Rebecca Bodenheimer

High school has always been hard, but its challenges are now unprecedented. Peter Nicks’s new documentary, Homeroom, which began streaming on Hulu on August 12, follows a group of Oakland students as they move through their final chapter of high school. Their academic year began in 2019 before it was, of course, interrupted by the pandemic. Homeroom is the third in Nicks’s Oakland trilogy, which also includes documentaries on Highland Hospital (The Waiting Room) and Oakland’s police departmen...

The title of Madremonte, the debut album from Colombian duo Jaguar, is a nod to the folklore of their homeland. A counterpart to the more well-known Latin American mythical figures La Llorona or the chupacabra, Madremonte is said to be a jungle dweller, covered in leaves and moss, who can cause storms and flooding. As a protector of Mother Earth, she enacts vengeance on people who cause environmental destruction or steal land, and even on philandering husbands. The group’s name, Jaguar, also ...

A prolific composer, Álavarez contributed countless hits to the Cuban popular music canon. His last album with Adalberto Álvarez y su Son, the group he created in 1984, was released in 2018. The group performed up until the onset of the pandemic last year.
Álvarez was born on Nov. 22, 1948 in Havana “by accident” -- his parents were visiting the capital from Camagüey, a province in central Cuba, and returned there shortly after his birth. As a teen, he began his musical career as a singer but...

The past year has been very difficult for the kids. Prolonged school closures, which have lasted over a year for most middle and high schoolers in California, have deprived students of normal social and academic interactions—during one of the most important stages in their social-emotional learning. Adolescent brains are particularly geared toward seeking status and respect among their peers. So, what happens when the primary settings for navigating and exploring interpersonal relationships a...

s the mom of a 9-year-old with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), I’ve often struggled to understand my son’s behaviors. He isn’t always able to sit still at the dinner table for more than a few minutes, he'll try to play with his soccer ball while the rest of the family is watching a movie, and I often have to ask him things three or four times before he hears me. He is also impulsive, talks back often, and has trouble not interrupting conversations.

For decades, they asked the lower classes to sacrifice on behalf of the revolution, while prioritizing tourism. Now protesters are saying they’ve had enough.
When the protests against the Cuban government broke out across the island on July 11, one of President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s first reactions was to refer to the behavior of the protesters as “totalmente vulgar, indecente, delincuente” (completely vulgar, indecent, delinquent). Though he would later backpedal and take a conciliatory tone, ...

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (the nation’s second largest teachers union), has recently embarked on a media blitz to tout her support for a full reopening of schools in the fall.
By and large, she’s found willing partners in news outlets. She has been profiled in the New York Times, stating “my union is all in” for reopening schools. She was interviewed on MSNBC, NPR, and a host of other broadcast news outlets, al...

Hulu’s Shrill, adapted from Lindy West’s 2016 memoir of the same name, has been a bright spot as it relates to the representation of fat women onscreen. There are very few TV shows that center the experiences of fat women—and even fewer avoid perpetuating fatphobia. Take This Is Us’s Kate Pearson (Chrissy Metz), the most famous fat female character on TV, whose storylines have mostly followed her struggle and desire to lose weight and her unhappiness as a fat person. Kate is, as Bitch Media e...

With over 40% of Bay Area residents fully vaccinated and two-thirds halfway there, many people are starting to reunite with family and friends and making plans for the summer. Unfortunately, this welcome trend also comes with anxiety about those “pandemic pounds.”
Over 60% of Americans have reported gaining weight over the past year. Now that the country is reopening, messaging on social media and the news is urging us to lose it. We’ve also seen instances of fatphobic hand-wringing from medi...

In 1935 Duke Ellington composed Reminiscing in Tempo. The piece was a departure for the great jazz composer. Reminiscing in Tempo (RIT) didn’t sound like Ellington’s popular songs. It was long, clocking in at over twelve minutes. It didn’t swing. It was experimental. It wasn’t something the white audience at the Cotton Club expected from a Black composer.
RIT posed a creative risk for Ellington. The work was personal. Ellington wrote RIT in response to the death of his mother. In A Beat of Hi...

The Mills School of Education had already adjusted its program to better prepare teachers for the challenges of urban schools. What happens when that intersects with a pandemic?
By Rebecca Bodenheimer
Professor Tomás Galguera is the bridge between the School of Education (SOE) faculty from before and after the turn of the millennium. Early childhood education used to underpin most SOE programming, he said, but once his older colleagues retired around the mid-2000s, there was a shift in the sc...

Kimberley Leo was the owner of Namaste Yoga and Wellness — which at its peak had three locations in Oakland and Berkeley, California — when the pandemic forced her to close up shop last May.
Afterwards, she began to see some of her teachers striking out on their own on Zoom. She said they were offering much lower prices than she'd had to charge to cover the cost of renting out studio space in the prohibitively expensive Bay Area.

“Every single day is a battle.”
That’s how Maria Elena Novo describes remote learning since suddenly becoming her son’s main teacher last spring. A third grader in the Oakland Unified School District in California, David hates Zoom; Novo has to hound him to turn his camera on.
“I sit with him every da...

As public health experts reach a consensus about the low risk of transmission of the COVID-19 virus within schools, Oakland parents have become frustrated at the lack of urgency by educational leaders to get kids safely back to the classroom. While the Oakland Unified School District rolled out a plan several weeks ago to begin a phased reopening on Jan. 25, it has now decided to postpone reopening, not even giving parents a new date.

Jigsaw puzzles have made a major comeback in 2020. In the spring, when the first shelter-in-place orders were issued in many regions of the country due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, there was a surge in demand for puzzles. Puzzle makers saw sales go up by 300 to 400%, and, due to the pandemic-related pause in production, quickly sold out of popular items. As this seemingly endless year has dragged on—with record-breaking numbers of COVID-19 cases in the U.S.—sheltering in place isn’t end...