positivelypersistentteach:

savesteveholt:

there is no such phrase as “wouldn’t of”.

I think you mean “wouldn’t have”. 

Learn to speak your own language, thanks.

I suggest you read the book The Skin We Speak by Lisa Delpit.  It might teach you a little bit about language, different venues we use it and the “rules” that we follow based on the situation, and how better to approach “correcting” someone’s use of words in various contexts.

K?  Thanks.

Yeah! I’m reading a book right now by Lisa Delpit also, The Real Ebonics Debate. That’s what I was trying to talk about in staff meeting today when white people jumped down my throat and instead of making my point well I ended up crying in my office.

Whose language are you assuming this is? And what language have you decided “we” all need to speak, and which one is correct? Because, my students speak a whole lot of languages, and many of them are Englishes, and I respect them in every single one of those languages. As a Midwesterner in New England, I wouldn’t presume to force students to use (not) silly phrases and phrasings that are correct to me where I’m from; so as a person of color among students of color, I defend my students’ diversity of languages that are also correct without trying to impose one standardized one on them.

I’ve been having a good & productive & restful spring break, but I’ll be glad to go back to work tomorrow and see all the kids who will be grumpy about being back in school. I got another lip piercing yesterday and almost passed out after and went back inside the parlor to puke, and my lip is still a little swollen so kids will get to tease me about it.

Later in the week I start my last round of teaching zine class for the year. I’m not sure which kids are gonna be in it yet, but I put in requests for some of the kids that I already yell about racist jerx with and some of the kids who I hear want to yell about racist jerx but are too shy. I just finished a book about leading question-based discussions, it was pretty cool, so I can be more serious now with analyzing hip-hop videos in class.

And I’m reading a book about Ebonics and cultural languages, and ways to affirm students’ home languages in public schools. It looks specifically at the Oakland School Board’s treatment of Ebonics in 1996, and also a lot of info from a linguistics perspective on Ebonics/AAVE being respected as a language instead of an incorrect form of English. The essay I’ve been really psyched on, and am passing along to my students’ teachers, is by Lisa Delpit and is online here.

I did manage to do a couple stupid spring break-ish things and yell “Woooo spring break!”, in addition to reading education theory and writing a little of my zine and going to an anarchist bookfair.

Have you ever been around a teenager before? They’re fucking obnoxious just for the sake of it!

When I was in high school I used to go downtown and play pranks on strangers and make messes and break things that I didn’t intend to clean up and try to buy porn and yell at boys to suck my dick and sneak around the cops when they tried to kick us off school property for loitering after school and say really stupid shit really loudly. Then I went to school and got almost straight A’s and did my homework and only got in trouble when it was for political rabble-rousing and graduated and went to an ivy league college.

These things are not mutually exclusive; they were all going on concurrently. That is how teenagers develop and learn what boundaries to push and what ones to respect and where to set my own. Like if I had had any money, best believe I would have had a ridiculous grill while I was sitting there in AP Calculus. And best believe if facebook existed when I was in high school there would probably be photos in the ether of me giving the finger with one hand and reading political philosophy with the other.

None of that would have made me a bad kid.

And if those photoshadbeen on the same Trayvon that was killed, it wouldn’t have mattered. He wouldn’t have been a bad kid, and he wouldn’t have deserved racial violence from the police.

Our goal needs to be supporting black youth—not the “right” or “good” black youth, butallof them. What are we saying to that other Trayvon Martin, the one who actually was the one photographed giving the finger and wearing a grill? That he would have deserved to be profiled as a criminal?

Fuck that. One of my favorite students, one of the smartest people I know (not just in the school, but in general), picked the wrong battle recently. I can’t give details on it but I had to defend him to someone not affiliated with the school who wanted to just brand him a criminal based on a few actions and profiling him as a young black man. This was just before the photos were put online of the other Trayvon, and I had to start worrying even more then about my students being labelled murderable in that same way. I’m sure every one of the high schoolers I work with and adore can be seen on facebook giving the finger or something similar. But they’re all so much more complex than that.

So what is the black community doing to tell the other Trayvon that had he been in the “wrong” place at the wrong time, he also wouldn’t have deserved to be murdered? What are we telling young people when we say that the Trayvon that was killed was a “good” kid, that he got good grades, that he stayed out of trouble—especially when those are markers of succeeding in a system that is set up against black youth?

The students that I’m most excited to work with are the ones that get in trouble, the ones who are angry and have outbursts and aren’t afraid to yell at authority figures and who have hobbies besides getting good grades. I’m really open about that with both students and staff. Those are not “bad” kids, and they are no more deserving of racist violence than “good” kids are. (And, if anything, my tendencies toward following the rules made me a hell of a lot more boring than my students now who make their own rules and get their own shit done, but that is a whole nother project to get into.)

Building a black community that really fights, that is a culture of resistance, means we gotta get complicated and we gotta let people be complex. And young people are really fucking complex. That’s why I love working with teenagers, they’re at a point of figuring out how the world treats them and how they want to move through it and making sense of what they’re up against. Sometimes that involves flipping off a camera, and in the age of facebook that’s gonna end up on the internet.

So when I want justice for Trayvon, I mean both Trayvons, but I also want justice for all black youth who aren’t allowed to be complex multifaceted developing people the ways white people are. And I want justice beyond labeling someone a token “good” black kid and settling for that, and I want justice beyond putting one token individual in a racist prison system that is generally set up against black people. Basically I don’t want to settle for anything that doesn’t deeply feel like justice, that isn’t clearly enough.

Today is the last day of the zine class I’m teaching. This time around we only had 8 sessions start to finish, so I’m not sure everyone will be done with their zines today but they’ve at least done some writing and arguing and flipping through zines and thinking about the fact that they can write something that someone else would read. All of that’s the important stuff anyway, more than having something totally finished. And we started out with some basic media literacy work, and they had lots of good stuff to say. They’re writing about awesome stuff like getting in trouble at school and how fucked up money makes people and using music to get you through really difficult things and how young women of color are shown in the media and being from a black immigrant family and all kinds of awesome stuff like that.

They’re a really rowdy group of kids and we were really slow getting work done, plus most of them are in some sort of special ed so they’re not used to hearing how awesome and brilliant they are and having people tell them that they should write down their stories because they’re worth reading. Next week is break but I’m gonna set up an open mic one day after break so whoever wants to present their work can be famous and we can cheer for them. (The incentive is that if enough kids volunteer to read, I bake cookies to have at the open mic.)

I had an awesome time with three freshmen after school today getting a thesis statement written about the Alien & Sedition Acts. Srsly. I really like when other students step up and help their classmate understand something, or pitch in when I’m working with a student. Sometimes if one student needs to get caught up on something, I’ll ask another student to teach them and then fill in any gaps they might be missing. So I was working with one girl on an essay she had to write, but the other two students joined in and helped out too, which was awesome.

We needed to work on understanding what alien and sedition mean (apparently they didn’t get definitions of those words in class?) so we busted out the Bible (what one of my crews of reading kids named the student dictionary I carry around). All three kids had just been telling me about how much they hate school and how it’s a waste of their time, and I was hearing them out, so when we needed to define sedition I gave them that as an example, like what if they went around telling everyone else how school sucked so they should all quit going to class. Then in talking about what alien means, they got really riled up—one of them is an immigrant herself, and the other two are from immigrant families.

Then we got going talking about the kinds of racist bullshit people say about latino immigrants, like about telling Mexicans to go back to their own country. They knew that a bunch of the US was stolen from Mexico, so then I was like, “Look, that’s exactly why we study history! Since you know the history of that happening, and clearly if someone says Mexicans should go back to their own country theydon’tknow history, you have something to use against them.”

One of them had described a video on youtube of two white girls in Arizona complaining about Mexican immigrants and saying shit like this, and she said, “I’m gonna go to Arizona just to snuff them. If anyone said that to me, I’d snuff em.” So I said, “Okay, we’re gonna snuff them [kids all got excited] with words [“Awww, Miss! I wanna snuff racist white people with my fists!”]”

The example I gave them to explain the Alien & Sedition Acts was based on what they were saying about how school sucks and tying that to white teachers getting suspicious of students speaking Spanish, since many of the teachers don’t understand what they’re saying and might assume they’re saying something bad or rebellious. And how it’s messed up when teachers assume that just because the students can speak in a way they can’t.

We also talked about the language that teachers use and assume students can navigate as well, but how the students of color can usually speak in several different ways but are expected to conform to just one in class. Meanwhile the teachers don’t have to know how to speak in a way besides a “standard” middle class white approved one. So I suggested that maybe when the students have to take benchmark tests periodically, maybe the teachers should have to take similar tests written in Spanglish and Ebonics. They got really excited about the idea of giving their teachers standardized tests since they have to take so many of them.

What I had planned for us to do before I knew all this would be what we’d work on was reading this article about students in Detroit holding a walkout and being suspended in response, and going through to figure out some vocab words based on context. So it was funny that everything was all related and we were able to connect a lot of dots, and see all these things right in front of us connecting through history and talk about why it’s important to study history, especially when so much of it is written in ways that are unfair to people of color. It ruled! My kids are the bomb!

I am getting really fucking stressed out for my students, most of whom are black and/or latino young men, compounded by the world + working 10 hours at school + a fucked up faculty meeting where I spoke up tho for the kids I work with because I was too tired at that point to give a shit about pissing off white teachers who say derisive things about hip-hop while asking “What does success mean to our students” and then referencing Kim Khardashian who our kids do not give a shit about.

And I don’t want to be a sucker for the old stand by your man shit but I also don’t want to do a politics that abandons men of color and especially young black men. I don’t want to do a feminism that doesn’t get why so much of my energy is spent on worrying about black and latino men in my life who I have this urge to protect while knowing that it’s probably a losing battle.

And white teachers scoff at “rappers” as their only answer to “Who do our students think of as successful?” and after subbing 4 classes, 3 of which involved me being the asshole giving them busywork, I don’t have the energy to go into a character evaluation of Kanye West whose music I am listening to right now and who speaks to me far more than that room of white teachers ever could and same goes for those students who they don’t know how to communicate with but do know how to scoff at behind closed doors.

And then a white lady writes off the smartest kid in the school, the kid who comes to me to borrow books on black history because he isn’t getting it in school and who isn’t afraid to call a pompous white teacher a stupid asshole, and also writes off a kid who has amazing but completely uncontrolled energy who has fucked up things going on that I’m worried will wind him up in the same spot as Trayvon Martin but without a march for him. And another afterschool staff person runs in looking for me to tell me how fucked up it was and I start yelling in the afterschool office and cannot handle all this shit. Just yelling, and someone has to close the door because I’m yelling things like “THEY DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT SHAKESPEARE”

and I cannot handle the erasure and history and am suddenly furious when I’m at school in a bad mood without the kids around. Cause when I’m in a bad mood, the kids who know me recognize it and usually try to help me out on it.

And I’m here reading about violence that young men of color are hunted down by, because what else is there to read about? That’s the news. People are marching for Trayvon Martin, and I am marching for my students and thinking it would be great if I were sure their teachers were too, and hopefully all of us will get somewhere and tht somewhere is JUSTICE and ends with Trayvon and Troy Davis and Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo and Malik Jones and Oscar Grant and all my students who I no longer need to worry about just COLD CHILLIN.

Tomorrow we are doing some basic media literacy by looking at portrayals of black men in the news and talking about youth voices and playing a round of Tell Em Why You’re Mad and I’ll admit to them that I’m PISSED.

readnfight:

Please sign this and pass it on!

Last year, Tonya, a single mother from Bridgeport who was struggling to give five-year-old son a great school was charged by the Norwalk school district for sending her child to one of its schools. Tonya was trying to provide her child with the kind of opportunities you have supported this year through the proposed expansion of high-quality charter schools. But because of residency laws that restrict those choices, Tonya found herself faced with a choice: Send her child to a failing school that wouldn’t meet his needs – and make her child one of many kids damaged by the state’s worst achievement gap – or do what she can to help her child get into a school that would.

As a result of fighting fiercely for the future of her son, as any mother should do, she faced criminal charges– and now she faces an unfair sentence.

Tonya does not deserve this unfair sentence for education theft. So on her behalf, and on behalf of every parent, mother, father, and grandparent faced with a lack of quality opportunities to learn, I ask you to support Tonya’s full pardon for educational theft. With this pardon, you are once again sending the message that Connecticut will put the educational and life needs of children first!

& some recent news in the case:

A Connecticut woman who was homeless has pleaded guilty to fraudulently enrolling her son in the wrong school district.

Tonya McDowell entered her plea Wednesday in Norwalk Superior Court under the Alford Doctrine, meaning she doesn’t admit guilt but concedes the state has enough evidence to convict her.

She also pleaded guilty to selling narcotics. She faces about five years in prison at sentencing.

I’m gonna keep reblogging this because I need people to sign it please. Or at least pass it on.

South End Press, 1998 - Biography & Autobiography - 254 pages

Since its publication in 1975, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying has been widely recognized as one of the most important books on the black liberation movement and labor struggles in the United States. It tells the remarkable story of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, based in Detroit, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, two of the most important political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s.

If only it were accurate when the author says this is unique:

A unique language controversy has led to a wide-ranging apology from the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay after a middle school girls basketball player at Shawano (Wis.) Sacred Heart School was reprimanded in class and kept out of one of her team’s games because she told her friends “I love you,” in the tongue of her family’s Native American tribe.

As reported by the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Associated Press and Green Bay NBC affiliate WGBA, among other sources, Sacred Heart seventh-grader Miranda Washinawatok was disciplined in class in front of her peers and then held out of a January basketball game because she had the temerity to tell two of her classmates “I love you” in the language native to the Menominee tribe, of which the Washinawatoks are a part.

When Washinawatok used the phrase in a class to two of her friends who she had taught it to, one of her teachers — Julie Gurta — reportedly threw her hands down on her table angrily and said that Washinawatok would not be allowed to speak in the Menominee language because doing so would keep the teacher from knowing what she was saying.

One thing that really bothers me when white adults, most commonly teachers, say, “You can’t speak [non-english language] because I won’t know what you’re saying is how horribly wrong those teachers are if they think they understand the bulk of what their students are talking about in the first place. My job is to be an intermediary between students and teachers to help the students out academically; I really feel like our number one problem is the inability of the students and teachers to communicate with each other across race and class divides. A lot of my job is just bridging that gap, helping students work through being a kid of color in a white-centered school—and that’s with the fact that my school tries really hard to be “progressive.” It still isn’t enough. The teachers so often still don’t know what the kids are saying, regardless of the words being used.

The other thing is that being multilingual is such an incredible skill. It is beneficial for your brain development, in many cases it can help you understand your primary language better, and it’s important to have people in a community who can translate. Seeing young people able to do that is amazing. I set my kids up with situations to see being bilingual in english and spanish as an asset that not everyone has, but not enough people appreciate them for that skill.

Please sign this and pass it on!

Last year, Tonya, a single mother from Bridgeport who was struggling to give five-year-old son a great school was charged by the Norwalk school district for sending her child to one of its schools. Tonya was trying to provide her child with the kind of opportunities you have supported this year through the proposed expansion of high-quality charter schools. But because of residency laws that restrict those choices, Tonya found herself faced with a choice: Send her child to a failing school that wouldn’t meet his needs – and make her child one of many kids damaged by the state’s worst achievement gap – or do what she can to help her child get into a school that would.

As a result of fighting fiercely for the future of her son, as any mother should do, she faced criminal charges– and now she faces an unfair sentence.

Tonya does not deserve this unfair sentence for education theft. So on her behalf, and on behalf of every parent, mother, father, and grandparent faced with a lack of quality opportunities to learn, I ask you to support Tonya’s full pardon for educational theft. With this pardon, you are once again sending the message that Connecticut will put the educational and life needs of children first!

& some recent news in the case:

A Connecticut woman who was homeless has pleaded guilty to fraudulently enrolling her son in the wrong school district.

Tonya McDowell entered her plea Wednesday in Norwalk Superior Court under the Alford Doctrine, meaning she doesn’t admit guilt but concedes the state has enough evidence to convict her.

She also pleaded guilty to selling narcotics. She faces about five years in prison at sentencing.

Today I launched a tutoring project at school that I’d been slooowly setting up all school year, that involved hiring my pick of several students to work after school. Of the kids I hired, one gets good grades and positive attention and the other two get in trouble. Today was the first run, and the one who gets good grades wasn’t around so all the work was on the other two with me helping them out.

And they were awesome and amazing and respectful and mature and knowledgeable and put rules into place with their classmates they were tutoring and asked me for help when they needed it.

Which meant I got to tell their teachers, I TOLD YOU SO because I knew they could do it. I mean, their teachers supported giving them a chance too, but had some doubts. So now I am a very proud afterschool lady.

Dr. Patricia Hill Collins quoting Public Allies CEO Paul Schmitz in her talk Answering the Call to Community Service. (via sexartandpolitics)

A microcosm of one of the fundamental issues with the non-profit industrial complex.

(via myflagisblackandred)

I’d never thought about it like that before.

(via hereidreamtiwasablogger2)

This is why I’m proposing that at the school where I work, maybe the teachers (almost all white & mostly suburban) are the ones who need Community Service Day more than the students (almost all latino and/or black and inner city).

(via girl-germs)