how easy and connected the school is to public transit. This availability is key to allowing less privileged kids to attend!

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I volunteered in a study hall. Kids often had math questions. I worked with this one kid all the time. The first time I accidentally offended him. I assumed he knew PEMDAS (the way to know which operation should be done first in an equation) but he did not and felt ashamed he did not know. I did not mean to make him upset but it taught me a valuable lesson. Never make a kid feel dumb. Afterwards when I helped him, I never assumed he knew something and was always excited when he got something right. Over time this gave him confidence and he got better. This may be a stretch but I connected this experience to Paper Tiger. You have got to accept any student unconditionally and help them. You both have the same goal and kids need support!

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This school feels awesome.  It is smack dab in the middle of the city.  It has no building of it's own.  The school is spread out over multiple buildings.  You have to go across skyways.  You see professionals going to and fro.  The kids even get to meet politicians like Dayton and Franken.  An awesome location

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Another chapter I wholly identified with was the third one, "Liberating the Curriculum."  I love how the author calls it 'liberating.'  Cuz that is what you have to do! Especially in history, my sub-field.  I love history and find it fascinating.  I thought everybody's house they grew up in had portraits of civil war generals - but I guess not.  So you have got to make class more fun.  Mrs. Johnson did a great job of this.  For instance, instead of just learning about ancient leaders, the kids did rap battles as them.  This is how you make history fun.  And honestly, I thank Hamilton (where she got the idea), which made history hip - we gotta do more of that!

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Hamilton cast performs "Alexander Hamilton" at White House

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This book was a great way to learn about teaching. The chapter called, "Creating an Environment For Learning," was awesome in showing how the physical space kids learn in is important. The chapter goes over what is needed: a place to move/play, a place that encourages contemplation/reflection, a place that encourages community, and most importantly a place where kids can see each other! The classroom I volunteered in had these aspects.  Students sat in a circle, there was a place to work quietly (reflect), and there was enough room to stretch and move around.  Out with the old style of classroom, in with the new!

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Hands down my favorite reading in this class was by Chris Emdin. In his book, "For White Folks who teach in the Hood," Emdin goes into why white teachers struggle with diverse classrooms. I absolutely love how he talks about you have to connect culturally to students. This was true at both places I volunteered. At SPCPA, to connect to artsy kids, I talked about my favorite Marlon Brando movies. Or in history class, while talking about the Romans, I brought up Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar". Conversely, at the Boys and Girls Club, which is mostly African American, I talked to kids about the NBA or my Timberlands or DBZ.  You always have to connect with what kids know and understand!

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Mary Kurt Mason Helping Students Find Their Courage | Office Depot

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Teacher Chris Emdin Finding Ways to Make Math Fun | Office Depot

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Office Depot®, Office Max®, and Adoptaclassroom.org have partnered together to help teachers change lives across America. Donate to a teacher or register your classroom at www.officedepot.com/teachers Chris is a science teacher in the Bronx. He incorporates the hip hop culture into the classroom material to help students see science in a different way.

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Info was hard to find online, but while volunteering I noticed the school was overwhelmingly white. This is where I have a criticism.  The area around the school is mostly minority but the school is mostly white.  Also, the school makes people commute.  Meaning you have to be rich enough to have a car and can afford gas.  Plus the school doesn't provide lunch, so you have to pay for it at nearby restaurants.  These reasons make the school mostly white and wealthy.  One positive for demographics, the school is mostly LGBT friendly.  Multiple teachers and students told me that this school was a haven for LGBT youth

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A magnet school and a charter school.  Open to applications from all over the metro.  Here are my gripes with this charter school: It is overwhelming white despite the surrounding demographics and the teachers are not unionized and get burned out quick. And with the new Education Secretary there will probably be more.

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Few disagreed that schools in Detroit were a mess: a chaotic mix of charters and traditional public schools, the worst-performing in the nation.

So city leaders across the political spectrum agreed on a fix, with legislation to provide oversight and set standards on how to open schools and close bad ones.

But the bill died without even getting a final vote. And the person most influential in killing it is now President-elect Donald J. Trump's nominee to oversee the nation's public schools, Betsy DeVos.

Her resistance to the legislation last spring is a window into Ms. DeVos's philosophy and what she might bring to the fierce and often partisan debate about public education across the country, and in particular, the roles of choice and charter schools.

The bill's proposals are common in many states and accepted by many supporters of school choice, like a provision to stop failing charter operators from creating new schools. But Ms. DeVos argued that this kind of oversight would create too much bureaucracy and limit choice. A believer in a freer market than even some free market economists would endorse, Ms. DeVos pushed back on any regulation as too much regulation. Charter schools should be allowed to operate as they wish; parents would judge with their feet.

Detroit Public Schools, she argued, should simply be shut down and the system turned over to charters, or the tax dollars given to parents in the form of vouchers to attend private schools.

"She is committed to an ideological stance that is solely about the free market, at the expense of practicality and the basic needs of students in the most destabilized environment in the country," said Tonya Allen, the president of the Skillman Foundation, a nonprofit that works with Detroit children, and a co-chairwoman of the coalition that produced the report that became the basis for the legislation last spring.

"If she was showing herself present in places and learning from the practitioners, that's a fine combination," Ms. Allen said. "But Betsy never showed up in Detroit. She was very eager to impose experimentation on students that she has not spent time with and children that she does not have consequence for."

Ms. DeVos has a long career as an education philanthropist and lobbyist, but not as an educator. She and her husband, Dick, an heir to the Amway fortune, are considered the most powerful Republicans in Michigan. In the debate over Detroit schools, Republican lawmakers say, Ms. DeVos withheld her financial support until they agreed to kill the bill.

And they were rewarded well when they did: Ms. DeVos's family began a flood of donations to Republicans that totaled $1.45 million in seven weeks.

Ms. DeVos declined to be interviewed. But her allies say her views have been misinterpreted.

"She's never said choice and choice alone is the panacea for public education," said Gary Naeyaert, the lobbyist who leads the Great Lakes Education Project, which Ms. DeVos founded to advance charter schools in Michigan in 2001 after her family had spent nearly $5.8 million on a losing initiative to establish statewide school vouchers. "It's choice, quality and accountability."

Hers was a different version of choice, quality and accountability, however, than that envisioned by those who drafted and supported the legislation: a broad coalition of charter school and teachers' union leaders, the Detroit chamber of commerce and some of the city's most prominent Republican philanthropists and politicians, its Democratic mayor and the state's Republican governor.

"The misinformation campaign was horrendous," said Thomas Stallworth III, a former state legislator who lobbied on behalf of the coalition. And the sway of her contributions was too much to overcome. "There's no way we could compete with that. We don't have those kinds of resources."

Ms. DeVos and her husband had lobbied hard for the state law that established charter schools in 1994. It allowed an unusually large number of organizations to start charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run. But it created little oversight.

Even charter school supporters now criticize Detroit as one of the most unregulated markets in the country. About 80 percent of the state's charters are operated for profit, far higher than anywhere else.

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Cody Academy of Public Leadership is a public school in Detroit. Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times

In 2011, the DeVoses and the Great Lakes project lobbied successfully to lift a cap on the number of charter schools, fighting off a provision that would have kept failing schools from expanding.

In Detroit, which now has a greater proportion of charters than any city but New Orleans, one result was a glut of schools as more charters opened but the city's population continued to decline. Yet while there are too many seats in schools downtown, there are not enough in the poorest, most remote neighborhoods, where most students live.

Traditional and charter schools alike compete with televisions, laptops and bicycles for students - and the taxpayer dollars that follow them. More than 150 schools have opened or closed in the last seven years, and it is not unusual to find students who change schools every year, and teachers who do so more often than that.

With more than a dozen organizations issuing charters, it is hard for parents to get the information they need to inform their choices. And, in a city of 140 square miles, the highest-performing schools usually remain out of reach to the poorest students, because most schools do not offer transportation, and the city bus service is unreliable.

Most charters have failed to improve on the dismal performance of the traditional public schools. High-performing national charter networks have stayed away because of the instability of the market. The Walton Family Foundation, which has committed $1 billion over the next five years to expanding charters and choice, similarly withdrew its money from Detroit earlier this year.

The legislation proposed earlier this year by Goeff Hansen, a Republican state senator, would have paid off the debt of the city's traditional public schools, which were on the brink of bankruptcy, and returned control of those schools from the state to a locally elected school board.

But the provision that proved most controversial to the DeVoses would have established a Detroit Education Commission, appointed by the mayor. With three members from charter schools, three from the traditional public schools and one an expert in educational accountability, the commission was to come up with an A-to-F grading system for all schools, and evaluate which neighborhoods in the city most needed schools.

School operators that earned below an A or B could not expand without the commission's signing off on their location. Schools that earned an F three years in a row could be closed.

Ms. DeVos and her husband wrote legislators urging them to reject any legislation that included the commission. Why, they argued, should residents have choice in where they shop for food and travel, but not in schools? She wrote a Detroit News op-ed arguing to "retire" Detroit Public Schools and "liberate all students" to use tax dollars to attend public or charter schools of their choice.

Leaders of 20 charter schools in Detroit, including some of the highest-performing, made a last-ditch effort to urge the Legislature to adopt the commission. "We have to be looking at every possible way to expand the choices and the opportunities in the neighborhoods for families," Clark Durant, a onetime Republican candidate for the United States Senate and the co-founder of a network of schools, said at a news conference alongside Mayor Mike Duggan. "And I believe this is the beginning of that effort."

The legislation passed the State Senate. But in the House of Representatives, support fell away, as leaders of the Republican caucus reminded the members of how much financial support the DeVoses could withhold.

They warned that the DeVoses would finance primary challenges against Republicans who defied her, as they had done to one who voted against the bill to lift the cap on charter schools five years earlier.

The DeVoses, said Representative Dave Pagel, a Republican who supported the commission, "made arguments that were strongly heard, and they prevailed."

Another Republican, declining to comment for fear of alienating Ms. DeVos when she is poised to become a cabinet secretary, sent a link to an article detailing the DeVoses' financial contributions to Republicans after the vote, saying it explained all there was to explain.

The House passed a bill that never included the language establishing the commission. The bill paid off the debt of Detroit Public Schools and returned the city's traditional public schools to local control. And it will allow the state to close the schools at the bottom of existing state rankings, which Mr. Naeyaert said was proof that Ms. DeVos supported measures to ensure quality.

But that will mean shutting down mostly traditional public schools, which in Detroit serve the neediest students, and further desert students in neighborhoods where charters have largely declined to go.

"My complaint around this is not that you disagree," said Ms. Allen, at the Skillman Foundation, "but that you never could come up with another solution to deal with the practical issues of poor public policy that is not only eroding a traditional school system, but eroding all schools."

Noam Scheiber contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: How Trump's Choice for Education Shaped Schools in Detroit. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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How Trump's Education Nominee Bent Detroit to Her Will on Charter Schools

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Few disagreed that schools in Detroit were a mess: a chaotic mix of charters and traditional public schools, the worst-performing in the nation. So city leaders across the political spectrum agreed on a fix, with legislation to provide oversight and set standards on how to open schools and close bad ones.

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The mission of Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists is to provide the highest caliber of academic and artistic education for aspiring pre-professional performing artists in the areas of instrumental and vocal music, theatre and dance, and to fully prepare students for college and conservatory.

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SPCPA is right in Downtown Saint Paul. At the corner of 5th and Wabasha near the Wells Fargo building.