Students Return to Big Changes in New Orleans

[athene]

NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 3 - Hundreds of children returned Tuesday for the first time since Hurricane Katrina to schools here that had survived on dry ground. Some came gleefully. Some came mournfully, and, to be sure, tens of thousands who were still displaced could not come at all.

The full NY Times article

Btw, the woman's class they show in the picture in the article is my mamma. You can see the back of her head in another picture in the slide show (she's teaching her class, wearing a dark green shirt)

x-posted to neworleans

Comments

[42itous.livejournal.com]

I'm curious how she feels about being back at work, and whether she sees kids appreciating education a little more than they did last year?

I've been doing some volunteer work with classes in a public school, grades K through 8. I know ours is one of the worst schools in the system, but it exhausts and depresses me every time I work there, how little the kids respect anybody (teachers and classmates) and how even the best kids don't seem particularly interested in the process of learning. I wonder, if these kids temporarily lost the ability to attend school, whether they'd appreciate it more when they got back.