Belle Chesler

Belle Chesler

Belle Chesler is a visual arts teacher in Beaverton, Oregon.

Articles by this author

A kid wears a face mask and a backpack in Kips Bay as the city continues Phase 4 of re-opening following restrictions imposed to slow the spread of coronavirus on August 15, 2020 in New York City. (Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images) 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...
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Perhaps it’s a rare opportunity to acknowledge that our nation’s public schools should not be left so alone to provide food, mental health care, and digital connectivity for our nation’s children. That should be, in a fashion almost unimaginable in America today, the role of the larger society. (Photo: Ryan Stanton/flickr/cc) 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...
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Teachers rallied at Manzanita Community School in Oakland on Thursday as about 3,000 educators went on strike to demand fair pay and more investment in public schools. (Photo: @CTAJulian/Twitter) 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...
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I’m still mired in the past, shaken by the spectacle of the Kavanaugh hearings, and pulled across the decades into the darkest crevasses of my memories. (Photo: Screenshot) 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...
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"Asking them to accept the depressing realities of the society we’re bequeathing to them without expecting them to respond, let alone protest, is tantamount to teaching without listening."(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images) 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...
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At the beginning of the semester, I gave my new students a questionnaire about their lives. One of them answered the question “What is one thing that really stresses you out?” by writing: “What really stresses me out is the fact that I might die in this building.”(Screengrab from NBC) 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...
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