Rethinking Schools

Those who are not in line with social norms due to students, especially race, language, sexual orientation, weight, or the ability to purchase the latest fashion, will bear the seriousness of this stereotype. They sometimes share anger and frustration with inappropriate times and inappropriate ways. But the classroom can be a safe place, and students can not only answer, they can also confirm their rights in some places in the world.

During the years that I spent in Jefferson, I thought that we needed to help students "correspond" to the rude and unrealistic stereotypes of our school. In particularly useful tasks, they wrote poetry as a "return" method.

I first read Margaret Walker's powerful poem "For My People." Walker 's poem talks about the hardships of African - Americans, and also celebrates the victory of her people. She encouraged and ended this poem as follows: "Let's set up a new earth, let's make another world ... Let's rise and dominate the group of people now!"

Let's see how Walker made her poem by repeating words "for my people". She will use this phrase as an introduction to the theme and follow it in the form of a list. For example,

For my people they sang their slave songs over and over again: praying every night to pray for their elegy and their minors, their melancholy and leap years, unknown gods Modestly bend the invisible power of the knee;

Walker's poetics teaches the power of iteration and listing to poetry. I also have the rhythm of this line - "their elegy and their minors, their blues and 50th anniversary", and the slave songs they are singing, the repetition of songs by elegy and minors, and prayers and prayers Pointed out.

Adam Sanchez (asanchez@zinnedproject.org) is taught at Harvest University High School in New York. He is an editor of Rethinking Schools magazine, and organizer and lecturer of Zinn education project. This article is part of "Our Our Our History" of the Zinn Education Project. Learn more about the Zinn education program and how to incorporate people's history into the classroom.

This article is intended to be used in the educational environment as part of the Zinn education program. This is a collaboration between school reconsideration and educational change, social justice teaching material publisher and distributor. In order to allow you to reprint this material in course packages, newsletters, books and other publications please contact the school to reconsider directly.

Last winter, the editing committee of the reflective school discussed a common core; we tried to decide how to cope with this latest trend in this fashionable educational reform world. Reconsidering school has always been skeptical about the above criteria. Too many standard projects are moving education and learning decisions from educators and schools and leaving them to the hands of distant bureaucrats and politicians. In the standard, we summarize historical, political and cultural disinfection versions, while strengthening public myths, ignoring students' and community voices and concerns. Regardless of the real collaborative dialogue that the school should teach and whatever the standard plays a positive role in what the child should learn, the destruction of bad processes, suspicious political issues, and commercial interests is repeated I am suffering.