Amen to this! My first year teaching was in the ghteto of Milwaukee the year Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. I threw out all the new methods of teaching English I'd learned in a progressive teacher Education program and followed my instincts (none of which had ever been in such classrooms). One young man never learned English from me, but I did teach him to drive a stick shift car (my little VW Bug!) Can you imagine the world letting me do that today? I learned more that year than in any other except perhaps the first year of my life. It changed who I would be for the rest of my life. Today's social issues challenges are nothing compared to what I saw and learned to love in 1967-68!