Systematic exclusion of supermarkets from low-income neighborhoods.
Yes, people need education.
Yes, people are cultural but it is becoming cultural to have unhealthy foods in the hood.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Hip-hop
Hip hop is a form of musical expression and artistic subculture that originated in African-American and Hispanic-American communities during the 1970s in New York City, specifically within the Bronx.
How America and hip-hop failed each other
President Nixon announced a war on drugs, but it was President Reagan who started the modern battle in 1982, when hip-hop was in its infancy. This fight would not only shape the black community but also mold hip-hop, a music and culture whose undercurrent remains black male anger at a nation that declared young black men monsters and abandoned them, killing any chance they had at the American Dream.
In the early 1980s, most of the socially conscious hiphop records mentioned drugs as one of the many problems affecting black Americans, not the central one. When they did touch on drugs, they were almost always depicted negatively; doing drugs was a character failing, and the songs usually portrayed the speaker as a bystander trapped in a ghetto, observing it, not participating in its ills. They were like griots, storytellers. Take Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” which begins: “Broken glass everywhere!” — a mirroring James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling’s “broken window theory,” which holds that a building with broken windows invites serious crime because it signals neglect. The song offers a litany of societal ills, with drugs being just one of them.
Grandmaster Melle Mel’s “White Lines” from 1983 is one of the few early hip-hop songs to deal directly with drugs. Mel focuses on cocaine rather than crack, which was not yet a major problem in American cities. Mel speaks in the first person and breaks the bystander norm, taking on the role of a user, although ultimately as an artistic device rather than truly implicating himself as later MCs would. And he uses the song to implore listeners to avoid cocaine — unlike so many future MCs who would try to make selling and using drugs look sexy.
Hip-hop’s journey between those two mind-sets happened as the unemployment rate among black men soared to twice the level among whites, passing 21 percent in 1983. A year later, the FBI’s antidrug funding increased more than tenfold — just in time for the start of the crack epidemic in 1985.
The prevalence of drugs alongside the dearth of jobs made joining the drug trade hard to turn down. It was a road many young black men chose because they lacked better options. Crack, a sort of fast-food version of cocaine, allowed some the chance to earn as much as they would have by owning a McDonald’s franchise, when their only other option was working at one. The crack trade allowed some young men to support their families.
MCs who grew up in the 1980s would brand themselves veterans of the drug trade because drugs dominated their economic possibilities, and those of an entire generation of young black men. But by the end of that decade, hip-hop had been transformed in response to a world filled with crack, rich and ruthless drug lords, militarized police forces, a level of violence not seen in the country since Prohibition, prison sentences as long as basketball scores, and lives ruined by a drug that was insanely addictive.
In the 1990s, whites comprised 70 percent of those arrested and 40 percent of the incarcerated, but that white crime did not reverberate outward to say something about the character of all white people. By contrast, black crime suggests something is wrong with the entire race.
Hip-hop is the product of a generation in which many black men did not know their fathers. How did these fatherless MCs construct their masculinity? For some, it was by watching and idolizing drug dealers. Many would make it as rappers by packaging themselves as former dealers — either because that is what they were or because that’s who they revered. I’m talking about the Notorious B.I.G., Nas, the Wu-Tang Clan, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, the Clipse, Rick Ross and others. By then, it seemed as though an MC needed to claim drug-trade stripes to earn acceptance among hip-hop’s elite.
Hip-hop could have grown into a challenge to the war on drugs but instead accepted it as a fact of life and told bluesy, or braggadocious, stories about its part in it.
Ross is just one of many whose music idolizes dealers, and who carry scars from the drug trade like medals. They swallow the stereotype whole. Ross’s entire career reflects this shift: He is a former corrections officer who took on the name of a legendary cocaine dealer — “Freeway” Ricky Ross — and proclaimed himself “the biggest boss that you’ve seen thus far” in his song “The Boss.” He’s just one of many MCs who have made millions by swallowing the drug-dealer stereotype whole, and thus deploying the drug problem and the criminalblackman myth for personal gain.
The nation surely failed its black male citizens by targeting and imprisoning them when joblessness and the crack epidemic left them with few real options. They were conveniently villainized, arrested and warehoused to help politicians, judges, prosecutors and police win the public trust.
But hip-hop also failed black America, and failed itself. It’s unavoidable that hip-hop and the war on drugs would become intertwined. But the music could have been a tool of resistance, informing on the drug war’s hypocrisies instead of acquiescing to them. Hip-hop didn’t have to become complicit in spreading the message of the criminalblackman, but the money it made from doing so was the drug it just couldn’t stop getting high on.
In the early 1980s, most of the socially conscious hiphop records mentioned drugs as one of the many problems affecting black Americans, not the central one. When they did touch on drugs, they were almost always depicted negatively; doing drugs was a character failing, and the songs usually portrayed the speaker as a bystander trapped in a ghetto, observing it, not participating in its ills. They were like griots, storytellers. Take Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” which begins: “Broken glass everywhere!” — a mirroring James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling’s “broken window theory,” which holds that a building with broken windows invites serious crime because it signals neglect. The song offers a litany of societal ills, with drugs being just one of them.
Grandmaster Melle Mel’s “White Lines” from 1983 is one of the few early hip-hop songs to deal directly with drugs. Mel focuses on cocaine rather than crack, which was not yet a major problem in American cities. Mel speaks in the first person and breaks the bystander norm, taking on the role of a user, although ultimately as an artistic device rather than truly implicating himself as later MCs would. And he uses the song to implore listeners to avoid cocaine — unlike so many future MCs who would try to make selling and using drugs look sexy.
Hip-hop’s journey between those two mind-sets happened as the unemployment rate among black men soared to twice the level among whites, passing 21 percent in 1983. A year later, the FBI’s antidrug funding increased more than tenfold — just in time for the start of the crack epidemic in 1985.
The prevalence of drugs alongside the dearth of jobs made joining the drug trade hard to turn down. It was a road many young black men chose because they lacked better options. Crack, a sort of fast-food version of cocaine, allowed some the chance to earn as much as they would have by owning a McDonald’s franchise, when their only other option was working at one. The crack trade allowed some young men to support their families.
MCs who grew up in the 1980s would brand themselves veterans of the drug trade because drugs dominated their economic possibilities, and those of an entire generation of young black men. But by the end of that decade, hip-hop had been transformed in response to a world filled with crack, rich and ruthless drug lords, militarized police forces, a level of violence not seen in the country since Prohibition, prison sentences as long as basketball scores, and lives ruined by a drug that was insanely addictive.
In the 1990s, whites comprised 70 percent of those arrested and 40 percent of the incarcerated, but that white crime did not reverberate outward to say something about the character of all white people. By contrast, black crime suggests something is wrong with the entire race.
Hip-hop is the product of a generation in which many black men did not know their fathers. How did these fatherless MCs construct their masculinity? For some, it was by watching and idolizing drug dealers. Many would make it as rappers by packaging themselves as former dealers — either because that is what they were or because that’s who they revered. I’m talking about the Notorious B.I.G., Nas, the Wu-Tang Clan, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, the Clipse, Rick Ross and others. By then, it seemed as though an MC needed to claim drug-trade stripes to earn acceptance among hip-hop’s elite.
Hip-hop could have grown into a challenge to the war on drugs but instead accepted it as a fact of life and told bluesy, or braggadocious, stories about its part in it.
Ross is just one of many whose music idolizes dealers, and who carry scars from the drug trade like medals. They swallow the stereotype whole. Ross’s entire career reflects this shift: He is a former corrections officer who took on the name of a legendary cocaine dealer — “Freeway” Ricky Ross — and proclaimed himself “the biggest boss that you’ve seen thus far” in his song “The Boss.” He’s just one of many MCs who have made millions by swallowing the drug-dealer stereotype whole, and thus deploying the drug problem and the criminalblackman myth for personal gain.
The nation surely failed its black male citizens by targeting and imprisoning them when joblessness and the crack epidemic left them with few real options. They were conveniently villainized, arrested and warehoused to help politicians, judges, prosecutors and police win the public trust.
But hip-hop also failed black America, and failed itself. It’s unavoidable that hip-hop and the war on drugs would become intertwined. But the music could have been a tool of resistance, informing on the drug war’s hypocrisies instead of acquiescing to them. Hip-hop didn’t have to become complicit in spreading the message of the criminalblackman, but the money it made from doing so was the drug it just couldn’t stop getting high on.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Is Teach For America A Program For The Poor Or For The Rich?
I’m going to start with full disclosure: I have never liked Teach for America. If that’s going to bug you, you might want to move on to the next blog.
Why do I dislike Teach For America? Because it has nothing to do with permanent investment in our schools, or thoughtful reform of education. Because it is one of many organizations that seem to exist more or less to give privileged young people the “life experience” that will qualify them to go on to their next advanced degree. Because it relies for its prestige on the idea that people who are middle or upper class naturally have something special and intangible to offer to the poor. Because it activates our not so thinly-veiled social contempt for people who chose the hard work of teaching public school as a career, often doing it for decades in places where they are forced to buy books and classroom supplies out of their own salaries.
I dislike TFA because public education does not exist to give graduates of elite colleges and universities a couple swing years so that they can later go on to great graduate schools and fabulously well paid careers. I dislike TFA because I am a teacher, and I am quite clear that you don’t learn to teach in five weeks, much less teach students who have a range of social, economic and developmental problems; who are often hungry, in pain, angry or frightened; and who come in unruly waves of 40-50 every 45 minutes. So thank you Michael Winerip for interviewing numerous elite college grads who are struggling with the “stigma” of having been rejected by this glitzy non-profit because there aren’t so many paralegal and entry-level Wall Street jobs this year; and thank you for using this as an opportunity to take a look at this popular NGO that makes a lot of claims for itself that are thinly documented.
As someone who is a career teacher, I am offended by the notion that anyone can step into a classroom and teach effectively, even though they are inexperienced and virtually untrained, because they are oh-so-smart and have successfully gotten into Harvard or Zenith. And teaching public secondary school is harder than teaching, or being a student in, college. Public school is open to the public, folks, and nobody does a sort for you to separate out the ones who are ready to learn, or who already speak English. Magnet and charter schools can be even harder to teach in, since in their initial years they are often the dumping ground for students who have been expelled from and flunked out of other schools.
But let’s be clear: mostly I dislike Teach for America because it is not school reform and it claims to be. It is a neo-liberal romance about the ways in which volunteerism by elites can replace a political and fiscal commitment to lifting Americans out of poverty by supporting, and investing in, the schools that poor people attend. Worse, TFA is a spiritual extension of those internship programs that these eager young things with BA’s larded their records with to get into elite colleges and universities in the first place. The logic is: if it looks good for me, then it must be good for “them.” As Winerip comments, “Teach for America has become an elite brand that will help build a résumé, whether or not the person stays in teaching. And in a bad economy, it’s a two-year job guarantee with a good paycheck; members earn a beginning teacher’s salary in the districts where they’re placed.”
And they don’t stay in teaching. Perhaps the worst aspect of TFA is that it views teaching as a kind of boot camp for entering the leadership class. TFA’s website claims that “corps members and alumni are creating fundamental change,” but what that change comprises, and what counts as change, is not clear. The website cites research “that Teach For America corps members’ impact on their students’ achievement is equal to or greater than that of other new teachers. Moreover, the most rigorous studies have shown that corps members’ impact exceeds that of experienced and certified teachers in the same schools.” But in fact, if you click on the link that supposedly leads you to that research, you find that “Studies of TFA teacher vary widely in both their findings and the strength of their methodologies.” Hmmm. And actually, although you can get citations for these studies, the documents themselves have not been uploaded to the website.
What the website doesn’t tell you is how many of those teachers quit in the first six months. As Winerip notes, according to one study, “by the fourth year, 85 percent of T.F.A. teachers had left” New York City schools.” That’s change for you. My guess is the rate of attrition is higher and faster in the Mississippi Delta, currently identified by TFA as a location in great need of amateur teachers. According to one of my former students who entered the program over five years ago and is still teaching in the troubled urban system he was assigned to, his cohort lost half its membership in the first year, and he is the only original member of his team still in teaching.
TFA has not helped to build a permanent corps of excellent teachers who will train other career teachers or use their classroom training to become effective principals. Hence, it has nothing to do with a program of fundamental, structural reform for our nation’s public schools. It has nothing to do with how schools, and school systems, might use their centrality to communities to address issues that are currently crippling education, such as unfunded testing mandates, the effects of poverty and unemployment, teaching critical thinking rather than rote memorization, or state budget cuts that eliminate books and raise class sizes. TFA does, however, seem to be a training ground for education bureaucrats, such as Chancellor Michelle Rhee of the District of Columbia, who continues to blame most of her system’s problems on undocumented teacher incompetence.
Rhee recently laid off over 250 teachers: how many of them will be replaced by TFA fly-by-nighters, whose salary is paid by a combination of private and federal dollars? I don’t know about other states, but because of drastically reduced property tax revenues, Connecticut is currently laying off young teachers who have actually committed to teaching as a career, not as a temporary stopgap before law school. Other states are waiting anxiously to hear whether Congress will pass a bill that would fund the Obama Administration’s new education initiative, and whether they will actually receive the millions of dollars they were promised for system-wide education initiatives. Will these funds be replaced by well-intentioned and untrained young people from elite schools who are here today and gone tomorrow?
comment- Ultimately, the Great TFA debate comes down to a simple question: Do you think a Band-Aid fix (in the form of TFA teachers) is better than the current situation or do you think a Band-Aid fix actively precludes real solutions?
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2010/07/is-teach-for-america-program-for-poor/
TFA Research- http://www.teachforamerica.org/our-organization/research#card
Why do I dislike Teach For America? Because it has nothing to do with permanent investment in our schools, or thoughtful reform of education. Because it is one of many organizations that seem to exist more or less to give privileged young people the “life experience” that will qualify them to go on to their next advanced degree. Because it relies for its prestige on the idea that people who are middle or upper class naturally have something special and intangible to offer to the poor. Because it activates our not so thinly-veiled social contempt for people who chose the hard work of teaching public school as a career, often doing it for decades in places where they are forced to buy books and classroom supplies out of their own salaries.
I dislike TFA because public education does not exist to give graduates of elite colleges and universities a couple swing years so that they can later go on to great graduate schools and fabulously well paid careers. I dislike TFA because I am a teacher, and I am quite clear that you don’t learn to teach in five weeks, much less teach students who have a range of social, economic and developmental problems; who are often hungry, in pain, angry or frightened; and who come in unruly waves of 40-50 every 45 minutes. So thank you Michael Winerip for interviewing numerous elite college grads who are struggling with the “stigma” of having been rejected by this glitzy non-profit because there aren’t so many paralegal and entry-level Wall Street jobs this year; and thank you for using this as an opportunity to take a look at this popular NGO that makes a lot of claims for itself that are thinly documented.
As someone who is a career teacher, I am offended by the notion that anyone can step into a classroom and teach effectively, even though they are inexperienced and virtually untrained, because they are oh-so-smart and have successfully gotten into Harvard or Zenith. And teaching public secondary school is harder than teaching, or being a student in, college. Public school is open to the public, folks, and nobody does a sort for you to separate out the ones who are ready to learn, or who already speak English. Magnet and charter schools can be even harder to teach in, since in their initial years they are often the dumping ground for students who have been expelled from and flunked out of other schools.
But let’s be clear: mostly I dislike Teach for America because it is not school reform and it claims to be. It is a neo-liberal romance about the ways in which volunteerism by elites can replace a political and fiscal commitment to lifting Americans out of poverty by supporting, and investing in, the schools that poor people attend. Worse, TFA is a spiritual extension of those internship programs that these eager young things with BA’s larded their records with to get into elite colleges and universities in the first place. The logic is: if it looks good for me, then it must be good for “them.” As Winerip comments, “Teach for America has become an elite brand that will help build a résumé, whether or not the person stays in teaching. And in a bad economy, it’s a two-year job guarantee with a good paycheck; members earn a beginning teacher’s salary in the districts where they’re placed.”
And they don’t stay in teaching. Perhaps the worst aspect of TFA is that it views teaching as a kind of boot camp for entering the leadership class. TFA’s website claims that “corps members and alumni are creating fundamental change,” but what that change comprises, and what counts as change, is not clear. The website cites research “that Teach For America corps members’ impact on their students’ achievement is equal to or greater than that of other new teachers. Moreover, the most rigorous studies have shown that corps members’ impact exceeds that of experienced and certified teachers in the same schools.” But in fact, if you click on the link that supposedly leads you to that research, you find that “Studies of TFA teacher vary widely in both their findings and the strength of their methodologies.” Hmmm. And actually, although you can get citations for these studies, the documents themselves have not been uploaded to the website.
What the website doesn’t tell you is how many of those teachers quit in the first six months. As Winerip notes, according to one study, “by the fourth year, 85 percent of T.F.A. teachers had left” New York City schools.” That’s change for you. My guess is the rate of attrition is higher and faster in the Mississippi Delta, currently identified by TFA as a location in great need of amateur teachers. According to one of my former students who entered the program over five years ago and is still teaching in the troubled urban system he was assigned to, his cohort lost half its membership in the first year, and he is the only original member of his team still in teaching.
TFA has not helped to build a permanent corps of excellent teachers who will train other career teachers or use their classroom training to become effective principals. Hence, it has nothing to do with a program of fundamental, structural reform for our nation’s public schools. It has nothing to do with how schools, and school systems, might use their centrality to communities to address issues that are currently crippling education, such as unfunded testing mandates, the effects of poverty and unemployment, teaching critical thinking rather than rote memorization, or state budget cuts that eliminate books and raise class sizes. TFA does, however, seem to be a training ground for education bureaucrats, such as Chancellor Michelle Rhee of the District of Columbia, who continues to blame most of her system’s problems on undocumented teacher incompetence.
Rhee recently laid off over 250 teachers: how many of them will be replaced by TFA fly-by-nighters, whose salary is paid by a combination of private and federal dollars? I don’t know about other states, but because of drastically reduced property tax revenues, Connecticut is currently laying off young teachers who have actually committed to teaching as a career, not as a temporary stopgap before law school. Other states are waiting anxiously to hear whether Congress will pass a bill that would fund the Obama Administration’s new education initiative, and whether they will actually receive the millions of dollars they were promised for system-wide education initiatives. Will these funds be replaced by well-intentioned and untrained young people from elite schools who are here today and gone tomorrow?
comment- Ultimately, the Great TFA debate comes down to a simple question: Do you think a Band-Aid fix (in the form of TFA teachers) is better than the current situation or do you think a Band-Aid fix actively precludes real solutions?
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2010/07/is-teach-for-america-program-for-poor/
TFA Research- http://www.teachforamerica.org/our-organization/research#card
Race, unfortunately and tragically, factors into gun death at the metro level. The share of the population that is black is positively related to both the overall rate of gun death (.56) and even more so with gun-related homicides (.72). The pattern is similar for the share of the population that is comprised of young black males which is also positively related to the overall rate of gun death (.55) and murder by gun (.70). That said, we find no significant association between any type of gun death and the share of the population that is Hispanic. The importance of gun control cannot be minimized. The state level is the appropriate level to examine this. And our previous state level analysis found gun deaths to be significantly lower in states with stricter gun control laws.
The rate of gun deaths is negatively correlated with states that ban assault weapons, require trigger locks, and mandate safe storage requirements for guns.
Death by gun clearly reflects the class divides which vex America, being substantially more likely in poorer, less advantaged places. And this concentrated nature of gun violence makes it easier for those in more affluent and sheltered places to ignore its consequences. Yes, our nation is in desperate needs of strategies to bridge its burgeoning class divide, but if we truly care to limit the carnage caused by guns in our society, controlling them is the best place to start.
Renowned urbanist Richard Florida at the London Conference
Leading author and thinker on urbanism Richard Florida, professor at University of Toronto and NYU and senior editor at the 'Atlantic', speaks about the potential of the creative classes at the London Conference 2012.
The London Conference is produced by IPPR and the Centre for London.
concentration of advantage and disadvatage
"Much homicide is black-on-black, much inner-city, much gang-on-gang, unlicensed illegal guns, whereas the mass shootings have all been individual, white-on-white, mostly non-urban, often licensed guns (although often licensed to others as in [Sandy Hook])."
distinguished criminologist, Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University
it's time to essentially flip the construct of concentration and clustering on its head. Instead of focusing just on "concentrated disadvantage" to describe crime, we should also focus on "concentrated prosperity." He adds that the main problem in making the connection between the concentration of urban prosperity and disadvantage is that our measures are far too broad. To do so would require more micro-level data at the neighborhood or Census tract level, something like a "micro place-based Gini coefficient."
John Roman, an urban crime expert at the Urban Institute, took a detailed look at the declining homicide rates in America's largest 24 urban centers
The concentrated nature of economic advantage is a central feature, if not the central feature, of the rapidly evolving urban knowledge economy. We are seeing the rise of an increasingly spiky world where prosperity and economic advantage are becoming increasingly uneven and concentrated at every single geographic scale — between as well as within cities and metros, globally and national, and across neighborhoods and communities.
We have tons of research that compares metros. What we need is better data and more research which looks inside our cities — at their increasing economic and geographic divides, tracing differences in income and wage levels, class and industry composition, density and other factors at a much more fine-grained scale.
distinguished criminologist, Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University
it's time to essentially flip the construct of concentration and clustering on its head. Instead of focusing just on "concentrated disadvantage" to describe crime, we should also focus on "concentrated prosperity." He adds that the main problem in making the connection between the concentration of urban prosperity and disadvantage is that our measures are far too broad. To do so would require more micro-level data at the neighborhood or Census tract level, something like a "micro place-based Gini coefficient."
John Roman, an urban crime expert at the Urban Institute, took a detailed look at the declining homicide rates in America's largest 24 urban centers
The concentrated nature of economic advantage is a central feature, if not the central feature, of the rapidly evolving urban knowledge economy. We are seeing the rise of an increasingly spiky world where prosperity and economic advantage are becoming increasingly uneven and concentrated at every single geographic scale — between as well as within cities and metros, globally and national, and across neighborhoods and communities.
We have tons of research that compares metros. What we need is better data and more research which looks inside our cities — at their increasing economic and geographic divides, tracing differences in income and wage levels, class and industry composition, density and other factors at a much more fine-grained scale.
How Economic Development Is Changing the Geography of Urban Crime
"I found gun-related murders to be higher in metros with higher poverty levels, higher levels of inequality, more blue-collar working class economies, and higher shares of commuters who drive to work alone (a proxy for sprawl, among other factors)."
Safer, healthier cities draw and keep new residents away from the unsustainable suburbs and exurbs. But while the numbers point to positive trends on the whole, they also REVEAL our sacrifice zones: Cities that have not been revitalized in this recent wave, where we have allowed poverty and violence to concentrate, out of sight and mind — cities that go unmentioned in the wake of mass murders like the one in Newtown, though they are actually our mass murder capitals.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/12/how-economic-development-changing-geography-urban-crime/4187/
Safer, healthier cities draw and keep new residents away from the unsustainable suburbs and exurbs. But while the numbers point to positive trends on the whole, they also REVEAL our sacrifice zones: Cities that have not been revitalized in this recent wave, where we have allowed poverty and violence to concentrate, out of sight and mind — cities that go unmentioned in the wake of mass murders like the one in Newtown, though they are actually our mass murder capitals.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/12/how-economic-development-changing-geography-urban-crime/4187/
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
We Don't Play With Guns At School
I am grateful that early childhood education emphasizes social-emotional development, as it helps ensure that students will mature into self-regulating and independent individuals. And I strongly believe that teaching preschool students (and all students, for that matter) to connect meaningfully with each other is vital. Only when students learn the power of empathy can they develop genuine relationships.
More than anything, I am thankful to work in a field built on the ideals of joy and love. I am proud that my kids feel safe in my classroom and that they know that they are loved by me. And while I understand that they may sometimes face things no child should, I take solace in knowing that, aside from the occasional tantrum, my kids have had positive experiences in our school thus far. This reaffirmed my response to Samiyah on Friday.“Yes, guns hurt people, and we don’t hurt each other in school. Instead… we… tickle each other!” Their innocent laughter filled my heart as we played on the carpet, a sound that serves as a hopeful reminder of the joy of this work.
http://www.teachforamerica.org/blog/we-dont-play-guns-school
More than anything, I am thankful to work in a field built on the ideals of joy and love. I am proud that my kids feel safe in my classroom and that they know that they are loved by me. And while I understand that they may sometimes face things no child should, I take solace in knowing that, aside from the occasional tantrum, my kids have had positive experiences in our school thus far. This reaffirmed my response to Samiyah on Friday.“Yes, guns hurt people, and we don’t hurt each other in school. Instead… we… tickle each other!” Their innocent laughter filled my heart as we played on the carpet, a sound that serves as a hopeful reminder of the joy of this work.
http://www.teachforamerica.org/blog/we-dont-play-guns-school
Friday, December 14, 2012
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Out of the top 11 countries with the widest gaps between rich and poor, the U.S. is third... right after Hong Kong, China and Singapore
http://dss.ucsd.edu/~ecomisso/philo28/documents/Inequality09.pdf
http://dss.ucsd.edu/~ecomisso/philo28/documents/Inequality09.pdf
Monday, December 10, 2012
Personal responsibility
"Personal responsibility is not supposed to be a ticket to separation: it is an instrument of moral and cultural inclusion, the chief weapon in the fight to overcome unfairness. They do not want to sit in some ghetto sideline; they want to be in the middle of the action" (Newman, 1999 p. 267)
Friday, December 7, 2012
Riding the Subway as Therapy
Wrapped in steel and plastic and surrounded by strangers, riding public transportation can be therapeutic as a trip to a local psychologist or a night out with my friends.
Wrapped in steel and plastic and surrounded by strangers, riding public transportation can be therapeutic as a trip to a local psychologist or a night out with my friends.
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