So this week I'm reading Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-First Century by Monique W. Morris, and clearly it's taken me more than a week to read. I could blame this on having to grade all of the things for the end of the semester, or on my three children's unwillingness to just leave mom alone to read, but it really has more to do with how hard it is to stay focused while reading line after line of statistics. Don't get me wrong, I think the layout of the book goes a long way towards overcoming the this problem through the page design, organization, and use of introductory prose in each chapter, but the sheer volume of information is overwhelming.

All together, though, that information paints a picture of unequal opportunity and consequences in this country, albeit with some strides in the right direction. None of what it presented was really new to me because of my previous reading and experience, but it is an excellent resource to have so many facts collected in one place for easy access.

What I found myself reflecting on in relation to my teaching as I read, however, was how these numbers don't actually tell the story that needs to be told. Just a few weeks ago, one of my composition students was presenting on his project looking at the quality of prison food in Ohio. His research hadn't been terribly in-depth, and my other students were content to leave the discussion at, "Man, that looks like the gross food they served us in high school!" but I wanted to push them a bit further. I was asking questions about the purpose of prison (punishment, rehabilitation, seclusion) and how their position on that purpose might change their thinking about what quality of food ought to be served. Then I asked them about the fact that people of color are disproportionately represented in the prison population for things like drug offenses despite the reported rate of drug abuse being roughly equal across all demographic groups.

The majority of the class erupted into comments about decriminalizing drugs, fighting racism, or at least improving the quality of the food, but one girl kept insisting, "Or maybe they could just not do drugs! If you don't break the law, nothing bad can happen to you!" She was clearly frustrated, turning red in her anger, and I could relate to her feelings. I remember taking such an adamant stance myself in my younger days.

Which brings me back to my issue with numbers. As I'm continually telling my students regarding quotations, these numbers can't speak for themselves. If left to ourselves, we will attach whatever narrative to them that suits our worldview, whether we take the blatantly racist view that more African Americans are incarcerated because they are more inclined to criminal behavior, or the more subtle position of my student that whatever discrimination might exist could be overcome by good behavior on the part of an individual. Both views miss the point, in my opinion, of all of the numbers working together, demonstrating that a lack of access to education, job opportunities, financial services, affordable housing, health care, and a safe environment stacks the deck against African Americans in this country, making that good behavior my student sees as natural incredibly difficult to achieve.

My job as a white educator is to make sure I'm telling the stories that flesh out what these numbers mean in the lives of actual people. For more help with that, I'm moving on to Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me for next week.

(Mis)Understanding Integration

As I mentioned in my last post, I've taken on the project of reading all of the books on Crystal Paul's "10 Books I Wish My White Teacher Had Read." For this week I read Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession. 

I'm not trying to write a traditional book review here (though I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who would like a highly readable and fair-minded discussion of some of the major themes of education and education reform in the US over the past two hundred years), so I'm going to focus on what stood out to me the most in relation to Paul's article rather than the book as a whole.

I've spent the last few years studying the meeting minutes and other internal documents of the New York Women's Trade Union League from the first couple decades of the twentieth century. I was, therefore, very interested in Goldstein's discussion of the role of teacher's unions in the history of education in the US. As usual, I discovered that the answer was complicated. While I'm inclined to be fairly sympathetic to the need for collective bargaining and other protections for workers who are vulnerable due to their youth, gender, and social class, the ugly underbelly of racism and xenophobia so common in labor unions of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries is evident in Goldstein's history. This was disappointing for me to see, though not surprising.

What was surprising for me was discovering my own blindspot regarding the integration of schools following Brown v. Board of Education. Going into this book, my thoughts on the subject went something like this:
Segregation and discrimination were inherently bad, but one byproduct of the "separate but equal" system was that many of the most capable and brilliant minds in the African American community became teachers due to a lack of other opportunities. As a result, despite terrible facilities and a lack of supplies, African American children often received superior instruction. Through the Civil Rights Movement, however, opportunities opened for those teachers to choose other, more lucrative professions, leaving African American children with fewer stellar role models in the classroom.

In reading Goldstein's history, however, I realized that I only had part of that story right. Integration did lead to Black children losing wonderful teachers, but not because those teachers were off living the American dream. Far from it. When schools were combined, most of the African American teachers were fired and replaced by White teachers who were often less qualified. In addition, these White teachers brought with them into the classroom prejudices against Black children's abilities to learn and achieve at higher levels. These often became self-fulfilling prophecies as children saw that they were not valued or expected to succeed, and did not see anyone who looked like them modeling who they could become.

After reading this history, I find myself shaking my head and saying, "Of course. Of course they didn't want to integrate teachers fairly. People who would scream and curse at children for just wanting a decent education are not going to submit to a person of color having authority over their children. How could I have not considered this aspect before?!" The answer, of course, is privilege. I haven't had to wonder why there isn't anyone who looks like me at the front of my classroom because generally, my teachers did look just like me. I'm sitting here wracking my brain, trying to think if I ever had an African American teacher before I got to college, and I can't think of one. And even in college, the two professors who come to mind weren't African American but recent immigrants from Africa. But I didn't notice.

This is why Paul needs teachers like me to read these books. Because even when we mean well, we sometimes just don't notice what's going on around us.

Up next:

Reading the "10 Books I Wish My White Teacher Had Read"

The class that I began writing this blog for is now over, but I have enjoyed writing semi-informally about pedagogy and my classroom practice, so I thought I would keep it up for awhile, even though I will no longer have a captive audience.

Over the past few years, I've thought a lot about systemic racism and my role in dismantling it as a white, woman teacher. Two main messages have come to my attention in this process: first, it is essential to listen to and believe the experiences of people of color in order to understand what actually needs to change, but second, I need to do the heavy lifting of educating myself on what the current and historical situation is in this country rather than relying of people of color to spoon-feed that knowledge to me.

My first post-course series for this blog is an attempt to do both by listening to the suggestions of one person, Crystal Paul, for what 10 books she wished her white teachers had read to prepare them to meet the needs of students of color, and then to do the hard work of actually procuring, reading, and processing through the information in each of them. Paul's article appeared on Bustle just over a year ago, but the titles are no less relevant today and it's better to do the work late than never. Seriously, the fact that I have not yet read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me feels like a mark on my character at this point and the sooner I can rectify this omission, the better.

I'm proceeding through the list in the order I am able to borrow the books from my local library rather than in the order she listed them, but my goal is to read one book each week and write at least one post reflecting on that week's book.

This week I'll be writing about the tenth book on Paul's list:

Summary of Learning

I embarked on this course with a little trepidation. It is my first education class on this campus (I took a qualitative research course in the Education Department at the Univ of TN, but it was much more about research methods than pedagogy) and it is focused on using technology, which I have improved in greatly over the last few years but still don't consider an area of strength for me. I have been pleasantly surprised, however.

For one, I've found that much of what we have discussed is immediately useful to me in my composition courses. I completely changed my major project for this semester in order to let my students play with some of the cool tools we reviewed, while enabling to think about who needs to know the information they discovered in their research and how they could most effectively present that information to their chosen audience. They (mostly) had fun while engaging in the higher order thinking I was hoping they would do.

In addition, it's been very eye-opening for me to see just how many really great resources are readily available online if I build up a personal learning network that will help direct me to them. Life as an adjunct professor can be a very isolating experience. I have a person assigned as my officemate whom I have never seen and am beginning to doubt exists. I was depressed all spring by the continued sight of several candy canes that the office staff had placed as gifts into all instructor mailboxes at the end of last semester that were never picked up by those who presumably never had time to come into the department. I work really hard to build relationships with my colleagues during my more extensive time on campus in my office doing conferences, on social media, and by participating in a faculty learning community this year. These efforts have led to sharing some good assignments and classroom management strategies, but those benefits pale in comparison to the volume of practical materials that I have come across this semester. I plan on using the NGLC composition course lessons to help me manage teaching five sections on two campuses in the Fall.

For some reason, I've had a very lone wolf, solitary genius mentality about my lesson plans, feeling like I had to invent everything anew for myself, but I've seen such high-quality lesson plans and resources through this class, and even in the structure of the class itself, that I feel empowered to treat teaching as a community affair that I don't have to manage alone.

At the same time, I have felt encouraged to embrace the sharing economy in education. I am undertaking the creation of some discussion guides, class activities, and assignment ideas built around satirical or entertaining videos that also aim to inform the public, such as Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, with my colleague across the hall from me. I have used John Oliver clips fairly extensively in my classes because he creates such beautiful yet entertaining arguments and have assigned a group project where students were to create their own mini-episode of Last Week Tonight. I've shared those lessons on a very small scale, but now I'm going to attempt to go big. Because if I don't have to plan every little detail of my class myself, I can afford to spend more time making the lessons I'm passionate about really great and worth sharing.

I didn't expect to learn so much about community in a class where I expected to (and to a certain extent did) feel like an outsider. But technology enables us to create community with those beyond our immediate physical access.

Bubbl artifact

I used Bubbl.us to create an artifact illustrating what I learned this semester. It's an intuitive and free application, two features I generally love.

How to How-to #7: What's Left to Learn?

When I started this project, I wanted to learn how to use my phone to film me braiding, how to use software on my phone and laptop to edit that film and add audio, and how to upload those videos to YouTube to share with others. My underlying goal was to then be able to turn around and share that technical knowledge with my students when I ask them to create videos in their multi-modal projects.

I believe I have made progress towards all of those goals, though I would still like to improve in all of them. For instance, while I managed to use a selfie stick to hold my phone with MacGyver-like improvisations, I am positive I could be finding better angles to film from and a more permanent system for holding my phone if I continue making these videos. Additionally, when it comes to software and apps, while I like using iMovie and Splice, they are both Apple products that not all of my students will be able to access. That means I need to learn the basics of some other programs if I'm going to be able to help everyone in my classes.

Just in general, I think continued practice will lead me to discover so much more that I don't even know that I don't know right now. The good news is, I've gotten over my initial fear of trying a new skill, and I now know that it's possible to figure it out. Plus, there are still so many hairstyles to demonstrate! I'm also very tempted to try some satire in the form of videos about everything that goes wrong or what it actually takes to train a child to sit still long enough to do a fancy braid.

How to How-to #6 - Zig-Zag Braid video!

The zig-zag braid is in many ways the braid that started it all, so it seems appropriate to finish with it. I had done fancy hairstyles in Ambriel's hair prior to it and posted pictures of them on Facebook, but it was the zig-zag braid that earned me the reputation of being a braiding expert. It's the one I do in the hair of other people's kids when they beg me to do their hair like my daughter's. I have more pictures of it than any other. The funny thing is, I started doing it because I found a single, straight-down-the-middle, French braid difficult to do and kind of ugly, but I didn't want to always have to do pig-tail French braids, so I tried this. If I had been better at regular French braids, I might never have branched out into more complex ones!

As for the video, I am generally very pleased with this one. I did try to have a "Please Subscribe!" slide at the end of it, but Splice insisted on putting their logo over top of it, and I didn't notice in time to correct it. I could probably have cut a little more just to keep the video shorter, too, but overall I like this one a lot.

Enjoy!

How to How-to #5 - The Cutting Edge

I mentioned in my last post that I was planning to edit my next two videos by cutting one and speeding up the other. I actually ended up doing both for both. I had a "Eureka!" moment when I figured out that it was much easier to split my video on either side of the part I wanted to cut on iMovie and then delete the entire clip in the middle that doing so created than it was to try to use the sliding controls on Splice to select the entire piece I wanted to delete. Suddenly, I was the master of my destiny, slicing and dicing my film to eliminate all of the little infelicities of me struggling to get a piece smooth or stopping to use a brush mid-braid. 

What I found, however, was that the clip was still way too long after I had eliminated those moments, so I went ahead and speeded up the film. My goal was to learn how to help students cut their videos, and I feel confident doing that now, so I might as well have the look I want. 

You'll notice that I also added more still photos and a bit of text in this video. Sadly, it wasn't until just after I uploaded this one that I noticed that the orientation of this video is portrait. I fixed it in the next one so that the picture is bigger and there isn't a frame around it. 

It's a little crazy to me how much I feel like I am improving with each video. When my little neighbor was acting as film crew, she asked if she could see the videos I had already made. I was somewhat embarrassed to show her the first one because I would do it so differently now (though she was still impressed just to know I made something that anyone could see online). I'll talk more in my next post about what I still need to learn, but for now I just wanted to say it's nice to feel like I am getting the hang of this.