Belle Chesler

Belle Chesler is a visual arts teacher in Beaverton, Oregon.
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, August 20, 2020 The “Great” Reopening Seventeen years ago, against the advice of my parents, I decided to become a public school teacher. Once I did, both my mother and father, educators themselves, warned me that choosing to teach was to invite attacks from those who viewed the profession with derision and contempt. They advised me to... Read more |
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Views Monday, May 11, 2020 This Empire Has No Clothes: In the Classroom That Zoom Built Do you hear that silence? That’s the absence of footsteps echoing through our nation’s public school hallways. It’s the silence of teaching in a virtual space populated with students on mute who lack a physical presence. It’s the crushing silence of those who are now missing, who can’t attend the... Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 18, 2019 Defunding Children, A National Crisis of the Soul Three weeks ago, I sat in a cramped conference room in the large public high school where I teach in Beaverton, Oregon. I was listening to the principal deliver a scripted PowerPoint presentation on the $35-million-dollar budget deficit our district faces in the upcoming school year. Teachers and... Read more |
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Views Thursday, October 18, 2018 The Kavanaugh Hearings Just Won't Leave Me Alone It’s been three weeks since Dr. Christine Blasey Ford gave her testimony before the nation and I’m still struggling to move on. As talk turns toward the impending midterms, I find myself mentally pushing back against the relentlessness of the news cycle as it plows on, casting a spell of cultural... Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 19, 2018 Students as Teachers: Facing the World Adults Are Wrecking During the first week of May 1963, more than 800 African-American students walked out of their classrooms and into the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, to call for an end to segregation. Despite frequent arrests and having dogs and high-pressure firehoses turned on them, they kept marching. Their... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, March 06, 2018 Will an AR-15 Succeed Where the American Dream Failed? “It was no surprise to anyone who knew him to hear that he was the shooter.” — Emma Gonzalez , Senior, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Over the past three weeks, the impassioned voices and steadfast demands of the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have resounded across social... Read more |