Catholics gather to celebrate Pope Leo's election at Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe
DES PLAINES, Ill. — Chicago-area Catholics continued to pray and give thanks for the selection of Pope Leo.
Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected Thursday as the first American pope. Prevost was born in the Chicago area.
More: Robert Prevost named Pope Leo XIV
Many faithful flocked to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Des Plaines Thursday after hearing the news.
Shrine staff says they're weekly mass will go on as at 7 p.m. WGN's Christine Flores was at the shrine and got reaction from those who came by
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8 hours ago
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My 2 kids and I are living with my parents before moving to Chicago. I'm learning asking for support isn't a weakness.
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11 hours ago
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That time I was headed nowhere, fast
Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up School was a break from work on the farm and on trucks, and I wanted to laugh and run wild. Still, I wonder what difference it might have made if any one of my teachers had given me a tape measure, pencils, and paper and sent me out to measure everything in the playground or draw the birds in the sky that I saw there. But that just wasn't how teachers taught boys like me. I suspect they had little doubt as to the type of man I would become — the kind I worked with on ranches and construction sites, ones with clichéd blue-collar traits, both good and bad. Advertisement My father was among them. A professional country music musician, a trucker, and operator of heavy equipment, he was also a drinker and a fighter. He espoused racist views that made no sense to me, since I'd only ever been around white people, and some of them were dangerous crooks who'd spent time in prison. My father was also the one man I spent much of my young life with — under trucks, tending farm animals, riding around in pickups. Advertisement I drank with or around him in my late teens. I spent endless hours with him as he worked and drank with other men. I often witnessed his raw violence — toward helpless animals on our farm, toward a sister's boyfriend who'd sneaked into the house. I learned that emotions can be dangerous. When I was 8, after weeks of being attacked by a rooster that left me bloodied, my father locked me in a barn with it. I had a large stick. The rooster, his spurs. I knocked him out of the air and would have killed him, but my father stopped me. He respected that rooster and called me 'Rooster' ever after. By the end of my junior year of high school in 1981, I had a grade-point average in the low D range, poor attendance, lunch time drinking, and pervasive discipline problems, including fights in and out of school. Like millions of American boys and young men, past and present, I was well on my way to becoming a member of a Advertisement So how am I writing this after a 30-year career in journalism instead of a few stints behind bars and the kind of hard-luck life I'd seen so much of? Rebellion, and a science fiction novel. As my senior year approached, my father wanted me to delay going back to school so I could work for him. Ambivalent as I was about school, I knew that if I did this, I would never go back, and I had the vague but motivating sense that I wanted something else for myself, something more. I rebelled by going back to school. Later that year, I moved out of my family home. I met the girl who has now been my partner for more than 40 years. I made guy friends who introduced me to punk rock and wild, nonviolent escapades with bikes, trampolines, junk cars, and conversation. And then I met Mark, who gave me the first novel I ever read. I had noticed that our social studies teacher genuinely engaged with Mark's challenging questions. Skinny and studious, Mark appeared more rebellious to me than those of us roughhousing, flirting, drunk or stoned or both, giggling at the back of the classroom. I was curious about Mark's ability to so constructively question authority. We spoke a few times about it, and one afternoon, he gave me ' Advertisement Briefly, 'Orphans' is about a young man, Hugh Hoyland, who discovers that his world exists inside a spaceship. This reality was hidden from him by myths and lies passed down to him that his own willful ignorance perpetuated. Only when he encounters the freaks of that world — banished mutants, the readers of forbidden books, and thinkers — does Hugh understand that there is an entire universe outside his world. There could not have been a more apt metaphor for my cramped, small, myth-laden life. The novel sparked something in me. I began to read and study. I participated in a week-long event for high schoolers on a college campus. I figured out how to get student loans and Pell Grants. I figured out how to get into the community college in Billings and then the University of Montana, where I studied philosophy and eventually earned an MFA in creative writing. For me, education was an act of defiance. It freed me from the confines and contours of a destiny as a hard and angry man, and it made me want to earn access to the world beyond it. But I had to discover my own path to the power of language and knowledge. There's a lot of talk about boys these days. How they're in trouble. How they're toxic. I hope that as we focus on them, we don't force-feed them our expectations or beat them down like dangerous animals. I hope we give them the time and space to be rebellious and build themselves up with education that welcomes them. It's a lot of trouble to let boys be boys, but I believe in us. Advertisement
Buzz Feed
17 hours ago
- Buzz Feed
The Hidden Dark Side Of Gifted Programs Revealed
I don't remember precisely when I first heard the word 'gifted,' but it must have been in early elementary school. I do remember being pulled out of my first-grade class and led to the fifth-grade classroom, where a teacher told me to choose a chapter book that was 'more at my level.' I appreciated the chance to choose from all sorts of new books, but it marked an early example of what would eventually be both a privilege and a curse: my foray into being 'set apart' academically from my fellow classmates. By the time I reached middle school, the gifted and talented program in my district had taken wing. The timing makes sense: In 1998, many American schools were provided with official K-12 standards for so-called 'gifted education' by the National Association of Gifted Children. While the NAGC first promoted advanced academic programming in the 1950s, its work in the late '80s and '90s represented a more structured approach to educating students who were found to be gifted. K-12 gifted education standards were preceded by the passage of the Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Act in 1988, which secured funding to 'orchestrate a coordinated program of scientifically based research, demonstration projects, innovative strategies, and similar activities that build and enhance the ability of elementary and secondary schools to meet the special educational needs of gifted and talented students.' In those early days, my experience with Gifted & Talented (or G/T, as we fondly called it) was almost entirely positive. Our G/T class was tucked away in a windowless classroom whose walls we decorated with silly drawings and posters. Several of my close friends were also in the program, and there was nothing better than getting to hang out with them for an hour or two per day while working on our largely self-assigned curriculum. Our teacher was warm and encouraging, always pushing each of us to incorporate our individual interests and skills into projects. In fact, nearly all the teachers I worked with in G/T were engaged educators who genuinely wanted their students to thrive. I'm forever grateful for their personal guidance, regardless of my later reflections on the program. In so many ways, G/T was a safe place at school — a place where I could be my true (weird) self and engage in more self-directed learning. But there was a troubling flip side to the G/T experience that took me years to unpack. From what I could gather, most students qualified for the program based on standardized test scores. While the NAGC defines gifted pupils as 'those who demonstrate outstanding levels of aptitude (defined as an exceptional ability to reason and learn) or competence (documented performance or achievement in top 10% or rarer) in one or more domains,' it seems inevitable that many kids would be excluded from gifted education for factors beyond their control. In her 2016 book Engaging and Challenging Gifted Students: Tips for Supporting Extraordinary Minds in Your Classroom, Jenny Grant Rankin, Ph.D., outlines gaps in gifted education. Nonwhite students, socioeconomically disadvantaged kids, girls, and those classified as English language learners are disproportionately excluded from gifted and talented programming, Rankin reports. She also cites a 2016 study by Jason A. Grissom and Christopher Redding that found that Black students were 50% less likely to be considered for gifted and talented programs than their white counterparts, even when both groups recorded similar standardized test scores. What's more, students of color were less likely to be labeled gifted when their teachers were white. In G/T, I learned quickly that much of my self-esteem came from academic praise and approval from adults. The 'gifted' label seeped into everything I did and was a stumbling block at times — if I struggled to master a concept in math class or didn't understand a question on a social studies test, I'd avoid asking for help. After all, I was gifted. I shouldn't need help with anything, right? It felt like my so-called 'natural' giftedness should pre-qualify me to succeed in any endeavor, which led me to prematurely give up on new hobbies later in life when I didn't immediately feel like a master. And when a project in a non-G/T class earned anything less than an A, I often found myself in tears and seeking reassurance from my family and friends that I was 'still smart.' The question of 'potential' was another overwhelming aspect of G/T. Gifted kids at my school were encouraged to pursue all sorts of fields — with the unspoken message that no matter what we pursued, we were expected to be excellent. Most of us went on to take as many Advanced Placement classes in high school as our schedules would allow, driven by the sense that we simply had to be high achievers. Academic excellence would translate directly to excellence in career and life in general, many of us thought. It wasn't until college that I first experienced the lingering impacts of the gifted education experience. Suddenly, I was a very small fish in the massive pond that is the University of Michigan. I wasn't the 'smart kid' anymore— I was one of thousands of 'smart kids,' all of whom had ambitions on par with or beyond my own. College instructors rarely offered direct praise, and the occasional B in a class became commonplace. When I couldn't maintain perfection, I felt like I was failing the version of myself I was supposed to become. Unsurprisingly, college was also when my mental health took its first major nosedive. Alongside a handful of personal issues, my sudden sense of academic invisibility had triggered a crisis. My path felt unclear. Wasn't I supposed to get to college, breeze through with perfect grades, and immediately jump into an impressive career? When graduation rolled around, I got a dose of validation by heading off on a Fulbright teaching grant to Malaysia, but my life beyond that looked so blurry. It took a long time to admit that I didn't want to go to grad school, which felt shameful. Without academic validation or 'high achievement' on the table, would I be untethered forever? In the decade since, I've drawn connections between my most plaguing anxieties and my early education. It's taken practice to feel more comfortable with accepting professional criticism or admitting when I'm not sure how to do something at work. I see how my G/T years merged self-worth with accolades and grades, and I feel sad for the younger version of myself — along with other 'formerly gifted' peers — who internalized so many false measures of success. At times, adulthood feels like an ongoing battle to remind myself that I'm a valuable, worthy person, regardless of outward achievements. I'm not alone: In recent years, the 'formerly gifted kid' trope has become something of a meme, with TikTokers cracking dark jokes about their lingering sense of anxiety, perfectionism and perceived failure to live up to parents' and teachers' expectations. It's funny because it's true. Data shows that while gifted programs can result in better long-term academic outcomes and college success for some students, these benefits still reflect inequities. A 2021 study by Grissom and Redding found that small associations existed between participation in gifted programming and long-term achievement in math and reading, but there was no evidence to support a correlation between gifted kids and their general engagement with school. Most glaringly, even these small positive associations were skewed toward higher-income white pupils, with low-income or Black gifted students excluded from long-term academic gains. What's more, this research doesn't begin to explore gifted education's extended impact on social and emotional development for all participants. I don't regret my time as a gifted kid, but I do wish G/T had offered more care for students' mental health and more inclusivity for children who didn't fit the program's relatively narrow mold of exceptionalism. I wish I could unlearn the idea that outward praise equals true success, and measure excellence in the form of learning for learning's sake. Above all, I wish we'd had an environment where every single student was reminded how smart and talented they were, and given the tools to explore their gifts — no matter what form they took.
