Welcome
"Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?" --Pres. George W. Bush, Jan. 11, 2000
Hi.
My name is Ruben Abrahams Brosbe. I’m a NYC based educator and writer. I get very excited about social justice, making a great playlist, and ice cream sandwiches.
In 2007, I started a blog “Is Our Children Learning?” to write about my experiences as a first year teacher in the Bronx. It was a way for me to share stories from my teaching journey with my friends and family, and it gave me a chance to keep writing.
Fourteen and a half years later, I’m jumping on the Substack bandwagon for similar reasons. I’m not in the classroom this year, but I still have lots of ideas about teaching and education policy. I want to use this space to share them, and to continue growing as a writer.
While I’ll continue to ground much of my writing in my firsthand experiences as a teacher, I’ll also be thinking a lot about the systems that shape teaching and learning. As a first year teacher, I thought a lot about my identity and privilege as a white, middle-class person. In the years since then, I’ve been lucky to learn so much from friends, professors, authors, and organizers. They have given me some language and tools to think about systems of oppression like racism, patriarchy, classism, ableism, and others.
I’m also very passionate about abolishing the prison-industrial complex and fighting authoritarianism in the United States. I don’t see these as completely distinct topics from education, but I want to give you a heads up I’ll probably be writing about them from time to time.
I won’t claim to be an expert on any of these topics, even teaching. Nonetheless, I am very excited to share what I do know, and what I wonder.
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