Teaching to reach every single student

There will be plenty for me to say soon about using technology in my classroom. I am in the process of setting up the blogs and wikis (at last).

For now, though, I saw this article in Saturday’s New York Times. It has nothing to do with technology, but would make a great lesson anyway.

Thirty-five years ago this month, Mr. Geller joined other men in holding up a Herald Square bank and making off with $63,535. Three of the robbers were quickly nabbed, as they used to say, including at least one with a gun. But a fourth man, Gerry Geller from Brooklyn, melted into the blur of a metropolis he knew so well.

Save for a law enforcement official or two, no one cared about the loose ends of a flubbed bank robbery that was quickly fading from the city’s collective memory. Out there somewhere, though, was a man who could not forget, and so was assiduously working at being forgotten.

He kept changing his name, his home and his job in a state-trotting whirl of deceit that eventually landed him back in the great hiding place called New York. He soon found that in wanting to keep his true background to himself, he was not alone.“I was no different than any illegal alien,’’ Mr. Geller said after his court appearance.He began working in diners as a waiter and a cook, and moved into an old S.R.O. on the Bowery called the Andrews House. “They’re very small cubicles, but it’s a roof, and there’s hot water,’’ he said. “It’s still a Bowery S.R.O., but the people are more than kind.’’Perhaps one day he would have died under the assumed identity of George Cook, his actual name a casualty of an old crime.

But Mr. Geller’s failing heart led to a change of heart.

The story is about this change of heart and how Mr. Geller turned himself in decades after the crime.

Should we celebrate criminality with our students? Of course not. But should we celebrate the intregrity and courage of this man? Definitely.

Time Tempers Fugitive’s Day of Reckoning - New York Times

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