My Daily Gratitude

For the length of 2014 I wrote a daily gratitude on an index card and hung it on my wall. It was a way to remind myself of the many blessings I encountered everyday. On December 31, 2014 I read through every single one of those 365 index cards and reflected on my year, my struggles, my triumphs, and my incredible community.

The process was so beneficial for me that I decided to continue it for 2015 and spice it up a bit. Since the beginning of my return to the classroom didn’t go as smoothly as I anticipated I decided that every day for the rest of this school year I’d tweet something I was grateful for in relation to my work as a teacher and learner. I started on our first day back, January 5, 2015 and kept it up throughout the month. A few of my highlights are below but you can check out the entire feed on my Twitter page @GenevieveDeBose. I think I tagged most of them with #bk2thept (the hashtag shortened version of my blog title “Back to the Point”) so you can follow that too.

Teachers, when days are tough or lessons don’t go quite as you planned how do you stay grounded in the beauty and importance of your work? Please share in the comments section below and know that I’m grateful for your thoughts.

Writing for an Authentic Audience

Last week my 7th grade students and I submitted an application for a $2500 grant to reduce the amount of trash and rats in our community of Hunts Point and Longwood in the Bronx. Citizens Committee for New York City is an incredible organization that awards Neighborhood Grants to groups of community members who want to improve something in their neighborhood. Their website says, “Through our Neighborhood Grants, Citizens Committee awards micro-grants of up to $3,000 to resident-led groups to work on community and school projects throughout the city. We prioritize groups based in low-income neighborhoods and Title I public schools. Recent awards have enabled neighbors to come together to make healthy food available in their communities, transform empty lots into community gardens, organize tenants to advocate for better housing conditions, and start school recycling drives.” I’m hopeful that we get the grant and inspired by my young adolescents who saw a need in their community and collectively cam together to brainstorm ways to fix it. As one of my students shared, “I shouldn’t have to walk past a dead cat on my way to school.”

Read a bit of our grant application below and let us know in the comments section what experience you’ve had with students and community-based projects. How do you create an authentic audience for your students and their writing?

AN EXCERPT FROM OUR APPLICATION

Please briefly describe your group’s purpose, history, and accomplishments (maximum: two short paragraphs).

We are a group of seventh graders who are scholar activists. We are all amazing students who are willing to help clean up our community because we are tired of seeing rats running and trash laying around. Our group name is Beauty of the Bronx and our purpose is to improve and beautify our neighborhoods of Hunts Point and Longwood. We don’t really have any history because we are new to this and this is something we have never done before. In our English Language Arts class we are completing a unit on scholar activism. One of our guiding questions is, “How can we improve our community?” So far we have learned about a number of scholar activists and how they have improved their communities. We don’t have a lot of accomplishments yet but are hopeful that with this grant we can accomplish a lot in Hunts Point and Longwood. 

Describe your project and its goals (maximum one page).

Beauty of the Bronx is a community-based effort to clean up the Hunts Point and Longwood communities of the Bronx. We plan to do a number of things to clean up the streets and decrease the rat population in our neighborhoods. Some of these things include:

• Holding community meetings to share information and solicit community input about best ways to reduce the amount of trash and number of rats in our communities.
• Holding fun and lively spring community clean up days where volunteers come together to clean up the streets of Hunts Point and Longwood.
• Increasing the number of trash cans in our community and working with the Sanitation Department to paint new and existing trash cans bright colors so they stand out and people are drawn to them.
• Creating and putting up colorful signs in the community to remind people to throw trash in cans and curb their dogs.
• Increasing the number of tree guards and flowers around trees so that people are less likely to throw their trash there.
• Creating posts with bags for people to use to clean up after their dogs poop on the ground.
• Going to local schools, bodegas, and community organizations to do teach-ins about the trash and rat problem in our neighborhood and share ways that people can become involved.

 Our goals are to 1) decrease the amount of trash thrown on the ground, 2) decrease the rat population, 3) increase the number of trash cans, 4) educate people about the dangers of trash and rats, and 5) encourage people to join our campaign.

Picking My Battles

I’ve been struggling with something lately. My students have this very strong aversion to any field trip experience that a) is connected to what we’re learning or b) involves work. It seems that they’re used to field trips that are “just for fun” and involve the movies or some sort of play space. When I told them about today’s trip to the Museum of the City of New York to explore the exhibit “Taking a Stand: Activism in New York City” more than a few students said, “Aw miss. I’m not coming that day. Museums are boring.”

A huge part of my work as a teacher is exposing my students to the world outside of their neighborhood and as an English Language Arts teacher I know that building my students’ background knowledge is key to them growing as readers, writers, listeners, and speakers. So you can see why I struggle with their reaction to our fieldwork experiences.

Today, of the 26 students in my first period class only 13 came. Many were absent – I think because they didn’t want to go on the trip – and five were at school but said they didn’t bring back their permission slips because they didn’t want to go. For some of them, I even called their families before we left and got permission from their parents but the students still made it clear they weren’t interested in participating.   

That’s when I decided to pause, reassess, and pick my battles. If a 7th grade student really doesn’t want to go on a fieldwork experience do I force them to go? One on hand, that’s my job as their teacher. By design, I am meant to help expose them to what’s beyond the Hunts Point and Longwood communities. On the other hand, why risk ruining the experience for the rest of my students by bringing along a group who has made it clear they don’t want to be there? (A little piece of me died when I typed that last sentence.) But this is what I’ve been processing and thinking through all year. When do I push kids? When do I let things slide? Is it OK to lower my expectations sometimes? Does every child need to have access to the same experience? Am I setting students up for failure by demanding that they do something they may not be ready for? Are they really “not ready” or just not interested? Are those two the same thing sometimes?

After a short discussion with my colleagues we decided not to engage in the battle. We gathered our thirteen students – only 50% of our first period class – and traveled to the museum. We learned a ton from a phenomenal museum educator named Maeve, made buttons about an issue we want to change, and even saw our Hunts Point community members highlighted in the exhibit for their work to revive the South Bronx in the 1970s. Don’t Move, Improve.

After the winter break, I’ll take my other two classes to the museum to explore the same exhibit. I’ll do all I can to encourage students to attend – reach out to their parents, share how much fun we’ll have, and enlist some positive peer pressure from those who went today. A recent conversation with my principal – after he observed one of my afternoon lessons derail – reminded me that change takes time. I may not get all of my students to want to go to the museum this time around but I’m hopeful that by the end of the school year their aversion to fieldwork will shift towards enthusiasm.   

Learning from the Activsts Around and Before Us

My students and I launched a new unit last week entitled “What does it mean to be a scholar activist?” They helped co-plan it --- blog on that process coming soon! --- and today they finished presenting group posters on scholar activists from around the world. We’ll now name each table group after a scholar activist and these posters will hang above their tables as visual inspiration. I have so many reflections about this unit so far but I just had to share some of the gems of conversation we’re having as a result of their learning. The 7 scholar activists we selected for their groups are Malala Yousafzai, Frederick Douglass, Roberto Clemente, Dolores Huerta, The Freedom Riders, and two local Bronx scholar activists Sister Miriam Thomas and Mothers on the Move.

We’ve been connecting the work of scholars and activists to the current protests and actions taking place around the globe connected to Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the #blacklivesmatter movements. My kids have lots of ideas around this issue and we’ll continue to make connections and find ways to take action. Today I laughed and was inspired multiple times during this morning’s presentations. Here are a few very middle school gems.

• Three of the four Freedom Riders group members said they would have joined the Freedom Riders if they were alive in the 1960s. One said that he didn’t want to risk being on a bus that was targeted with a bomb so he would have helped end segregation by telling the story of the Freedom Riders instead of being part of the group.

• Brison connected Malala Yousafzai fighting for access to education for girls in Pakistan to one of the characters in the novel we just finished. In Linda Sue Park’s A Long Walk to Water Nya, a girl in Sudan in 2008, doesn’t have access to school because she is a girl.

• Madeline asked a number of interesting questions during the Frederick Douglass poster presentation. I’m not sure how the conversation turned to Michael Jackson but during the Q&A portion of her peers’ presentation she raised her hand to ask, “If Michael Jackson was alive during slavery would he have been a slave? You know, because he’s white.” This sparked a lively class conversation about race, skin color, plastic surgery, skin bleaching, whether or not people choose to be enslaved, and so much more.

Madeline also had a few questions about the following quote from Frederick Douglass that the group shared:

“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”

She didn’t have the context and background knowledge to understand the quote and asked if he was talking about jewelry. At first, her peers were confused and she said, “You know you said chain. Like a chain. A piece of jewelry.” They let her know that these were chains used to put around the wrists, ankles, and necks of African Americans who were enslaved.

After a few more questions from students about how Frederick Douglass taught himself to read and the books he wrote Madeline asked at the end, “Didn’t he have a lot of kids? I thought he had kids with Harriet Tubman.” Her peers respectfully let her know this was not true.

I just adore the conversations that happen with my middle school kids. I also love the learning that takes place when peers teach one another. It’s wonderful as a teacher to sit back and observe students learning from each other. I can’t wait to see where this unit takes us and how we grow as readers, writers, and critical thinkers.

Conversations & Connections on the Subway

I live in one of the best cities on the planet. The opportunities for learning are so rich that there’s no way I can keep my kiddos in our classroom all of the time. Today, in our seventh week of school, my 7th graders and I went on our first field trip.

I prefer the term fieldwork instead of field trip because I want my students out in the field doing research, exploring, interviewing, learning, and challenging themselves. Today’s journey was more of a field trip/fieldwork hybrid. We traveled from the Bronx to Manhattan’s Times Square to see the film “The Good Lie.” The anchor text for our first unit, “Journeys and Survival,” is Linda Sue Park’s A Long Walk to Water which follows Salva, an 11-year old boy from southern Sudan after he is separated from his family because of a civil war. The film follows four Sudanese youth who experience a similar tragedy.

Before the film, my kids were excited for a number of reasons. First, they were going to the movies. Second, they were going to Times Square. Third, they were going to buy overpriced popcorn and soda. (Pricey!) Fourth, they were going to sit with their friends. After the film, they shared how saddened they were by the content, how many of them shed tears multiple times throughout the movie, and how amazed they were by the number of lights and large screens there are in Times Square. (Many of them were also still shocked that they actually had an assignment to do.)

For me, the best part of any fieldwork experience is riding the subway with my students. In part because New York City’s subways are filled with such diversity that you can’t help but learn about the world but also because it gives me that downtime with kids that is so rare in the classroom. Today I learned that burger is a negative term used to describe someone these days. (One student said it’s like using the word trash.) I also learned that my kids are afraid they’ll contract Ebola since it’s now come to New York City. I learned that our advisory has ethnic roots in Mexico, Nigeria, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Italy, Ireland, and West Africa. (So incredible!) And that one of my student’s mom’s – who is pregnant and due in one week but came along as a chaperone (What?!?!? Talk about commitment!) – has yet to find out the sex of her new baby. These are the connections that make me a better teacher. Building community with my kids and their families is key to me being a stronger English Language Arts teacher. Those strong relationships will be what's us through when the learning gets hard.

I’m committed to taking my students out of the building for fieldwork at least once every 6 weeks but I’d love to do it more than that. We’ve got too much to learn and too little time. Let’s get back on that train. Where to next?

What have been some of your favorite fieldwork and field trip experiences as a teacher or a student? Share them in the comments below.