New Racism....The Quiet Storm (E.Catalino)

There was a time when racism in America was so easy to detect. You can see the word "Nigger" across headlines. You see people of color hosed down. Protest and marches were shut down. Activist were blatantly speaking out about injustice, discrimination and the abuse suffered by minorities. However, we have entered a new age where racism is quiet. It's this thing that still infiltrates our institutions, organizations, and our society at large yet...

Connecting the Dots

So how does talking about race help us better understand schools and the dynamics we see today? You can’t have a conversation about our schools until you tackle the American invention of intelligence and the political/economical gain of creating institutions called schools.  The conversations about our schools in our media and board meetings are usually summarized into discourse regarding test scores, low funding and behavioral incidents....

"They" Schools: On Embracing Hip-Hop Education

If someone were to ask me to sum up my relationship with hip-hop in one word, I'd probably respond with: tenuous. Growing up in a southern black household with a pious, conservative, and traditional mother my childhood CD collection was never one to contain much hip-hop. Classic albums like Lil' Kim's Hardcore or Nas' Illmatic were intentionally kept off of my radar. My mother with the best intentions kept hip-hop at a safe distance from me because...

Organized Activities and Leisure Activities: Are They Really Necessary? -Shelda Raymonvil

Before you read this post, be inspired by the words of this song!   Well, go ahead...click play! :-D I hope you appreciated those lyrics just as much as I did! Now. Back to the topic at hand. My previous post on unequal childhoods reflect upon the difference between concerted cultivation and natural growth as it relates to a child's upbringing. As I read more into the text, Lareau further analyzes the effects of organized activities and...

A Call for Specificity

Each essay in Everyday Antiracism strives to give educators easy actions to use in their classrooms to combat racial inequality. Many of these essays push you to not only develop your classroom, but also develop yourself as a person in a world where we are daily bombarded with racists messages. I will be discussing my thoughts on a few spefcific essays in my next few posts. A Call for Specificity Equal opportunity for ALL children should...

The Compartmentalization of Oppression

In my last post about bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom, I wrote about the need for teachers and students to be considered whole human beings. We live our lives as a summation of all of our experiences, and the groups that we self-select or are selected for us do not tell the entire story of us as people. hooks writes of her struggle in academic settings to assert herself as an African-American feminist writer/English...

Beginnings

So I'm about a fifth of the way into The Warmth of Other Suns, which doesn't bode well for the likelihood that I am going to finish this book this summer. That said, I think I am starting into the meat of the book. As I said before, TWOOS follows three different individuals who Wilkerson has chosen as very representative of the Great Migration and the aspirations, frustrations, and hopes of many other migrants. Those are Ida Mae Gladney in...

Remembering that We Teach Individuals

Last week I found myself on the subway to Brooklyn at 7:03 AM, nodding my head vehemently. I was reading the first couple of chapters of bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom and I felt like she was calling me out. I wasn't offended; she writes about not only the struggle between oppressed students and their educators, but also the struggle that educators feel within themselves. That need to meet the standards...

"With all deliberate speed..."

"We need to remember that the fight for school desegregation was not simply a symbolic fight for the acknowledgement of the humanity and equality of all children.  Fundamentally it was a struggle for equal access to publicly funded educational resources.  Clear that struggle continues." I just wrapped up the introduction and first chapter of "Can we talk about race? And other conversations in an Era of School Resegregation". Dr. Tatum's...

Girly-Boy: On Rethinking Gender in the Classroom

This post was inspired both by the text that's consumed me for the past three weeks and by a former student of mine. For the sake of privacy, I'll refer to her throughout this post as Melody. Melody was the tallest girl in the sixth grade this year. She was loud. She had a major in your face personality and she consistently rebelled against traditional gender norms. This past spring, Melody decided to try out for and join the 6th grade boys football...

Unequal Childhoods: Concerted Cultivation vs. Natural Growth -Shelda Raymonvil

A decade has past since the first edition of Unequal Childhoods was published and so comes a second edition, an updated version which expands on the progression of those 12 families that were studied before. The update of those families comes later on in the text so for now, I will analyze what Lareau defines to be concerted cultivation and natural growth. Lareau does an in depth analysis of the lives of several families from the middle class,...

“What You Test is What You Get”

Gallagher puts a new spin on the old saying “what you give is what you get” in his book Readicide. He declares that “what you test is what you get,” meaning that the kind of knowledge that we test our students on is the kind of knowledge that our students will possess. This phrase gives light to one of the many discriminatory policies in our country, the No Child Left Behind Act, which has been shaping our education system’s culture since 2002....