I sat in the back of the classroom in a green metal chair, just small enough that my knees bent at an uncomfortable angle. The room hummed with the morning activity of students unloading backpacks, turning in homework and making their lunch selections on the white board. I waited patiently for my morning...

By J. Scott McElroy and Jessie Nilo The ceiling of the Florence Baptistry in Italy. Dating from 1225, it tells stories from the bible and has impacted millions of people over hundreds of years, including many Renaissance artists. Hundreds of years ago, local churches were, in many ways, centers for experiencing beauty,...

Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become your character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.    Anonymous   Sometimes there is a confluence of events that that makes current...

Kids—particularly kids who aren’t yet school age—act weird in church. They don’t play by the same rules as adults: they draw with their crayons, they read their books. I once saw two preschool-aged boys sitting next to each other, each playing a different game on their two iPads. And when they...

I had an outcast in my middle school a while back.  She was significantly bigger than the rest of the students and in China, where the genetic code predicts that about 83% of the people are going to be skinny, this compounds the stigma of being “big boned.”  She sweated a bit too much....

I teach too much. I’ve been teaching from the same four books for seven months now. I’m not magical but I’ve come to foresee every question, every laugh and every mispronounced word like a sorcerer sees a shrew. This can be mind-numbing at times but sometimes, rarely, my students unravel strange...

When Waiting For Superman came out in the fall of 2010, I was nervous as much as I was excited. While the movie sparked a long overdue conversation about the cracks and crevices of American K-12 education, I knew it was doing so by highlighting the very school district where I teach, DC Public Schools....

I threw a little temper tantrum at Office Max about a month ago.  Standing in front of the Post-It note display, I eyed the price tag on the oddly sized pads of paper my daughter needed to take to school.  Fifteen dollars!  The price of the sticky notes was more than her crayons, colored pencils,...

If you can today, pray for this situation. Why?  Because we should pray for all these situations.  But also because Burnside contributor Diane Nienhuis is a teacher at Creston High School.  We hope she (and the rest of the students and staff) stays safe if the situation doesn’t cool down. Here’s...