Day: August 29, 2023

View the full episode transcript.
It’s a common scenario – one that plays out in schools and homes all the time. A child hurts another child, physically or emotionally. Grownups are called in to arbitrate. The adult tells one – or perhaps all – of the kids to say, “I’m sorry.” Those two words are uttered, and all is supposed to be well. But the resolution is often lopsided. “When you just do that quick apology, you feel better, you move on,” said fifth grade teacher Rayna Freedman. “But oftentimes the other person is still left with a bucket of feelings.” She remembers that from her own childhood, and she sees it all the time in her classroom at Jordan Jackson Elementary School in Mansfield, Massachusetts.
That’s why, for the last few years, she’s been teaching her students how to give more meaningful apologies. During these lessons, the fifth graders practice not only saying “I’m sorry,” but acknowledging why their actions were wrong, offering to repair harm, and promising not to r..

Eric Hitchner teaches English on the fourth floor of a 111-year-old high school in Philadelphia. Come September, his classroom will be packed with a new crop of teenagers, but one thing will be the same: the lack of air conditioning.
It can get so hot in his room, he says, “no one wants to even move, let alone do some strenuous thinking.”
He knows firsthand that even when the outside temperatures cool down, his classroom often doesn’t. Last September, when it was in the low 70s in Philadelphia, it was 86 degrees inside.
His SmartBoard, an interactive teaching device that the school district bought with COVID relief money, tells him the exact temperature and humidity level. He’s clocked it as high as 93 degrees.
“Those things are not inexpensive,” he says. “I would have allocated that money for air conditioning. But nobody asked me.”
Hitchner teaches in one of the estimated 36,000 public schools nationwide without adequate air conditioning. As temperatures keep rising around much o..