AVReading Newsletter June 2025: Looking Back
Years ago, I had a student who told me that I should have her uncle come as a guest speaker to my class. She gave me no prompt as to why he might be a good fit, or even what he would talk about but the class was called Sex, Drugs, and RocknRoll: a Study of the the Counter Culture of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, so I went with it. I was comforted by the fact that he was a teacher in Minneapolis, so I wasn’t taking a huge risk in inviting him to class. When he showed up, I learned that he taught theatre in a high school. He wore glasses, but he was missing one of the stems so they sat askew on his face. This was the 90s and AVHS was almost exclusively white, so his first comment to me was, “Wow! I’m in a White Palace here!” There is so much I remember about his talk that day. He was a recovering addict, so he had a few stories about some of his wild adventures. He talked about race at ...