Tuesday, November 21, 2017

on censorship.



How cool is this?  I beamed.  The President of the United States, a leader who will bring real change and genuine faith and who gets it will speak to students in classrooms across our nation tomorrow.  


This means something.  And teachers across America can quote President Obama and refer back to his relevant advice to our kids.  I wonder if this was his idea?


My anticipation of Obama’s back-to-school speech, coupled with the handful of anti-Obama (but let’s be real, anti-Black president) parents in my 2009 school community reminded me how much I missed the big city and surrounding myself with like-minded people. Am I the only one geeking out over this around here?


As the school-wide instructional leader at that time, I had both power in decision making and the responsibility to collaborate with teachers and parents to provide the best educational opportunities for our kids.  We all wanted success for these young minds.


So to my surprise, blatant verbal threats blasted through my not-so-smart silver flip phone just days before the 2009 speech was to air.  


Do you really think I’m going to let you show my daughter that?  If I find out she was part of that viewing, we are going to have another conversation.  


Or…


“I will pull my three kids if you show that man on the TV.”


And the kinder-toned demands…


“We do not support Barack Obama, and if you are planning on showing that speech to my child, he needs to be removed from class.”


So I did what any school leader would do. We held a viewing party and I strongly encouraged teachers to show the live speech.  


Some teachers chose not to play it and some parents kept their kids home that day.  To be expected...


We’re not reading To Kill a Mockingbird in fourth grade, people.  We are watching a nationally publicized speech from the President of the United States of America!


And don’t get me wrong, eight years later, I cringe at the sound of our current president’s voice.  But do I play CNN Student News each morning for my fifth graders?  Yes.  And when Trump blurts out another ignorant message do I want to cover and protect my kids’ innocent ears?  Yes.    


Debating, analyzing and digging deep on various points of views makes for a hellova class discussion, doesn’t it, though?  Who knows, kids might even develop their own opinions, beyond their teachers, parents or President’s.  (Gasp!)


Is that what those parents and teachers were scared of in 2009?  That kids might’ve liked what Obama had to say, and the adults weren’t okay with that?  


In the end, reality is reality.  And I’m no proponent of inappropriate language, sexual content or glamorized violence in school settings, but uncovering age-appropriate controversial topics surrounding us in today’s current events with a carefully chosen text set makes sense to me.  


The challenge now is to teach our students how to back up their newly developed opinions with strong text evidence.  Sending y’all strength and yoga breaths on this one...


Stay woke teachers.  Happy Thanksgiving!  Power to the teacher.  


“But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life -- what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home -- none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school. That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. There is no excuse for not trying.


Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up. No one's written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.”  -Barack Obama, Back-to-School Speech, September 8, 2009

Want to read more?  Check out Obama’s entire speech here.  

Sunday, November 12, 2017

on reading for fun.


Choosing between reading a book and watching Netflix is a no-brainer for me.  Last night, I shamefully indulged on three episodes of MTV’s Catfish while simultaneously trolling Instagram, Facebook and posting recipes on Pinterest that will likely never make it to my stomach.  


Who knew the Goosebumps addicted ten-year-old would one day choose crap TV over the new Gillian Flynn novel?  Who knew the literature loving fifteen-year-old who skipped the SparkNotes and fell in love with The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby would one day forgo a Saturday night snuggle with a thought-provoking autobiography to binge watch A Handmaid’s Tale.  (Don’t get me wrong, what a thought-provoking series!)


So what’s changed?  Technology of course.  The voracious reader I once was, slowly faded when smartphones, insta-movies, insta-music, insta-TV and insta-everything broke through in my early twenties.  As an educator, I obviously still love books, somehow though I rarely read for pleasure.  And books don’t make my Christmas list anymore.  


Thankfully that once book-obsessed child experienced a K-12 education with offered perspectives from Huck Finn, Veruca Salt, Ramona Quimby, Hester Prynne, Atticus Finch, The Babysitters Club girls and more.  


Do our students of today read for fun?  Do they like reading, or is it another chore like drying dishes?  Do they choose chapter books over Snapchat?  At home, how do they escape?  


Teachers hope reading logs and Accelerated Reader competitions promote lifelong readers, and for some kids, I think this does work.  In reality though, my guess is that kids do most of their reading at school.  


In the classroom, what is their purpose for reading?  Back in the eighties, pre-insta era, Nancy Atwell (In the Middle, 1987) researched and shared a list of negative things kids learn about reading:
  • Reading is difficult, serious business.  
  • Reading is a performance for the audience of one: the teacher.  
  • Reading is always followed by a test.  
  • Readers break whole texts into separate pieces to be read and dissected one fragment at a time.  
  • There is another kind of reading, a fun, satisfying kind you can do on your free time or outside of school.  


Atwell goes on to propose Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), also known as Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) where students across a school (or classroom) read for twenty or thirty minutes for pure pleasure.  Students choose their own books, there is no quiz to follow, and they just sit (or stand or lay down) and cuddle up with a good book.  

The last time I worked in a school that did this was 2004 in my student teaching placement.  With so much pressure for bridging the gap and catching up struggling readers, we rarely offer designated reading for enjoyment.  If not accompanied by comprehension questions and graphic organizers, we feel the need to hold some sort of accountability for their reading time.  


I get this.  My teacher friends get this.  We know lack of SSR and DEAR time in many schools hurts everyone’s goal of promoting lifelong readers.  


We know guided reading works, and with so little time to bridge gaps, we pick structured reading practice over unstructured.  


And since we also know kids go home and jump on Snapchat, we know they’re likely not staying up late reading Dragon Ball Z comics rather than playing the video game.


So fellow educators, I propose we bring back reading for fun in our classrooms.  For some of us, we have to sacrifice twenty minutes a day of target instruction that we know our kids need.  


I, too, feel this pressure.  Children though, can learn empathy, self-love, perseverance and relate to characters and real people, that just may inspire them to follow their dreams in life.  


Books can offer an escape into dystopian worlds, foreign countries and magical places that students may not encounter otherwise.  Yes, video games and films provide themes and settings, but is the movie ever really as good as the book?    


Growing up loving books opened my eyes to things before I ever got out of my parent’s house.  Throwing yourself into the human experience through the eyes of others is powerful.  


Hopefully, more schools prioritize the importance of reading for fun, or even to better ourselves as part of an ever-changing society that could use more empathy right now.      


Power to the Teacher!