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Teaching Outside the Box During the week between Christmas and New Year's -- when most schools are on their winter break -- All Things Considered has taken some time to get to know teachers and students who work outside a regular classroom. These teachers employ pedagogies of inquiry, discipline and love.
Special Series

Teaching Outside the Box

Students and teachers talk about innovative methods they're using in the classroom.

Blues Song Is a Decades-Long Music Lesson

As part of our series about students and teachers, musicologist Bruce Nemerov describes the way that one song is recorded by several different musicians in different decades of the 20th century. The older musicians are teaching the younger musicians through the song "Sitting on Top of the World." We hear the song as recorded by Al Jolson, The Mississippi Sheiks, Howlin' Wolf, Eric Clapton, Bill Monroe and The Grateful Dead.

Blues Song Is a Decades-Long Music Lesson

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Teaching Violence, and Control, to Children

Karate instructor Louise Rafkin describes the way that she teaches children to hit. Childhood is a violent time, Rafkin says, and her students learn how to control their innate violence. As Rafkin talks with two of her young students, one describes the power struggles at his school.

Teaching Violence, and Control, to Children

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Students Praise Above-and-Beyond Teachers

Three students at Curie High School in Chicago share stories of the teachers who mentor them after school. Kirsten Sanders profiles her bowling teacher, Madeline Ramirez. Charles Garcia interviews his TV teacher Noel Occomy, and Phillip Baggett introduces his gospel choir director, Rev. Daniel Garrett.

Students Praise Above-and-Beyond Teachers

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Opinion

Forgetting a Language, and Learning it Anew

As an adult, Pueng Vongs is relearning how to speak her native language. When she was a child, her family emigrated to the U.S. from Thailand. Isolated from other Thais in the Midwest, her parents decided that they should speak only English in their home.

Forgetting a Language, and Learning it Anew

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