JOSE

These posts are focused more on world events from an educator’s perspective. Raw and unfiltered, these writings tackle the tougher subjects.

What If You’re A White Teacher Teaching Black History? [Some Examples]

by Jose Vilson on February 4, 2013

In my last post, I put down some thoughts on Black History Month, something I’ve written about at least once for the last four years. Every so often, I get a question that I ought to put in an FAQ section. For instance:

“What if you’re a white teacher teaching about Black history?”

I often reply, “Go right ahead, as long as you do it right.”

Of course, you want to know what I mean by “right.” Besides the aforementioned article, I’d like to point you in the direction of some of the comments made in that article, too. For instance, here’s my respected colleague Mike Kaechele:

As a social studies teacher I really don’t like all of the special months and days. I try to teach the various viewpoints of history holistically. I will not be singling out blacks in February, just like we didn’t talk about terrorism on 9/11. We did spend three weeks on 9/11 and terrorism when it fit where we were as a class. We have talked about African Americans in the context of all of the wars and foreign policy that we have discussed. I feel comfortable not focusing on Black history in February because we do integrate it all year in context and we will spends weeks on the Civil Rights Movement starting in March.

I do appreciate the need to still have these months because too many people and teachers still neglect them. But for me in my classroom, I choose to ignore the “calendar schedule” knowing that I will give the topics due diligence when it fits our scope and sequence.

We have something here. Here’s another one from my colleague Laura Sexton:

Having our school on a college campus means that I get to walk my Spanish 2 class over for the college’s Celebrando America Latina series featuring afrolatinos in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba this month, but we’re not going to even start the unit about afrolatino experiences in different countries (which you helped me out with a few years ago wiki style, and for which I owe you part of my National Board certification) until the end of the month, so it’ll go well into March too. So over 1/3 of the course is approaching Woodson’s goal, right?

Right. For now, I don’t want anyone thinking Black / Latino / LGBT / Asian / Women’s / Native American / Any Non-Dominant Group History Month should go away, but eventually, whether we have mainstream views on America or not, we do have to do more than acknowledge these groups’ roles in American history, and until we do that, we’ll continue to need them.

It starts with those of us in the classroom, but we can’t do it alone.

Jose, who needs non-educators to jump into the fray too …

Technorati Tags: black history month, comments

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If You’re Teaching Black History Month This Way, Please Stop

by Jose Vilson on January 31, 2013

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Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson with wife Rachel, Hall of Fame

First, I’d like to acknowledge that, on the chance that you’re actually celebrating Black History Month, congrats. You haven’t let the Common Core madness deter you from celebrating culture, whether it’s your own or someone else’s.  The decorations will spring up. Common faces like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Benjamin Banneker, and Will Smith will border the walls of a few classrooms, and probably a few hallways. There might be a fact-a-day in the announcements, and one in 400 schools might have someone who knows the Black National Anthem. (I know you’re mumbling it after the fourth line.)

But, has it ever occurred to you that, as well-intentioned as this might be, we ought to take the next step and celebrate Black history on March 1st as well?

We already know that Black History Month wasn’t meant to stay as lack History Month. Carter G. Woodson intended for this celebration to happen until it clicked for curriculum creators to speak to the story of the American Negro as part of the American history, and not just in platitudes and the Civil Rights movement.

People often argue that, when we stop celebrating Black History Month, people will start celebrating year-round, and there’s no way I’ll ever argue that. In fact, we should start celebrating all cultures and colors year-round so the need for specialized months for our marginalized groups would look antiquated. In other words, put John Steinbeck and Malcolm X quotes together, and celebrate The Beatles and the Temptations simultaneously. We can celebrate Michelle Obama as part of the lineage with Barbara Bush and Eleanor Roosevelt.

To Kill a Mockingbird in English class is a start, and so is having a Black president. Yet, we have so much pushback, I always wonder if we’ll ever not need a Black History Month. The “civil rights issue of our time” has a severe lack of sincere educators willing to tackle on the issue of diversity without trying to let go of their privilege, too. With the decline of black teachers happening all over the country (Chicago a prime example), it’s time for our White brethren to teach with compassion and understand on the issue of race if they aren’t already.

So jump into Black History Month, and get your feet wet with some of this history. Do your research a bit and drop the dime in a child’s ear, because that might inspire them to aspire. But once February 28th hits, leave those chapters open and bookmark those links.

The kids still need to know that there were, are, and will continue to be people who look just like them that positively impacted the lives of others, role models for the lack thereof in present times.

Jose, because this is to the memory of Hadiya Pendleton …

Technorati Tags: black history month, education, pedagogy, teaching

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On Writing As Revenge

by Jose Vilson on January 28, 2013

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The Rock, WWE Champion 2013

What happens when your writing becomes revenge?

Not the Twilight-Mean-Girls type of revenge, but the revenge that James Brown yells in “The Big Payback“?

I get that hate is too big a burden to bear a-la MLK Jr, but this isn’t hate. This harkens back to a remembrance, a devaluing, a necessity to reprove one’s ostensible skill even before it fully blossomed. As with other motivations in life, they’ve asked you to step aside, break out a highlight reel, or worse, sit on the sidelines while the supposed pros get to work.

Some of us don’t actually need more motivation, but we’ll take the extra wood for the fire, thank you.

It started at a summer camp in my teens. The writing instructor, at the time a senior counselor when I was merely a counselor-in-training, gave us an assignment: write a paragraph or two about your favorite number. Umm. I didn’t know what to do. I kept letting Blind Melon’s cover of “3 Is The Magic Number” invade my creative process. Actually, who am I kidding? I had nothing because, back then, we didn’t have iPods to remind us the lyrics to the songs, just the first few lines and a couple of hums.

When I turned in my paper, the instructor shook his head and said, “Vilson, you’re a very smart child, but the problem is: you’re lazy.” For the last few years, that and a few other incidents made me wonder whether I should write anything at all. I’ll comply with the papers and read the books, but I won’t do it creatively. I won’t add many descriptors, make cool pauses, or even formulate an opinion.

In college, things change as they always do. Some exposure to poets like Amiri Baraka, Staceyann Chin, and Gil Scott-Heron and writers like bell hooks and Carter G. Woodson pushed my analytical thinking to places I didn’t think possible, but again the doubts came.

What do you mean you’re going to blog? Under a pseudonym? You’re going to cuss people’s ideas out, but actually respect the people behind them? Oh, well, your writing doesn’t get read and commented on by college professors, even though your writing gets 50+ comments. You get featured by the site, so your writing must be garbage. People who know how to write well don’t get featured like this; they get featured the way I say it does.

OK, shut up already. Give me a dollar, some web coding skills, and a proper article in front of my name just so I can lay my thoughts bare for a growing audience.

In a few years, the high school English syllabi trickle into my contact form. The next year, a teachers’ college preparatory dissertation uses my blog as a resource. The year after, the blog gets me published in a book. The accomplishments pile on, even after more teachers complain privately that they can’t access my posts through their school district’s computers.

That’s ostensibly not enough for me.

It shouldn’t matter to you, either. Early on, they do. You meticulously look to see people commenting, sharing, liking, etc. Yet, once you reach a certain point, you jump into an avatar state, as it were, an abstract form of yourself that at once makes you most powerful and vulnerable.

How many people actually care about what you write? How often do you get brought up in conversations that you know you wrote about? How many people recommend you to their friends, or, worse still, ask you to comment on something when they don’t have the words?

How often does someone tell you that your voice isn’t just a gift, but a responsibility to share?

If you have answers to these questions, I’d like to hear them. For some of us, this type of writing isn’t for the self-congratulatory, but the self-affirming, a revenge on everyone who said their form of expression mattered less than theirs. I wouldn’t allow that, and neither should you.

Jose, who doesn’t hate the people who suggested he couldn’t write. In fact, he wishes their writing well, too …

Technorati Tags: revenge, the rock, writing

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The Revisionist’s Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have A Dream For Most Of Us”

by Jose Vilson on January 21, 2013

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Martin Luther King Jr.

For some revisionists, MLK Jr. was either one of two things: a staunch conservative who lived patriotically, owned guns, and worked towards self-help, or he was a such a commercial pacifist whose message for peace followed every rule in the book and posed no real threat to the establishment. Then, there are those who, after having recognized MLK’s full history, still want to use his name for things he would never entertain, like breaking unions and limiting opportunity to a full education to only the “good” kids, whatever that means. Here, I present their rendition of the Dream Speech.

Hope it helps.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. At least for most people in this country.

[Redacted because, let's be honest: in the future, your descendants won't read the whole first part of this speech. I'll talk about the history of the Negro in this country, and my call for reparations at least in the form of full rights afforded to all who helped build this country. I'll talk about the sorts of things people should know about me, the radical me. I'll talk about an America that has yet to come through on its promises. I'll also refer to people who rather swim in hatred and bitterness than actually loving one another on a human level, but you'll ignore that, too. So let's get to the "good" part.]

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream for most of us. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood, except the most uncouth. They can wait outside.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, except if you want to arrest Black kids for misbehaving in class. That’s admissible.

I have a dream today. For most of you.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little white boys and white girls will join hands with only the best and brightest of little black boys and little black girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today. For most of you.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood as long as they’re playing the instruments we want them to. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. Most of us, anyways.

This will be the day when most of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.” Every morning, without real understanding of it.

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

However you decide to define freedom, and to whomever you deem.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,

“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, most of us are free at last!”

[Just sayin'.]

Jose, who wouldn’t want people to take my words and mince them for their purposes either …

p.s. – For the real text of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, please click here.

Technorati Tags: i have a dream speech, martin luther king jr

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On National Education Discourse (Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That)

January 17, 2013 Jose

This is what happens when you start listening to folks who think the answer is square in the middle. The first time I took issue with a Michael Petrilli post, I was annoyed because, when it comes to education, only the people in his circle (frenemies or not) mattered and the rest of us (read: [...]

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If Every Other Word Out Of Your Mouth Is “Common Core”, You’re The Problem

January 15, 2013 Jose

Do me a favor and stop it. Just stop it, you. Yes, you. You’re ridiculous now. Every other word out of your mouth is “Common Core.” That’s enough out of you. I’m all for people having a voice, a seat at the table, and entitlements to opinions and such, but you’re not going to sit [...]

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Style and Substance (or, At Least Three Things You Don’t Say To A Man of Color)

January 13, 2013 Jose

Moments like this make me want to ask, “Who ASKED you?!” Some of my frustration lately stems from the perception that making something look easy equates to the task actually being easy. Especially as it pertains to the site and everything surrounding it. The design, the content, the schedule, the photos, and the accompanying branding [...]

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A Spoiler for Frontline’s Michelle Rhee Documentary

January 7, 2013 Jose

A bunch of my friends have already started posting up the trailer for Frontline‘s documentary on Michelle Rhee entitled The Education of Michelle Rhee (PBS, starting January 8th, check your local listings). Honestly, I’m not watching it. Most people get a benefit of a doubt, but Rhee’s earned nothing but doubt from me. Her videotaped [...]

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Ohhh, Sometimes, I Get A Good Feeling. [Get A Feeling That I Never Ever Ever Had Before, No]

December 31, 2012 Jose

On the first day of 2012, I waited for the birth of my son, Alejandro. We tried everything to hasten the process: long walks, hot spicy foods, and … well, I’d rather not say here. Just know that he knew his parents loved each other very much. I had already prepared my vocals for the [...]

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