MY MLK Day

I put the gauntlet down last week by requiring my students to avoid floating through MLK day brain dead. I encouraged them to educate themselves and learn something about Dr. King's life and/or the Civil Rights Movement.

I chose to head straight to a magnificent primary source: this morning I read King's 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail." It took me about a half hour to process the essay, and I really thought about his message to various ministers in the Birmingham community. So many of them resented that he, an outsider from Atlanta, had the chutzpah to demonstrate in Birmingham.

I was most impressed with King's measured tone, punctuating his lucid arguments to resist unjust laws, quoting from the Bible, Socrates, Aquinas, St. Augustine, Jefferson, Lincoln, and a plethora of other greats. Honestly, one could design a course of intensive study to last months just based on this historic letter.

I have always cherished the quote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," but I had little idea that it was from "The Letter."

Read it for yourself, and don't wait until the next MLK day to do it!

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Bearing Witness

My freshman English class is reading 1984 by George Orwell, and one of its major themes has to do with totalitarian regimes needing to scrub the memories of its citizens in order to stay in control. Big Brother's government demands a population of non-thinkers, people who know nothing of past unpleasantness or inconvenient truths about the world around them.

Leonard Pitts Jr., one of my favorite editorial writers, bemoans how in the African-American community there is a pervasive feeling of needing to forget the hell inflicted upon blacks during the Jim Crow South, and he mentions that in his own community there remains a "marked tendency to avoid the grit, gristle, and grime of our own history." He begins his article by admiring how Jews obsess about remembering the details of the Holocaust, deftly institutionalizing it, and educating others so that such a thing cannot happen again to them.

Millions of Americans today suffered terribly under Jim Crow, and untold thousands felt the heat of having neighbors and family members lynched. Pitts' article certainly serves as a wake-up call; we need to fight deliberate and accidental amnesia by being educated, critical thinkers. Could forgetting and failing to educate ourselves usher in a time when Americans again live in fear of being lynched or "vaporized?" Are Jim Crow and Big Brother relatives?

Read Pitts' article for yourself.

Using Voicethread to Teach Inferno

Did I Waste Time Over Break?

I truly value these long breaks because I finally have a chance to disregard time and schedules. I rarely check my watch (yes, I still own one), and I relish being able to read to my heart's delight. I knocked out the following books:

Little Bee, by Chris Cleave
I downloaded this from The South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative -http://sjrlc.lib.overdrive.com/70C7C4D1-9D2E-4185-922F-C40BD83D317E/10/420/en/Default.htm
This is a book that I found more poignant and gripping than even The Kite Runner. Read the review; it won't ruin the novel for you:
http://www.hclibrary.org/highlyrecommended/?p=3579



The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls
My mom had recommended this autobiography a few years ago. Jeanette Walls recounts the grinding poverty she coped with as a child, a poverty brought on by the nomadic lifestyle of her parents, loving but utterly irresponsible people, dreamers who bounced from town to town, raising their children with no structure. Several scenes turned my stomache.

On Thursday, I took my son and his friend to The Penn Museum http://www.penn.museum/, an awe-inspiring place packed with artifacts from around the world -- Rome, Africa, Greece, Mesopotamia, Canaan, Asia --- many of which were over 4000 years old. I cherry-picked loads of ideas for when I roll out the Greek Mythology Unit for my freshmen.

When Friday rolled around, I thought it was high time to take my daughter to the Philadelpia Museum of Art to see the the Michaelanglo Pist0letto exhibit. Check out the link and be sure to scroll down to see this amazing artist's work.
http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/412.html?page=2

Big Brother in the Classroom?

I've been thinking a lot lately about The New York Times article that I retitled "Big Brother in the Classroom." Honestly, could we teachers one day have video recordings of our lessons as a means of evaluation? If this happens, what's next? Could this morph into something terrible, like having permanent cameras in the room that would allow principals, administrators, and other teachers to constantly observe and critique? I invite anybody to come into my classroom at any time, even vulpine observers, but I have to draw the line at my classroom door when it comes to using cameras to record what I do without my approval. This comes dangerously close to the stuff of 1984.

Archiving Interesting Articles

It's funny how other people's habits can influence us. Long ago, back in my navy days and well before the ubiquitous Internet that now pervades our lives, I had a room mate named Ken who was a voracious and eclectic reader. I remember how he used to keep folders of newspaper clippings of stuff that caught his eye, and he would often make copies of the text so that it would neatly fit into file folders which he would then archive in plastic crates.

I admired the way he preserved and catalogued the articles in case he ever wanted to refer to them again, and after trying to emulate this idiosyncrasy of his, I gave up; I just wasn't organized enough and in my hands file cabinets and storage bins quickly become a big, messy nests of papers.

Enter the blog and its convenient way of maintaining a running list of links to our favorite articles! Look near the top of the blog to read an article that I read recently.

Give it a try! Look at the first article that I archived, the one about cameras entering the classroom to help evaluate teachers. Is this " Big Brotherish" and intrusive, or could this benefit the teaching profession?

Kiter Runner Chapter 13

Much about this chapter affected me emotionally.

For starters, General Taheri's disappointment at Soraya's wanting to become a teacher is very palpable to me. Admit it, in the United States, white collar jobs have a hierarchy. On the top of the pyramid come the monied professionals, the doctors, lawyers, financiers, then come the successful managers, power salespeople and entrepreneurs, all followed by teachers, social workers, and others who join the service professions.

I once thought of going to law school, attracted by the status and money that would reward me at the the end of the academic journey, but I kept coming back to teaching which in some ways I feel has been wired into my DNA. I've never looked back and I feel glad that I followed by heart and not the cash and prestige. It is a rich man who is happy with what he does for a living!

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The older we get, the more we think of our mortality. I've read The Kite Runner before I had anyone close in my life pass away. Last February, my father-in-law, a man whom I had known, respected, and loved for twenty years, passed away. He had many friends in his life, but he had long outlived them all, so his funeral was sparsely attended.

Baba was a man who only a few years prior had been strong and vital, loved for his generosity and gregariousness. The beautiful words said by so many at his funeral serve as a perfect tribute to a good man who lived his life well.