Classroom Update #5: Have you read a good book lately?
Howdy, long time, no write. I apologize, but life has been happening and that leads to less writing. Can you tell I’ve been teaching cause and effect lately? I’m doing Colonial American history with the class, and that will be the topic of this post.
We had read a novel, Blood on the River, earlier in the year, and so they we’re well primed for a realistic discussion of the relations between colonials and natives. I never have any difficulty teaching slavery to upper elementary students. They totally get that owning other people is wrong. The hardest part is explaining why folks would think that’s a good idea. We’ve talked about how the Indians did not do well with diseases brought over as contact between the Americas and other continents increased. We’ve also talked about how that didn’t clear out the land, so colonists were grabbing it through various means.
One of the things that been helpful as I’m using student level materials on the subject, is to be listening to and reading text on the subject myself. As elementary educators, most of the reading we think of as “work related” is pretty directly tied to instruction (Dewey, Dweck, and love or hate him, Lemov, etc.) and lots of secondary English teachers will talk about literature they’re reading, but I only occasionally hear about social studies reading my peers are doing.
These days, I’m thinking more deliberately about my reading choices in the subject matter I teach. My favorite book that I’ve read to go along with the colonial experience is Sarah Vowell, Wordy Shipmates. I opted for an Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Classroom Update #5: Have you read a good book lately?:
Recently, the Oscars have been getting a lot of attention for, well I’ll let this NY Post cover explain it…
I quit watching the Oscars around age 12, because I’m not much of a movie goer. My list of never seens include (but are not limited to) Titanic, Avatar, E.T., Gremlins, and Back to the Future. Seriously, I’m not much of a movie person. Apparently, I’m not alone is abjuring the Oscars, but these include folks who do watch movies, they just aren’t watching what the Academy is spending time and attention on. They have a problem. Sort of like tech companies that figure out that when you don’t have women and minorities on your development team, you end up with products that only appeal to your white male 20 year old designers, and while it’s good to have employees as customers, you need a wider customer base than that.
They also realize they have a problem (wow, that just pops up before I finish typing in “Academy ” on Google). Too many of the Academy voting members are old, white, and male so that they not only don’t reflect the business they are judging, but they really don’t reflect their audience. But, some folks outside, don’t think they have a substantive problem, merely a political correctness problem.
I bring you one of those people today, Stacey Dash. I bring her up not because she is worthy, but because I saw someone in my Facebook feed who thought what she was saying made sense. So I wanted to break down why she is wrong in much of what she contends, and talk about why this is important. Here is the quote from Ms. Dash:
“Either we want to have segregation or integration. If we don’t want segregation, then we need to get rid of channels like BET and the BET Awards and the Image Awards where you’re only awarded if you’re Black. If it were the other way around, we would be up in arms…Just like there shouldn’t be a Black History Month. We’re Americans. Period.”
She does not even engage with the lack of representation in the Academy
Keep your eye on the prize…