It’s a recent Tuesday morning at New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School. In Rahn Broady’s environmental science classroom, groups of three or four students analyzed an assignment as instrumental trip hop played through a speaker.
Broady is a biologist by study, but he’s been a teacher for 24 years and has brought his eye for nature into the classroom. On a low table beside the whiteboard sits the white skull of a feral pig, framed by a robin’s nest, a songbird suspended in a glass jar, and bug specimens pinned by his students. Around the room are wooden engravings with narratives his students wrote about native plants and animals. He came to Sci High last school year after the school board closed the Living School, the high school in the East where he used to teach.
“Alligator your computers,” Broady says at the beginning of class time, motioning for his students to angle their laptop screens down towards their keyboards. “I need y’all to focus.”
He stood at the front of his honors environmental science class in a pair of black skinny jeans, combat boots and a Yankees hat. He wore a leather cuff on one wrist, four silver rings on the other hand, and a black t-shirt with white text that reads “you can’t love freedom & hate diversity.”=
Broady regularly challenges his environmental science students to solve real-life problems in the world around them. Today, in the second week of school, he asked his students to turn their attention to a new intersection of Louisiana legislation and culture: balloons…