Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

had other remarkable teachers who remain cherished friends to this day—particularly Miriam Kagol, my English teacher, and Marjorie Bingham, who taught me AP American history and indulged my fascination with Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories and my early obsessions with Israel, the Six-Day War, and the Middle East. I was intrigued to hear them both reminisce about the high quality of the public schools. “I had money to buy whatever books I wanted,” Bingham remarked. “There were NSF [National Science Foundation] grants, there were national conferences you could go to. You never felt isolated in your classroom. [You felt as though] you were on a bigger stage and could talk to people from Illinois or California. [Today] a teacher will spend four or five hundred dollars of their own money on supplies. That just didn’t occur” back then. St. Louis Park “teachers were encouraged by the administration to be creative.”