Rethinking Math Textbook Preview - From Rethinking Schools Magazine

re thinking schools
SPRING 2013, VOLUME 27 NO. 3
LEARNING MATH LEARNING JUSTICE
USA/CANADA $5.95
Climate Change Through Story
Responding to Tragedy
Saga of a Promising Charter
Rethinking Schools is a nonprofit, independent magazine advocating the reform of public schools, with an emphasis on urban schools and issues of equity and social justice. We stress a grassroots perspective combining theory and practice, and linking classroom issues to broader social concerns. We are an activist publication and encourage teachers, parents, and students to become involved in building quality public schools for all children.
EDITORS
re thinking
COVER THEME
Wayne Au, Bill Bigelow, Linda Christensen, Helen Gym, David Levine, Stan Karp, Larry Miller, Bob Peterson, Kelley Dawson Salas, Jody Sokolower, Melissa Bollow Tempel, Stephanie Walters
EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES
Learning Math, Learning Justice

5 Editorial
Just Math By the editors of Rethinking Schools
Terry Burant, Rita Tenorio, Dyan Watson, Kathy Xiong

CURRICULUM EDITOR
Bill Bigelow
MANAGING EDITOR
11 Whose Community Is This?

Mathematics of neighborhood displacement By Eric (Rico) Gutstein Students use advanced math to study gentrification, displacement, and foreclosure in their neighborhood.
Jody Sokolower
BUSINESS MANAGER
Michael Trokan Tegan Dowling Kris Collett
OFFICE MANAGER
MARKETING DIRECTOR
ART DIRECTOR
18 Transparency of Water
A workshop on math, water, and justice By Selene Gonzalez-Carillo and Martha Merson Community educators bring math into an intergenerational exploration of the environmental, political, and economic issues surrounding bottled versus tap water.
Nancy Zucker
RETHINKING SCHOOLS Vol. 27, No. 3 (ISSN 0895-
6855) is published four times a year (October, December, March, and May) by Rethinking Schools, Limited, 1001 East Keefe Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53212-1710. Periodicals postage paid at Milwaukee, WI. POSTMASTER: Send change of address to Rethinking Schools, P.O. Box 2222, Williston, VT 05495-9940. Rethinking Schools is published by Rethinking Schools, Ltd., a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. It is listed in the Alternative Press Index. Rethinking Schools is a member of Community Shares of Greater Milwaukee, an alternative workplace-giving federation in Milwaukee. One-year subscriptions are $19.95. Bulk order subscriptions are available at substantially reduced prices. Occasionally Rethinking Schools makes its mailing list available for educational promotions. If you do not want your name given out, contact us. Rethinking Schools would like to acknowledge the support of Atlantic Philanthropies, Communitas Charitable Trust, Frederick Douglass Edhlund Fund, Jewish Communal Fund, New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, New Visions Foundation, Sheilahs Fund, and Tides Foundation. Rethinking Schools is printed at Royle Printing, Sun Prairie, Wis. Newsstand circulation is through Disticor Magazine Distribution Services (phone 905-619-6565 or fax 905-619-2903).
RETHINKING SCHOOLS
24 Beyond Marbles
Percent change and social justice By Flannery Denny Middle school students analyze a classroom full of social justice issues, armed with their understanding of percent change.
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FEATURES
Vol. 27, No. 3
DEPARTMENTS
30 Responding to Tragedy
2nd graders reach out to the Sikh community By Dale Weiss When a racist attack kills members of a local Sikh temple, a 2nd-grade teacher involves her students in a journey of connection and solidarity.
7 Action Education
Seattle Test Boycott: Our Destination Is Not on the MAP By Jesse Hagopian
36 An Unfortunate Misunderstanding
Saga of a promising new charter school By Grace Gonzales Helping create an independent charter school seems like a dream job. But teachers, parents, and children soon confront all-too-familiar charter school woes.
9 Letters to the Editor 61 Good Stuff

Encounters By Herb Kohl
62 Resources
Our picks for books, videos, websites, and other social justice education resources.
42 Creative Conict Collaborative playwriting

By Kathleen Melville A high school drama teacher searches for ways to encourage students to write about their lives without replicating stereotypes.
48 Hey, Mom, I forgive you

Teaching the forgiveness poem By Linda Christensen An English teacher builds community as her students write a poem about forgivingor not forgiving. She starts with her own story.
Got an idea for an article? Got a letter for us? Contact Jody Sokolower: jody@rethinkingschools.org
52 A Pure Medley
Poetry by Adeline Nieto
54 Paradise Lost
Introducing students to climate change through story By Brady Bennon The film Paradise Lostabout the rising ocean that threatens Kiribatiproves an evocative introduction to a unit on the impact of climate change.
RETHINKING SCHOOLS > 3
EYES ON MATH A Visual Approach to Teaching Math Concepts Marian Small

Illustrations by Amy Lin
SHOW ME WHAT YOU KNOW Exploring Student Representations Across STEM Disciplines Edited by Brbara M. Brizuela and Brian E Gravel
SEX ED FOR CARING SCHOOLS Creating an EthicsBased Curriculum Sharon Lamb
NEW FROM
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Getting Teacher Evaluation Right
What Really Matters for Effectiveness and Improvement
MULTICULTURAL TEACHING IN THE EARLY CHILDHOOD CLASSROOM Approaches, Strategies, and Tools, Preschool 2nd Grade Mariana Souto-Manning
SOCIAL STUDIES, LITERACY, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE COMMON CORE CLASSROOM A Guide for Teachers Ruchi AgarwalRangnath
Foreword by Christine Sleeter
GETTING TEACHER EVALUATION RIGHT What Really Matters for Effectiveness and Improvement Linda Darling-Hammond
SCHOOLING HIP-HOP Expanding Hip-Hop Based Education Across the Curriculum Edited by Marc Lamont Hill and Emery Petchauer
A SEARCH PAST SILENCE The Literacy of Young Black Men David E. Kirkland
Foreword by Pedro Noguera
Linda Darling-Hammond
DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION IN PRACTICE Inside the Mission Hill School Matthew Knoester
Foreword by Deborah W. Meier
KEEP THEM READING An Anti-Censorship Handbook for Educators ReLeah Cossett Lent and Gloria Pipkin
Foreword by Pat Scales
SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE LITERACY Teaching Adolescents for Purpose and Power Paula M. Selvester and Deborah G. Summers
Foreword by Shirley Brice Heath
A CRITICAL INQUIRY FRAMEWORK FOR K12 TEACHERS Lessons and Resources from the U.N. Rights of the Child Edited by JoBeth Allen and Lois Alexander
THE WRONG KIND OF DIFFERENT Challenging the Meaning of Diversity in American Classrooms Antonia Randolph
YOUTH HELD AT THE BORDER Immigration, Education, and the Politics of Inclusion Lisa (Leigh) Patel
Foreword by Michelle Fine
TEACHERS COLLEGE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
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By the editors of Rethinking Schools
Just Math
ETHAN HEITNER
ow to best teach mathematics has been debated for decades. Recently these debates have been rekindled with the implementation of the new Common Core State Standards for mathematics. Teachers are re-examining focus, scope, and sequence of math instruction.
Whats absent in most of these discussions, however, is something more fundamental than whether patterns should be taught in kindergarten or when multiplication of fractions should be mastered. The larger issue is how children will learn to use math to make sense of and transform the world around them. For too long, math curriculum and instruction have been shaped by corporate notions of international competitiveness or the demands of a labor market with high-tech jobs for a few and low-wage slots for the many. Children and youth deserve math curriculum that is different in essence from the new standards-aligned texts and tests that multinational textbook companies are scrambling to publish as they seek to corner profitable markets. Our children deserve to be taught math in ways that help make visible the ecological, social, and community issues that will shape their lives and their futures. They need math skills that help them understand and care for the planet and each other, not wage test-score wars with children around the globe. Students deserve to be taught math in ways that democratize the classroom. As math educator Rochelle Gutirrez explained at the recent Creating Balance in an Unjust World math conference in San Francisco, when we teach math as an abstraction, we are teaching children to separate their minds from their bodies, their lives, and their communities. A just math curriculum has at its core issues that matter. When math is embedded in important issuesfrom racial disparities
in school expulsions to the rate of global warmingevery child has a contribution to make and a stake in the answers. This is real-world math, not calculations about which train gets to the station first. This is not about political indoctrination or using curriculum for narrow purposes. All curriculum is about the construction of meaning, and all curriculum is political. To advocate for a broad social justice framing instead of a narrow technocratic one is to affirm that math is indeed for and about all of us. There is a particular urgency to teaching math in ways that prepare students for the ecological, social, and community issues that threaten life on Earth. In a recent Rolling Stone article, Global Warmings Terrifying New Math, environmental activist Bill McKibben writes, to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. McKibben proceeds to numerically reveal the climate collision course we are on. For example, in order to prevent the planet from warming a potentially catastrophic 2 degrees Celsius (about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), we can release no more than 565 gigatons of carbon into
the atmosphere. The problem? Energy corporationsand countries that act like energy corporations (think Kuwait) have estimated reserves of 2,795 gigatons of carbon, which they plan to sell and
explains how he engaged students in high-level math concepts to understand the mortgage crisis and gentrification of their neighborhood. Flannery Denny shows middle school students how to
Our children need math skills that help them understand and care for the planet and each other, not wage test-score wars with children around the globe.
burn for energy. Storying the climate crisis with numbers allows students to see our predicament in new ways. This issue of Rethinking Schools which previews our new, long-awaited second edition of Rethinking Mathematicsfeatures articles that provide examples of how math can be used so students are better prepared to understand and change the world. In Whose Community Is This? Mathematics of Neighborhood Displacement, Rico Gutstein, who co-edited the book with Bob Peterson, manipulate percents to investigate their own real-life questions in Beyond Marbles: Percent Change and Social Justice. In Selene Gonzalez-Carillo and Martha Mersons article, Transparency of Water: A Workshop on Math, Water, and Justice, questions about bottled water are the context in which children and adults learn math together. In these articles, we see students change their view of mathematicsfrom seeing it as a bunch of disconnected, rote rules to be memorized and regurgitated, to appreciating it
as a powerful way to make sense of complex social realities. Social justice education is not just for social studies and language arts classrooms. Every discipline offers unique ways to understand and express the world. Looking at the world through math tells a story about the world in a different way. Its one thing to look at the social and ecological impact of climate change, for example, but mathematics gives us another way to make sense of reality. It can complement other forms of narrative and deepen our understanding of the crises. We hope the articles in this issue and the new edition of Rethinking Mathematics inspire math teachers to weave social justice and ecological issues throughout the mathematics curriculum. But we also hope that teachers of other subjects will interject mathematics into their curricular areas. Its an approach that can deepen students understanding of society and prepare them to be critical, active participants in a democracy. n
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It was only this year that I discovered the Zinn Education Project. I cannot imagine being a teacher without it.
KRIS BECK, CHICAGO, 5thGRADE TEACHER
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A COLLABORATION BETWEEN RETHINKING SCHOOLS AND TEACHING FOR CHANGE
6 > SPRING 2013
Action Education
NOAM GUNDLE
Seattle Education Association teachers gather to support the MAP test boycott.
Seattle Test Boycott:

Our Destination Is Not on the MAP
BY JESSE HAGOPIAN
n Jan. 10, 2013, we teachers at Garfield High School called a press conference to announce our intention to refuse to administer the Seattle Public Schools mandated Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test a computerized standardized test given up to three times a year. We made it clear that we are not opposed to demonstrating student learning, but the MAP test is so irrevocably flawed that it is not a useful assessment. Our declaration of resistance, ratified by a unanimous vote at a staff meeting, sent school district officials scrambling for talking points and the PR flacks for the testing companies working overtime writing op-eds. Meanwhile, Garfield parents and students united with the teachers, with unanimous votes by the PTSA board and the student government in favor of boycotting the test. Schools around Seattle sent letters of support, as did the University of Washingtons faculty association. Large numbers of teachers at four other Seattle schoolsOrca K8 School, Center School, Ballard High, and Chief Sealth International Highjoined the boycott. Garfields original resolution cited many serious objections to the MAP test, including: Th e test is not valid at the high school level because the margin of error is higher than the expected gains. Th e test is not aligned to our curriculum. Th e former superintendent, the late Maria Goodloe-Johnson, brought the MAP to Seattle at a cost of some $4 million while she was serving on the board of the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), the company that
sells it. She did not disclose this connection until after the district approved the contract. The MAP test especially hurts students receiving extra academic supportEnglish language learners and those enrolled in special education. These are the children who lose the most each time they waste five hours on the test. Our computer labs are commandeered for weeks when the MAP test is administered, so students working on research projects cant get near them. The students without home computerspredominantly low-income and students of colorare hurt the most. Although not designed to do so, the MAP test is used in evaluating teachers. Washington ranks number 1 in the nation in the number of standardized tests K-12 students take. The state spends more than $100 million on standardized tests, yet ranks 42nd in per pupil spending. These are the intolerable conditions that provoked educators in Seattle to put their livelihoods on the line. Garfields stand against the MAP test didnt originate as a stand against standardized testing in general. But, as people around the nation saw the issues that Garfields teachers raised, many saw similar flaws in the mandated tests in their own schools. The story of how we organized the test boycott in Seattle holds lessons for people everywhere who want to liberate education from the standardized testing regime. Organizing the Vote One afternoon in December, I got a phone call from a longtime teacher in our building. Because I am a union representative at Garfield, I assumed this was another inquiry about our collective bargaining agreement. But when I got to
____________________________________ Jesse Hagopian teaches history at Garfield High School in Seattle and is a founding member of Social Equality Educators. He is a contributing author to Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation and 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed U.S. History.
the teachers cubicle, she peered over the top of the worn partition to make sure no one was within earshot. Im not going to give the MAP test, she said with a delighted defiance. And there are others I have talked to as well. Teachers had been complaining of the many flaws of the MAP test for yearsincluding by resolution at a citywide union meeting in 2010but now it seemed Garfield teachers were ready to take action. We organized meetings of teachers in the tested subjectsreading
declaring that the MAP test was not optional, and he expected everyone to perform their assigned duties. More than one teacher wondered if we had made the right decision. But, within minutes, the office secretary came on the intercom to announce that a pizza lunch, sent by supporting teachers at a school in Florida, was being served in the conference room. Our resolve grew as the chocolates, flowers, cards, books, donations, e-mails, and resolutions of support came streaming in from around the country.
ing them from the MAP; of the remainder, most blasted through the computer screen questions in only a few minutes, invalidating their scores. What Replaces Standardized Tests? Our MAP test boycott has already achieved several important victories. The national mobilizations, petitions, and email campaigns helped convince Banda to backtrack on his suspension threat. Very few students at Garfield ended up taking the MAP test this winter, which resulted in more instructional time. Because we dramatically reduced testing, our libraries were liberated for their intended use. However, our struggle has just begun. Banda has vowed there will still be consequences for our boycott. In the spring we face the third and final round of MAP testing for the yearthe scores that the district wants to use to measure teacher effectiveness. This will require another major mobilization. For the boycotting schools, our biggest challenge will be collaborating to design an alternative to the MAP test. As you would expect, there is a range of opinions among the boycotters about what should replace the MAP. Some of my colleagues propose replacing the MAP with another test that is aligned to our curriculum. Others, myself included, believe that portfolios and performancebased assessments would be better because they are more directly tied to the curriculum of specific teachers, can help cultivate skills and talents not measured by a standardized test, and allow for the assessment of students over time, rather than on a random day. Garfields teachers and the other MAP test boycotters have made a public declaration that we will no longer be relegated to the margins of the discussion about how to improve our schools. The current system is increasingly designed to reproduce the inequities in society, but teachers, parents, and students in Seattle are redesigning it. Join us. n
I would rather be reprimanded for standing up for what I believe in than for sitting back and letting this test take advantage of me and my students.
and mathematicsto see what action they might be prepared to take. Once we had heard from all the teachers in the tested subjects, we brought up the question of a MAP boycott at an all-staff meeting. Teachers asked me what the consequences could be. I didnt sugarcoat it: If you refuse a directive you can be labeled insubordinate. We have a progressive discipline policy in the Seattle public schools, but ultimately your job could be on the line. However, if we all refuse to give the test, I would be surprised if they fire anyone. A highly respected teacher rose and addressed the room: This flawed test is going to label my students and me as failures because it isnt testing what I am teaching. I would rather be reprimanded for standing up for what I believe in than for sitting back and letting this test take advantage of me and my students. That was it. A unanimous vote to boycott the MAP test followed. Solidarity The first test of our resolve came when Superintendent Jose Banda sent an email to every teacher in the district
The boycotting schools called for a national day of action to support the boycott on Feb. 6, and we were overwhelmed by international solidarity. We heard from parents, teachers, students, and community members in Victoria, British Columbia; Austin, Texas; Oxfordshire, England; and Rochester, New York. Students in Portland, Oregon, initiated their own boycott of the standardized OAKS test. Before our first sit-down meeting with Banda, the district announced that teachers in tested subjects could face a 10-day suspension without pay for failure to administer the test. When these bullying tactics only strengthened the teachers determination, Banda issued a new directive, mandating that Garfields administration oversee the MAP test if teachers wouldnt cooperatean attack designed to turn Garfields teachers against our administration. It didnt work. Teachers maintained their focus on the problems with the school district. Students passed out fliers urging their peers to opt-out. Parents rose to the challenge and mobilized an opt-out campaign, resulting in 75 percent of our 9th graders carrying notes to school exempt-
8 > SPRING 2013
Letters
Continuing Controversy over New Teacher Test We write to clarify misunderstandings about the edTPA initiative described in Stanford/Pearson Test for New Teachers Draws Fire (winter 2013) by Nini Hayes and Jody Sokolower. The edTPA was created by a national consortium of teacher educators and accomplished teachers to define, uphold, and support professional standards. It was not developed, as your article claimed, as a vehicle for corporate America to profit from teacher education. Rather, it is the outgrowth of over two decades of effort by the teaching profession, propelled by the belief that the best way to determine the readiness of prospective teachers for teaching is to have them actually demonstrate they can do it effectively. Unlike the impression given in your article, the edTPA has been well received around the country spreading over the last 10 years to 26 states and more than 120 institutions. Because interest in the edTPA grew so rapidly, the edTPA consortium needed a partner to assist in national distribution. Pearson Publishing was selected, from amongst numerous bidders, for the job. Its role, however, is limited only to distributing the assessment and providing the scoring platform. Pearson is NOT involved in the development of the assessment, nor does it control content, scoring, or policies. These are controlled by the edTPA consortiums policy board, which includes teacher educators, accomplished teachers, state standards boards, and education agencies. Scorers are teachers and teacher educators who are reimbursed for their efforts, which include extensive training (designed by the consortium) to examine prospective teachers work in relation to edTPA rubrics. Contrary to the claim in your
article, using the edTPA need not usurp the autonomy of teacher education programs. Programs still have the freedomand responsibilityto develop and uphold their own criteria, courses, clinical experiences, and assessments. In fact, those that have used it report that it enhances their work and better prepares candidates for the realities of teaching. Because our public education system compels families to entrust our children to the care of the teachers who work in public schools, it has a moral and ethical responsibility to assure that these educators meet a defined standard of expertise. The edTPA, as part of state certification, assures this because it requires teachers to demonstrate that they know how to teach before they assume responsibility for childrens lives. Those of us in educator preparation should welcome such a valid assessment of our work. Beverly Falk, professor and director, Graduate Programs in Early Childhood Education, School of Education, City College of New York Jon Snyder, dean of the college, Bank Street College of Education
Nini Hayes responds: The article does not say that the edTPA was created as a vehicle for corporate profit, but that it is one. Employing Pearson, a multinational conglomerate with no public accountability, to levy a fee and assess student teachers from afar is contradictory to the value of teacher education and public education as a public goodone that must be contextualized, personalized, and democratized. Across the globe, the discourse of education reform is being used to advance opportunities for profit and privatization. That the purveyors of the edTPA ignore this larger context, when we are
seeing the devastating impact of similar accountability and reform measures on K12 education, is astonishing. This is why Cant Be Neutral (CBN) stands in solidarity with United Opt Out National in their efforts to organize a boycott of Pearson. The edTPA is a high-stakes assessment of student teaching. Have we not learned from K12 accountability regimes that high-stakes measures reach back into curriculum and classroom practice, shifting the focus and dominating the discourse? The authors suggest that support of the edTPA is all but universal. They ignore the larger point of the article Barbara Madelonis job loss for speaking outand concerns about infringement on academic freedom in teacher education. Across the country, silence may mean compliance, but it does not mean agreement. That faculty are required to sign nondisclosure agreements to access the edTPA is evidence that the edTPA restricts scholarship, academic freedom, and the possibility of teacher educators as public intellectuals. This is why CBN stands in solidarity with concerned faculty from Teachers College, Columbia University, who have publicly expressed their reservations about the edTPA as a summative assessment tool. I agree that the moral and ethical responsibilities of teacher educators are profoundall the more reason not to entrust these to corporate entities and the illusion of objectivity. Teaching and learning to teach are human, personal, relationship-based experiences, with the goals of transformation and liberation. This is the work of people in relationships and social practice, not of a rubric and calibrated scorer. Nini Hayes, Cant Be Neutral Social Justice Education doctoral student, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Selkie Girl: Multifaceted or Biased? We write in response to Jennifer Holladays article The Character of Our Content (winter 2013). Holladay levels a number of charges against the Great Books Foundation and, in particular, against the story The Selkie Girl, which appears in our Junior Great Books program. As an institution that promotes the thoughtful consideration of divergent ideas, we are disappointed that the story (and the foundation itself) has been subjected to such a limiting interpretation. The stories in Junior Great Books have been carefully chosen, first and foremost, for their ability to support sustained, open-ended interpretive questioning. Folktales are particularly good vehicles for this type of interpretation, as they reveal much about the human condition in all its contradictory splendor. Such is the case with The Selkie Girl. This tale was chosen because it explores what happens when we lose touch withor denywho we really are. For students, the actions of both the male and female protagonist can be useful entry points into a discussion of the importance of staying true to oneself, and allowing others to be their true selves as well. Although it can be argued that the male protagonists actions in the story are not always laudatory, Holladays interpretation is a singular (and distinctly adult) one in a multitude of possible interpretations. It is a shame to champion this notionalong with the determination that the story promotes gender stereotypes and beauty normsto the exclusion of all others, as it determines the entire tale reprehensible, immediately terminating further discussion of its larger themes. We stand behind the stories we have assembled as thought-provoking, multifaceted takes on social and personal issues. The more facets explored,
BRENT NICASTRO
the more enriching the discussion. We write not to defend a particular position, nor to deny Holladay her own, but instead to emphasize our belief that civil discourse is essential for personal growth, social and civic engagement, and the common good. Rachel Claff, editorial director of K 12 programs, and George Schueppert, president, The Great Books Foundation Jennifer Holladay responds: I emailed the Great Books Foundation as a concerned parent when my daughter first encountered The Selkie Girl in her 2nd-grade classroom. I did not receive a response. Now I know what the foundations response might have been, and it does not allay my concerns. The foundation asserts that The Selkie Girl is about what happens when we lose touch withor deny who we really are. On its face, however, the story is about a man who kidnaps and rapes a woman. To summarize the basic plot points of The Selkie Girl: 1) a man becomes obsessed with a magical seal woman, 2) he steals her seal skin so she cannot return to the water, thus compelling her to stay with him, 3) she bears children during her captivitybecause she is there involuntarily, the sex that produces these children cannot be considered consensual, and 4) when her seal skin is located, allowing her to return home, she does so immediately.
The foundation describes the male characters actions as not always laudatory. Id describe them as misogynistic and criminal. At 7 years old, my daughter didnt use the words kidnap or rape, but she knew this man was abusing the seal woman, that he was wielding power over her and hurting her. (She also identified and resisted the white beauty norms imbedded in the story.) What implicit messages might young boys and girls learn from The Selkie Girl? Folklore invites the readers imagination, to be sure, but it also can cloak problematic social norms by wrapping them in an imaginary time and place populated by magical characters, making problematic content harder to see. The Selkie Girl normalizes misogyny and sends implicit messages about power and gender, even if young children dont yet know the grown-up terms for these issues. As educators, parents, and educational publishers, we must remember that the value of purportedly multicultural content isnt defined by where a story comes from (The Selkie Girl is a Celtic tale). The value of multicultural content is defined by its character, by its ability to position new possibilities in which the principles of social justice are made manifest. Jennifer Holladay Denver, Colorado
10 > SPRING 2013
Whose Community Is This?

Mathematics of neighborhood displacement
BY ERIC (RICO) GUTSTEIN
he equation went up on the board as my 12th-grade math for social justice class silently and soberly stared at it.
150,000 291,000 = 92,000
I talked as I wrote: Youve paid $291,000 on a $150,000 mortgage, and you still owe $92,000. Check that math out. Thats good math, lets look at that math: $150,000 minus $291,000 equals $92,000. (I pause for 20 seconds as students look and mumble to themselves and neighbors.) Think about that. Hey! You started with a 150, you paid 291, and you still owe $92,000. Whats going on here? Antoine: Theyre taking your money. Daphne: The bank is taking advantage of you. Rico: This is legalthis is how banks lend money and make money. I paused and repeated it slowly. This is legal this is how banks lend money and make money.
I asked students, What are some questions you could ask here? Renee said, Why is it legal? Daphne asked why more people didnt look into it so they wouldnt end up in that situation. So went a typical day in this class, one in which everything we did focused on learning and using mathematics to study students social reality. I wanted students to understand the root causes of oppression in their livesread the worldto prepare them to be able to change it write the worldas they see fit. Our Setting We were in the Social Justice High School (Sojo) in Chicagos Lawndale community. Sojo was born through a multiyear battle in the 1990s for a new high school in Little Village (South Lawndale)a densely populated, large, Mexican immigrant community with one overcrowded high school. A victorious 19-day hunger strike by neighborhood activists in 2001 (see Communities Struggle to Make Small Serve All,
Rico Gutstein teaches mathematics education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He occasionally teaches in neighborhood Chicago public schools and is active in social movements against education privatization. This article appears in the new edition of Rethinking Mathematics. Student names have been changed. Photographer Jeff Zolines photos can be found at flickr.com/photos/zol87.
summer 2005) forced the district to build the new school. In 2005, Sojo and three other small high schools opened on one campus. Although the building is in South Lawndale, 30 percent of the students are black, from the bordering community of North Lawndale, and the other 70 percent are Latina/o. Almost all students are low-income (~97 percent) as Lawndale, a spiritually and culturally rich community with deep reservoirs of resilience, is also economically battered. Sojo is a quality neighborhood public school, not a charter, alternative, or selective-enrollment school; any student in Lawndale can attend any of the four schools. I was part of Sojos design team and have worked there since 2003. I taught this class in the 200809 school year. Studying Neighborhood Displacement Displacement was part of students realitiesgentrification in North Lawndale, deportation in Little Village, and foreclosures in both. I started the unit by telling the story (with family permission) of Carmen, a student in class. Her grandmother paid off her North Lawndale mortgage years before but, because of rising property taxes and a leaking roof, took out a subprime (adjustable) home equity loan. When the rate set upwards, she lost the house. The families of two other students in class were struggling to stay in their houses, and boarded-up homes were all around. As students discussed their lives and observations, then analyzed local house prices (see graph), their questions emerged: Will we be able to stay here? From where and how does gentrification arise? What is the original purpose or plan? Why our neighborhoods? Where are families supposed to go? To study displacement, students initially learned discrete dynamical systems (DDS). A DDS is complex, and even simple ones can behave chaotically. A
North Lawndale Median House Sale Price, 2001 (2nd quarter)2006 (1st quarter)
North Lawndale Median Housing Sale Price, 2001 (2nd quarter)2006 (1st quarter)
300,000
250,000
DOLLARS
200,000
150,000
100,000
50,000
20 01 .5 20 02 .0 20 02 .5 20 03 .0 20 03 .5 20 04 .0 20 04 .5 20 05 .0 20 05 .5 20 06 .0
QUARTER
DDS has at least one baseline and one recursive equation, and one can use them to produce a mortgage or credit card schedule. (More complicated DDSs have multiple sets of equations, with which students learned to model HIV/AIDS transmission in Lawndale later that year.) For example, the monthly payment on a $150,000, 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage at 6 percent annually is $899.33. Its DDS is: a0 = 150,000.00 [an represents balance due at start of month n] an+1 = an + .005an 899.33 [what you owe at the start of a month is what you owed the previous month, plus the interest on what you owed, minus your monthly payment.] My plan, specifically about mortgages as part of the larger unit, was for students to unpack them and see how much more than the actual cost of a house one actually pays over the years. In addition, I wanted students to understand how subprime (high-cost) mortgages worked, the relationship of interest to principal, concepts like negative amortization, and more. My concern was that students begin to appreciate how banking works as part of a larger capitalist economic system and its relationship to their lives and experiences. I started by teaching students to use a DDS to model an interest-bearing
savings account and gave them an assignment to put their knowledge to use. The next day, we began by reviewing the homework: Create the DDS and find the balance after one year on a $500 deposit at 3 percent annual interest. Marisol wrote on the board: a0 = 500.00 an+1 = an + .0025 x an Using our overhead graphing calculator, she showed the results after one month, then up to 12, and said, So, overall in a year, youre gonna be left with $515.21.
12 > SPRING 2013
After some back and forth, with her clarifying, we moved on. The next problem was: Assume you have this $500 deposit that pays 3 percent per year, but you withdraw $25 a month. Create the DDSwhen will you run out of money? Vanessa tackled this: OK, I did the same as Marisol, but I subtracted the $25 because you also withdraw 25 a month. She showed us wed run out of money in 20 months:
Lawndale Foreclosures per Year

600
500
NUMBER OF FORECLOSURES
North Lawndale Foreclosures per Year Little Village Foreclosures per Year
400
300
200
100
0 2000 2001 2002 2003

YEAR
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
of monthly income going toward housing. Minerva said that a median-income South Lawndale familyearning $32,317 a yearcould afford $807.92 monthly. She explained: I divide their annual income by 12 to get how much they earn per month and multiply that by .3 to get 30 percent.
As we worked as a whole class, students initial attempt was: a0 = 150,000 an+1 = an + .06an This equation was wrong on two counts. I helped students through their first misconception: no payment was subtracted. Then Antoine said that the .06 was annual and should be .005 (monthly). Daphne, Ann, and Vanessa then discussed the meaning of each term in the equation. I stayed out of it until I pushed Vanessa to explain every symbol that Ann had entered into the overhead calculator:
These preparations took us to the reality of students communities, in which foreclosures had tripled over three years. Students examined the graph on Lawndale foreclosures and discussed how mathematics reflected what they were seeing and experiencing. Why were foreclosures rising so dramatically? Our next step was to find how much a median-income family in each Lawndale could afford for housing without hardship, using the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Developments guideline of 30 percent
So far, the mathematics hadnt challenged students much. But my next question did:
If a median-income family in your community (either North or South Lawndale) takes out a 30-year, fixed-rate $150,000 mortgage at 6 percent interest: 1) Create a DDS with a0 being $150,000 and 6 percent interest annually. 2) Determine whether they can afford the mortgage without hardship. If yes, how large a mortgage can they afford? If no, explain why not.
Vanessa: . . . your monthly payment, and then $149,942 is how much you owe. Rico: When? Vanessa: After you give . . . your first payment. Rico: Exactly. That $149,942 is what you owe after your first payment. OK, how much less than your initial payment is what you owe now? Antoine: $58. Rico: $58. How much did you pay? $808. Out of the first payment of $808,
$750 goes to interest to the bank. Only $58 reduces your loan balance. Understand how banking works. Almost 15 times as much money goes to the interest as goes to the principalthe money you owe. That is profit for the bank. Yes, they have to pay their employees, but there is still a huge profit. Thats how they make money. I was trying to interweave students reality, mathematics, and a broader political and economic analysis, but I didnt belabor the point and returned to the math, knowing that students would shortly uncover the strange equation that begins this article. Ann then taught the other students how to set up the equation in the calculator so that each time she pressed ENTER, the calculator would show the next months balance. I interrupted to refocus us: So what is the problem? What is the question? Daphne: Are we trying to see how long before they pay it off ? Rico: Not only are we try Carleton: Can they afford it! Rico: Yes, were trying to see, can they afford this mortgage? How many payments are there altogether? Calvin: 360. I had Ann press the calculator button 360 times as she counted aloud while we watched the balance shrink on the projector. After 360 presses, the board showed:
The lesson here: No median-income South or North Lawndale family could afford this mortgage without hardship. And, as we discovered when we examined neighborhood prices, many houses were this much or moreespecially new condos. A student brought in an advertisement for a new North Lawndale condo for $285,000, not including the $10,000 gated parking space. Over the next few days, I had students answer two related questions: W hat income is needed to afford a mortgage of $150,000a 30-year, fixed-rate, 6 percent annual interest mortgage? W hat mortgage amount, with the same terms, can a median-income North Lawndale/Little Village family afford? By graphing the DDS on their calcu-
Antoine was very interested, and, at my suggestion, we investigated after school. Through internet research, we uncovered that a transnational capital investment fund was trolling the globe for investors to profit from displacing him from his community. Antoine was livid and presented his findings to the class, including a four-minute promotional video for the proposed development. Students also delved into the math of subprime mortgages to better understand how banks profited from them. They were fascinated by this topic. I had students create a scenario, including some negative amortization, for each of three types of subprime mortgages: adjustable-rate, pay-option, and balloon mortgages (respectively, a mortgage whose interest rate changes or adjusts periodically; one in which the buyer has
People need to know what happenswhy they get into debt, especially that what the banks do is legal.
After 30 years, the family still owed almost $92,000. I asked what was the total paid after 30 years and, on the overhead calculator, multiplied 360 by $808, roughly $291,000. That prompted the dialogue and equation that starts this article: 150,000-291,000 = 92,000
lators and adjusting their numbers, students uncovered that a $150,000 mortgage would require roughly a $36,000 income and that median-income families in Little Village and North Lawndale could afford mortgages of $134,750 and $84,500, respectivelynot $150,000. Although students saw and lived with displacement, understanding how and why it worked involved examining complex global processes of finance capitalism. The two Lawndales experienced displacement in ways both similar and different, due to real estate development, the economic crash, (un)authorized immigration status, geography, housing stock, deindustrialization, and proximity to public transportation and highways. As the unit continued, I told students about a plan to build a massive gentrification complex in Little Village.
the option to decide how much to pay per month within limits, often accumulating negative amortization; and one in which the whole balance becomes due and balloons at the end of a relatively short period, e.g., seven years). They were to turn in, for each: 1. The mortgage terms as they changedi.e., interest rate, amount borrowed, monthly payment, and number of months. 2. A table showing how much the borrower paid at different time periods, at what interest rate. 3. What the borrower paid over the loan term, itemizing principal, interest, and refinancing costs, if a balloon. 4. A comparison of the total amount from #3 with the cost of a 30-year, fixed-rate, 6 percent per year mortgage.
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Immigration and Deportation In the second part of the unitimmigration and deportationstudents investigated the complicated role of the U.S. government and NAFTA in displacing Mexican farmers from their land to the maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexico border, and eventually to South Lawndalewhere displacement for unauthorized migrants does not just mean out of the neighborhood, but out of the country itself. We studied the table showing the concentration of USDA corn subsidies to agribusiness and examined the graph showing that, after NAFTA, the price paid to Mexican corn growers dropped while the cost of tortillas soared (further impoverishing rural Mexicans and increasing migration). Students investigated and created graphs showing how corn subsidies to U.S. agribusiness were highly concentrated in huge conglomerates (e.g., the top 1 percent of companies receiving the largest subsidies collected, on average, 117 times more than firms in the bottom 80 percent). We considered how these subsidies undercut Mexican farmers who could not compete with cheaper, imported U.S. corn, and how this contributed to displacement from the Mexican countryside. Students also analyzed data on Mexican migration to the United States in relation to NAFTA policies. We looked at the concentration of Mexicans in various U.S. occupations, examined the volume and rate of change of immigration over time, and used linear and quadratic regression to analyze and predict future immigration trends. We studied, graphed, and analyzed the loss of manufacturing jobs in Lawndale over time and discussed this in relation to demographic changes, NAFTAs rise, and capitals drive to maximize profit by leaving areas with well-paid union jobs to reduce costs. These explorations helped students understand the complexity and multiple ways that people in both Lawndales experience similar and different ways of being displaced.
Concentration of USDA Corn Subsidies to Agribusiness

Pct. of recipient Top 1% Top 2% Top 3% Top 4% Top 5% Top 17% Top 18% Top 19% Top 20% Pct. of Payments 19% 30% 39% 46% 52% 84% 85% 86% 87% Number of Recipients 15,729 31,458 47,187 62,916 78,645 267,395 283,124 298,853 314,582 Total Payments 19952006 $10,726,604,754 $17,053,420,149 $21,870,918,998 $25,767,405,826 $29,022,040,929 $46,941,027,794 $47,629,179,204 $48,258,099,906 $48,834,286,526 Payment per Recipient $681,964 $542,101 $463,495 $409,553 $369,026 $175,549 $168,227 $161,478 $155,235 $5,830
Remaining 80% of recips. 13% 1,258,332 $7,336,588,731
Corn and Tortilla Prices in the Mexican Market

2,50 Tortilla prices Pesos/kg Corn prices Pesos/ metric ton 2,00 - 900 - 800 - 700 - 600
PESOS/KG PESOS/ METRIC TON
1,50 -
- 500 - 400 - 300
1,00 -
0,50 -
- 200 - 100
0,00 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 YEAR 1998 1999 2000 2001
Taking It to the Community As a way to write the world, students 600 two public forums to share what held they learned with family, friends, and 500 community. The public presentations (which they titled Our People, Our 400 Issues: Math as Our Weapon) were at the end of the year, one in each 300 neighborhood. Students created an 81-slide presentation, with my minimal 200 feedback and editing. Although we didnt have time for a full run-through 100 and students were anxious the first night, they presented what they had learned 0 and received much positive feedback. 2000 2001 2002 2003
For example, the students who presented on immigration showed the following slide:
NAFTAs Impacts on Mexico: C orn subsidies to large U.S. corn growers North Lawndale Foreclosures per Year C heaper to produce U.S. corn Little Village Foreclosures per Year Mexico Mexican government stops corn price supports Mexican government stops tortilla price controls Immigration increase to the United States Cheaper to import U.S. corn than grow in
NUMBER OF FORECLOSURES
2004
YEAR
2005
2006
2007
2008
The theme that both Lawndales have more commonalities than differences surfaced strongly at the forums, as their presentations final slide captures:
Why Should We Care? Both communities face the same problems but different situations. There are many lies and stereotypes about both Mexicans and African Americans: >Mexicans steal the jobs of U.S. citizens. > African Americans are lazy. Dont let them pit us against each other!
In written reflections, students said they felt good that they had informed their families and communities, applauded their own and classmates collective presentations, and critiqued themselves for insufficient preparation, nervousness, and reading too much from their PowerPoint. To a person, students thought it was worthwhile and important to teach their people. From my point of view, providing students the opportunity to take it to the community and share what they learned is an important component of teaching for social justice and lets students develop competencies that they will need as future agents of change. Reections Developing and teaching a curriculum that supported learning about these interlocking sociopolitical processes and college preparatory mathematics challenged me, despite my experience with critical math. My academic goal was for students to learn serious mathprecalculus, algebra, discrete mathematics, quantitative reasoning, and statistical analysisto better understand neighborhood displacement, and to appreciate maths usefulness in doing so. Its nonnegotiable that students learn math to have full opportunities for education, life, and individual/community survival. Social
justice mathematics demands this as part of supporting marginalized communities self-determination, and educators cannot shortchange students mathematical learning or life chances. My sociopolitical goal was, as much as possible, to have students understand the causes, mechanisms, and roots of displacement in each neighborhood. I wanted them to see that both Lawndales have the same larger contexta global political and financial system that plays out in particular and sometimes contradictory waysand, thus, whatever differences students saw between their own and others communities were far outweighed by commonalities. Did all my students achieve this? I cannot definitively say. Not all students learned the same amount, based on my assessments of their mathematics learning and sociopolitical understandings. In hindsight, creating and teaching an interdisciplinary curriculum through which students could unwind the interconnections of neighborhood displacement was more complicated than I had anticipated for both students and me. Nonetheless, students said they learned a lot. In a reflection, Mnica, a Latina and lifelong South Lawndale resident, wrote:
Some connections that I see between these two parts of the unit are that in both communities, people are being forced out of their homes. Of course, its different situations, but similar causes. African Americans are being forced out of their homes because they cant pay for their homes. The taxes go up so much that they cant afford to keep living in those communities, so they are forced to look for another place to live. For Mexican people, the problem is that they dont have jobs in Mexico because corn isnt being sold, because its cheaper to import subsidized U.S. corn than to grow their own. That forces
Mexicans to leave their family and homes to come to the U.S. to look for a job. . . . Also, the house mortgages dont only affect one community, but both. They are sometimes the target of bad loans that only make banks richer! I want the people in my community to know that we are really similar in these situations. That there is more that makes us similar, less that makes us different. If we want to fight the bigger people out there, the best way is to unite. Fighting each other is not going to take us anywhere. I think this is something very important our community should know.
Renees comments were particularly powerful in linking the unit to her reality as a Latina:
The unit made many relations between black and brown communities. There are so many misconceptions about black people as well as brown. Both communities think bad about each other. In the black community, they might say that Mexican people dont belong in this country because were illegal aliens. As well, there are Mexican people who say that all black people have a Link card and spend all their money on clothes, etc. What people dont understand is that we both have the same struggles. They might seem different because of the color of our skin but deep down inside our parents struggle to get by with sicknesses, drug addictions, or unemployment. People are dealing with foreclosures and then become homeless. . . . When we did the 30 percent of the median household income for both communities we figured that we cant afford the houses that we are living in. Our family members kill
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themselves in factories trying to make ends meet. This unit taught us that we have the same struggle. People always ask what similarities do we all have, and this unit tells us why we are the same.
As for how mathematics helped them, Carleton explained what he learned, critiqued the system, and wrote about helping others:
Learning the dynamical system helped me really understand how and why people were losing their homes. It showed how small of an amount of income the average black/brown family was making and how, since it was a small amount, how hard it was to pay off the mortgage loans. Not only was it hard but the banks were really stealing money from these people because they would end up paying a double amount of money than they took out because of this thief called Interest. . . . These were also the most important things that I learned because they helped me understand what I know now. It helped me to be able to predict whether or not a family would be able to pay off their loan with certain types of mortgages, and this is very important in being able to read the world so we can be able to share with the world.
with our government. People such as my sister lose their homes because they dont read the papers they are signing when they get a loan for a mortgage. People need to know the difference between the different loans that are out there. The only question that I have after this unit is can what the banks do be made illegal? The most helpful part of this unit was the dynamical systems. As soon as I really learned how to work with the dynamical systems, I came home and grabbed my credit card bill and the mort-
persistence. First, students were overall engaged in the years topics, which they chose to study and which were personally meaningfulthe 2008 presidential election, displacement, HIV/AIDS, criminalization of youth/people of color, and sexism. Second, math provided a way to understand their lives and answer their questions, including: Whose community is this? Conclusion It was important that students came to understand, as Renee said, that they had the same struggle, in a context of divide
As soon as I really learned how to work with the dynamical systems, I came home and grabbed my credit card bill and the mortgage and plugged them into the calculator.
gage and plugged them into the calculator. Paying the minimum balance on my credit card wasnt enough. I would have to pay double my minimum balance to get out of it in less time. Obviously, what my mother is paying isnt enough to finish paying the house in 30 years. The worst part about this is that what she pays isnt 30 percent of her income its more.
And Renee used what she learned to analyze her own particular circumstances:
Its crazy how banks give you this loan with a monthly payment that eventually people dont really get out of debt. There are people who dont know this and believe in their capitalist country. People need to know what happens why they get into debt, especially that what the banks do is legal
Despite these and other students claims of understanding DDSs and finding them useful to read the world, learning the math, with conceptual understanding, was not easy. Almost all my students had attended under-resourced neighborhood schools that, despite many teachers efforts, insufficiently prepared most for advanced mathematics. Some students in class had solid mathematical backgrounds, some quite shaky ones, and others in between. However, I believe two factors contributed to students
and conquer. Racism has long impacted Lawndale, and racial division between African Americans and Latinas/os is one of its many effectsin Sojos first years, black students were sometimes unwelcome in Little Village and even attacked after school. The displacement unit supported black-brown unity (as people here call it) by having students analyze the sociopolitical conditions of their livesthrough mathematicsand realize that they have common enemies and a common struggle. As Mnica wrote, the best way is to unite to fight the bigger people out there, and not each other. Though not all students experienced or knew much about each others neighborhoods, I am confident that all students left class with a deeper understanding of their commonalities. To re-emphasize: This unit was based on interconnected mathematical and political analyses. In my view, this provides a basis for multiracial solidarity, which we will need in order to read and write the worldwith and without mathematics. n
A workshop on math, water, and justice
Transparency of Water
BY SELENE GONZALEZ-CARILLO AND MARTHA MERSON
f you are an environmental organizer, like Selene, your classroom is a conference room, the community garden, or a church parking lot. Your students are everyonefrom toddlers to the elderly; they come with a variety of levels of formal education.Your goal is to increase environmental justice, community well-being, and individuals health.
us together. SfA provides organizers and community members with tools and resources for understanding and using scientific data in communities affected by environmental contamination. During the project, we led an SfA-inspired workshop in Spanish designed to probe participants distrust of tap water and arm them with skills and knowledge to take on water quality/delivery issues. Do You Drink Chicagos Tap Water? We made coffee and set up a water taste test. At 9 a.m., volunteers recruited for a six-week leadership program filed in
Selene Gonzalez-Carrillo has worked as the open space coordinator for Little Village Environmental Justice Organization and on outreach for Statistics for Action. Martha Merson is the project director for Statistics for Action, based at TERC. She is a coauthor of the EMPower curriculum series for nontraditional students. This article appears in the new edition of Rethinking Mathematics.
If you are a math educator/curriculum writer with an interest in data, like Martha, you teach in adult ed and K12 classrooms, libraries, and living rooms anywhere you can sneak in math. The teaching starts with a provocative statistic or a document with unfathomable numbers. Your students are often math averse. Their motivation could be to earn a high school diploma or simply to learn more. Many have plans to put learning to use in their communities, churches, and families. Your goal is to encourage adults and youth to take a new look at numbers, to ask questions. Statistics for Action (SfA) brought
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MARTHA MERSON
for their 4th session. Among the participants were Carmela, a single mother, college student, and intern at Little Village Environmental Justice Organization; Elena, who is studying for a commercial truckers license; and two middle school students, Luna and Maria, who brought along their pet rooster. The eight participants ranged in age from 10 to 60. Their project facilitator, Norma, also a neighborhood resident, has a long history of social justice work. We began a taste test of Mountain Spring bottled water, filtered water, and tap water. Selene instructed the participants to sample water from each of three pitchers. They examined the water in their cups, swished it around, and swallowed. Carmela: This is good because Im dehydrated. Sandra: Im a dummy; they taste the same to me. Carmela: Its all the same water, I
get it. She laughs, then: Is it? Elena: Its between A and B. Although divided in their preferences, most surprising to them was their difficulty in discriminating between bottled and tap water. Martha then asked: Do you buy bottled water? We wanted to understand why and to what extent the participants paid for bottled water. We hoped that some of their reasons would be examined in The Story of Bottled Water (storyofstuff.org), which we had queued up. Yoana: I buy bottled water because its cleaner. Carmela related what happened when her girlfriend offered her water: Im like, What are you doing? because thats tap waterforget about it. [But] the tap water tasted better and I would tell my mama, Drink water from the tap, it tastes very good, and she would say to
me No! Are you crazy? It has chemicals. We didnt judge participants choices. Distrust of tap water can run deep in communities of color. Little Village, the Chicago neighborhood where the participants live, is home to more than 90,000 residents, nearly half of whom are immigrants, according to the University of Chicago. Many come from places with a history of serious water issues. In a 2011 study published in Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, of the parents surveyed, Minority parents were more likely to exclusively give bottled water to their children. Reasons cited included taste and safety.1 In 2008 the Environmental Working Group published results of their investigation of 10 popular brands of bottled water in nine states and found a total of 38 chemical pollutants . . . with an average of eight contaminants in each brand, including industrial solvents and fertilizer residue.2 Consequently, the reliance
on bottled water in communities of color is a serious concern. In addition to the ecological and economic issues related to bottled water use, these communities are disproportionately at risk for health consequences associated with bottled water. Selling the Public on Bottled Water Selene introduced the group to the video, which illustrates the trend away from tap water and toward bottled water, situating this shift in a larger context of manufactured demand. She asked the group: Twenty years ago, people in the United
Distrust of tap water can run deep in communities of color.
States rarely drank bottled water. So how did so many peoples opinions change? Annie Leonard, the films narrator, throws out intriguing facts. In a common sense way, she explains how bottled water is a problematic product along its whole life cycle: It takes petroleum to make the bottles, and we know how devastating oil spills can be; it takes fuel to move the bottles around and that pollutes the air; and then the bottles end up in trash cans or by the side of the road. Of those that make it to recycling centers, only a few are actually recycled. Leonards message is simple: Were trashing the planet; were trashing each other; and were not even having fun. Although ads may promise glamour and bottled water manufacturers say their product meets consumer demand, in taste tests across the nation, people chose tap water over bottled water. The animation of this point, a stick figure spitting out bottled water, adds comic relief to the disturbing story Leonard spins. Two minutes into the video, we paused to let this fact sink in: Bottled water costs 2,000 times more than the cost
of tap water. At 3:46 minutes in, we heard and captured this: One-third of bottled water sold in the United States is filtered tap water. At 4:42 we paused to record: 80 percent of plastic water bottles go to landfills. Leonard goes on to explain why the trend toward buying bottled water took off by defining manufactured demand as the force that drives the production of goods. In order to grow you have to sell stuff. When soft drink companies feared a drop-off in business, they fabricated the need for bottled water by inducing fear, making bottled water look seductive, and misleading the consumer. Marketed as a beverage, bottled water companies avoid the rigorous testing the Environmental Protection Agency requires of municipal water systems. In the final minutes of the film, Annie sends out the battle cry: Take back the tap! She makes clear that viewers can take action and make a difference to save our right to clean water. After viewing the video, we asked: Was there anything surprising? Sandra spoke up: I did not think that the bottles would be [piled up] . . . just like that, mountains and mountains [of bottles]. . . . I used to consider myself damned because I could not buy
this type of water. A friend would tell me Youre drinking dirty water from the tap! But tap water isnt bad; theyre just charging us double. That was an important point. We wanted participants to create sound bites drawing on one of the three statistics and their experiences, imagining that they were talking to a neighbor who hadnt seen the film. Selene planned to elicit an example, stating a fact with a fraction, a percent, and a ratio. Selene: Instead of a third, whats the percentage? Elena: Un tercio? Carmela: Oh, we learned this in school1.3. Elena: 9 percent. Carmela: How did you get that? Elena: Cause you divide three times the decimal. Selene: What do you know about a third? Is it more than a half? Elena: Its more. Juan: Its less. When Elena said a third was more than half, we realized that she was unclear about more than the fraction-percent conversion. Because others were struggling too, we opted to slow down, to play with different ways to show these fractions. We treated this opportunity
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with great respect, conscious that it takes courage to learn the basics in public. Selene: If this is a complete bottle of 100 percent, half would be 50 percent and a third would be a little less, because it is three parts that make it complete, and so it has to be of three equal partsone, two, three. We tore open a 24-pack of bottled water brought as a prop, inviting the group to show us one half. They quickly separated the 24-pack into two groups: 12 in each. We wrote 12 is half of 24 on the board and asked them to explain how one-half is like 12/24. The schoolage participants smiled knowingly. We all agreed that another way to say onehalf is one out of every two. One-third of the bottled water sold in the United States is from the tap. We challenged the group to show us with the 24-pack. Now they could see that one out of two is more than one out of three. Half the 24-pack was 12; onethird was only eight. A participant demonstrated one-fourth to emphasize the relationship between the change in the denominator (increase) and the number of bottles set apart (decrease). We spent a little time on the second statistic, especially because Sandra had mentioned that bottled water costs double. Her statement communicated the gist of the situationconsumers are paying dearly for waterbut it massively understated the amount. The film draws an analogy between paying for bottled water and a consumer paying $10,000 for a hamburger. To explore the comparison between the cost of bottled water and tap water, the group listed current prices and calculated price tags 2,000 times higher. For one gallon of gasoline$8,000! Selene summarized: Would one spend that much money on gas? But that is what we are spending in reality on water. Murmurs and head shaking indicated the group members were impressed.
Bottled water is overpriced, and bottled water companies are generating big bucks from consumers willingness to pay the price. The Transparency of Water: See for Yourself Ultimately, we want residents to make informed decisions based on data rather than on suspicion or misinformation or even faith in us. In the beginning of the video, Leonard reminds viewers that in many ways bottled water is less regulated than tap. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates bottled water in the United States, does not have the ability to require the submission to the agency of results from the testing conducted by and on behalf of bottled water manufacturers, and . . . does not have specific authority to mandate the use of certified laboratories, according to testimony given by the FDA to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.3 We felt that it was vital to draw this distinction. Although there might be legitimate concerns about what lurks in tap water, at least it is a matter of public record. People voice all kinds of fears about the tap water, but they can read water test results, answer some of their own questions, and make specific demands of their government. Having information about our drinking water allows people to take action. This is the case in California, where residents are fighting to be the first state to set a limit on the carcinogen hexavalent chromium.4 To this end, we examined Chicagos
water report, which we distributed to participants. Municipalities have to report to residents annually, but few people know that or have ever read them. We asked participants: What do you know? What do you want to know? When Norma admitted to feeling overwhelmed, Selene explained: Parameters, what they tested for, go down the side. See anything familiar? All: Chlorine, fluoride, copper, lead. Juan: The water has all of this? Carmela: What! Theres cyanide in our water? Selene: Well, lets see. These are all the things they test for. In the next column, we have numbers from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. What do you think? Why would they put numbers in a water chart? Yoana: To communicate? Selene: Yes, they are communicating that 200 micrograms of cyanide per liter of water is the maximum safe level. If we see a higher number therelike 250its for sure a known risk. What else? Elena: Some are blank. Sandra: Because they are trying to figure out if it is good or bad? We explained that the federal guidelines for maximum contaminant levels in drinking water regulate about 100 of the chemicals in use. Municipalities test for other chemicals, but under the Illinois EPA regulations, there is no set limit for comparison, so the cell is blank. Carmela voiced a question about the abbreviation ND. Quickly we set up a demonstration of not detected with a postage scale.
Martha: Lab equipment tests for how much contaminant is present. Will every scale give an exact reading? For example, this scale, is it accurate for small objects? Elena: Try this pen cap. Maria: Try this paper clip. The scale registered nothing until we tried a book. Everyone witnessed reporting limits firsthand: A zero reading does not mean no amount is present.
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Below a certain amount, a scale simply wont register. ND means any amount of contaminant from zero to the reporting limit could be present. Anyone reading environmental quality reports should check that the reporting limit is set below the amount considered safe. Next we pointed out the columns listing the level of contaminants in the raw lake water. After treatment, sodium levels go down, while chlorine levels increase. Pairs picked one parameter, tracing how the level changed before and after treatment. Carmela: Cyanide is allowed in drinking water up to 200 micrograms per liter and it shows that it came in at . . . wait, when there is a less than sign . . . .What does that mean? Selene draws < on the board. Carmela: The alligator eats the bigger number! Everyone laughs. So less than five. Selene: Exactly. Thats how I remember. I used to draw little teeth. What the alligator is eating tells us that the actual amount is less than whatever number its eating. The participants nodded and Carmela finished her assessment: The amounts for cyanide before and after treatment were less than five. Less than five what? The column specifying units indicates less than five micrograms per liter. The time went so quickly. We had to put off an exploration of units as well as the critical notion of safe levels. Identifying (or explaining or determining) safe levels is a frustrating endeavor. For carcinogens such as arsenic, there is no such thing as a safe level, only what has been deemed acceptable risk. Generally standards are set to protect safety and are set based on known risks, yet many agree that standards are inadequate, because researchers know little about synergistic effects, the likely accumulated health impacts from exposure to a variety of chemicals across a lifespan. Over time, researchers may compile a body of evidence that shows negative health
effects at lower levels than previously thought, but it can take years for regulations to catch up. Setting standards is an imperfect process, one that historically takes into account costs to business and government as well as research findings. Complex as it is to make sense of levels and standards, clean water activists believe politicians will succumb to pressure from industry, as they have in the past, if communities are silent on these issues. Participants Responses and Our Reections With limited time for exploration, it is tempting to avoid messy data sets and questions that have no easy answers, for example, Is <5 g/L of cyanide safe? Yet we wonder whose purposes are served if we take a pass. SfA resources include activities and data sets that make teaching the math of environmental data a bit easier, and hints for facilitators and participants to take control of the math (sfa.terc.edu). Although the Common Core standards set forth a prescribed sequence for math learning, our experience shows that local, relevant data spark engagement at all levels. Regardless of their past success or failure with math, participants grasped concepts like reporting limits, explored persistent misunderstandings like the relative size of a half and a third, and coordinated information from rows and columns to identify contaminant levels. Young participants made connections to school learning. New England-based activist Jackie Elliott once told us:
Proposers or developers of a nasty product go to communities that are naive, have low levels of education, are politically powerless, and are compromised with economic stress.
Elliott maintained that when a hand-
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ful of people who have done their homework go to public hearings armed with numbers, the proposers realize they cant put on their usual dog and pony show. Conclusion We considered this workshop a success. As math educators, we were pleased that the people stayed with the math instead of counting themselves out. The group got started on the path toward digging into the numbers. As environmentalists we observed participants make connections between purchasing choices and environmental consequences like mountains and mountains of trash. On a short evaluation form, participants told us what they valued learning:
I can drink water from the sink. Ill know not to buy bottled water and save money. Cost of H2O (bottled) 2,000 x more!
Bottled water is a problematic product along its whole life cycle: It takes petroleum to make the bottles, and we know how devastating oil spills can be; it takes fuel to move the bottles around and that pollutes the air; and then the bottles end up in trash cans or by the side of the road.
the best position to monitor and safely deliver drinking water. Clean drinking water supply is in a precarious position, threatened by fracking, pesticide runoff, and, in Chicago, privatization. Even in cities where the water routinely gets high marks, residents cant afford to be complacent. Access to clean water, as Annie Leonard says, is our birthright; but in a capitalist economy, nearly everything is for sale and the water (system) we all rely on and need to live requires vigilant protection. Many of us memorize and spout statistics that affirm our beliefs without so much as a glance at data sets like water quality reports. As educators and organizers, we advocate interpreting data to describe conditions. We advocate shedding light on how to calculate, quantify, and explain the costs of injustice. Workshops like this one set the stage for broader involvement in developing and understanding these statistics. This is part of a respectful approach to convincing people whove grown accustomed to buying waPage 1
ter that they are shouldering an unjust financial and health burden. Intuitively many know the situation is inequitable, but facing the data can ignite a sense of urgency. Then the hard work of identifying steps for collective action begins. n ________________________________
ENDNOTES Marc H. Gorelick. Perceptions About Water and Increased Use of Bottled Water in Minority Children, Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. 165:10, June 6, 2011. Retrieved Nov. 1, 2012, from archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid= 1107603#AuthorInformation. 2 Environmental Working Group. Bottled Water Quality Investigation: 10 Major Brands, 38 Pollutants, 2008. Retrieved Nov. 1, 2012, from ewg. org/reports/BottledWater/Bottled-Water-QualityInvestigation. 3 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Testimony of Joshua M. Sharfstein on Regulation of Bottled Water, July 8, 2009. Retrieved Nov. 29, 2012, from hhs.gov/asl/testify/2009/07/ t20090708a.html. 4 Lyndsey Layton. Probable Carcinogen Hexavalent Chromium Found in Drinking Water of 31 U.S. Cities, Washington Post, Dec. 29, 2010. Retrieved Nov. 29, 2012, from washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/18/ AR2010121802810.html.
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Conversation continued as people left. As she walked out the door, Yoana said, They are trying to confuse the people; people should have access to water without paying so much. Months later, the participants of this workshop joined a protest against the mayors plan to privatize Chicagos water system. They had the background to contribute to discussion about who is in
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Beyond Marbles
Percent change and social justice
BY FLANNERY DENNY
n my eighth year of teaching, I hit a wall teaching percent change. Percent change is one of the few calculations taught in math classes that shows up regularly in the media, and one that I often do in my head to make sense of the world around me. Despite this, I had been teaching percent change using textbook problems about the number of marbles in a jar, which had no meaning in my 7th-grade students lives. I told myself that I could and must do better to engage my students interest.
It was October 2010. I had just read that the representatives in the U.S. Congress were the most diverse group in our nations history, so I decided to see how dramatic the change had been over the course of my lifetime. I started with the 1979 Senate. How was it possible that, nearly 60 years after women won the right to vote, only 3 percent of our senators were women? And only one an African American? I want my students to believe that statistics can tell powerful stories about the injustices in our society, and these numbers seemed like a good place to start. I made a handout with the data (see p. 25) and distributed it to my students, a diverse group hailing from four New York City boroughs, vastly different socioeconomic means, and a broad range of cultural and racial backgrounds. (Although tuition at this private school is expensive, the school uses a sliding scale to calculate tuition costs, and most of the student body pays less than full tuition.) As I asked the students for their observations and reflections, I hoped they would notice that our representatives in Congress do not represent the full diversity of the country, and question the system that is responsible for that divide. The room started buzzing.
____________________________________ Flannery Denny teaches 6th- to 8th-grade math at Manhattan Country School, an independent coeducational pre-K to 8th-grade school in Manhattan. Students names have been changed. This article appears in the new edition of Rethinking Mathematics. David McLimans editorial illustrations can be found at davidmclimans.com.
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DAVID McLIMANS
Are we learning math today? Why is there only one black senator? Thats racist! Why are there so many more categories for the 111th Congress? Why did you pick these years? Each question was followed by reactions and hypotheses. I jumped in to engage with some, but I listened and let them try to answer each others questions first. I made a point of engaging the students anger about the sole African American in the U.S. Senate. I asked them whether they thought that people decide who to vote for based on race. They noticed race as part of the last two presidential elections, but they had a much longer list of reasons why people vote as they do. We agreed that race should not be the only criterion on which people base their votes, but we were clear that there should be more African Americans in Congress. Why do you think that African Americans have gained 26 seats in the House of Representatives over the course of my lifetime, but that there is still only one black senator? There are fewer representatives in the Senate.
Diversity Diversity in in U.S. U.S. Congress Congress

95th Congress (19771979) n Senate (100 members): 3 women 1 African American n House of Representatives (435 members): 18 women 17 African American 105th Congress (19971999) n Senate (100 members): 9 women 1 African American n House of Representatives (435 members): 57 women 41 African American 111th Congress (20092011) n Senate (100 members): 17 women 1 African American, 1 Hispanic, 3 Asian American, 1 Native American 13 Jewish, 26 Catholic, 53 Protestant, 5 Mormon, 1 Eastern Orthodox Christian n House of Representatives (435 members): 78 women 42 African American, 25 Hispanic, 8 Asian American, 1 Native American 32 Jewish, 161 Catholic, 239 Protestant, 2 Muslim, 2 Buddhist, 1 Quaker, 1 Atheist, 5 Mormon 3 openly lesbian or gay
You dont have to get the whole state to agree to vote someone into the House. I reminded my students of the map of New York Citys voting districts that we look at when were lobbying our rep-
at satisfying answers to all of them. Its important not to get bogged down by this. Teaching social justice is never neat and tidy, and no teacher should anticipate arriving at the point where everyones questions about the world we live
Percent change is one of the few calculations taught in math classes that shows up regularly in the media.
resentatives. Keyshawn mentioned that most of the people in Harlem are black, so it would be likely that they would elect a black representative. Madeline pointed out that Chinatown probably elects an Asian American representative. I said that the district I live in is predominantly Puerto Rican and our representative, Nydia Velzquez, was the first Puerto Rican ever elected to the U.S. Congress. What do you think happens outside of cities? I asked the class. Do you think that there are districts where most of the voters are African Americans? Maybe in the South? I used the opportunity to explain that people in power have historically gone out of their way to make it hard for African Americans, Latina/os and other people of color to end up in control of voting districts by creating strangely shaped districts that disperse communities among several districts. The Voting Rights Actthe product of civil rights activismattempts to counter that by requiring redistricting that gives each community a fairer chance. The data that we were looking at is a good reason why we have to be thoughtful about how we set up our voting districts. It was time to move on. I challenged my students to keep thinking about whether they could come up with a way to hold elections that would make it more likely for our representatives to reflect the full diversity of our society. Some of their questions had strayed far from mathematics, and we didnt arrive
in are answered. Life is complicated, and these questions are worth asking even if we cant always answer them. Calculating Percent Change Next, I put the formula for percent change on the board and asked the class how we could use the formula to calculate the percent change of African Americans in the House from the 95th Congress to the 105th Congress.
percent change = amount of change original amount X 100
I encouraged them to think about what the words mean outside of math. We discussed what original amount means in this context and how we could calculate the amount of change (the difference between the original amount and the new amount). Once everyone felt comfortable with the example, I assigned each student a single calculation to complete and contribute to the chart on the board. I placed the elements on the chart to make comparisons easy. The student assigned to calculate the percent change for men raised his hand and wanted to know how he was supposed to calculate when I didnt tell them how many men there were. I intentionally left if off the list; many students thinking gets stuck in a box when faced with unfamiliar material. I stopped everyone and posed the question to the whole class. A student explained how to use the total number of senators and the number of women senators to find the number of men who are senators. The whole class relaxed because, even though it wasnt obvious to all of them, they all
Percent Change in Diversity in U.S. Congress

Women in the Senate Change from the 95th to 111th Congress 3 p 17 467 percent increase Women in the House Change from the 95th to 111th Congress 18 p 78 333 percent increase
African Americans in the Senate Change from the 95th to 111th Congress 1p1 0 percent increase
African Americans in the House Change from the 95th to 111th Congress 17 p 42 147 percent increase
Women in the Senate Change from the 95th to 111th Congress 3 p 17 467 percent increase
Men in the Senate Change from the 95th to 111th Congress 97 p 83 14 percent decrease
Women in the Senate Change from the 95th to 105th Congress 3p9 200 percent increase
Women in the Senate Change from the 105th to 111th Congress 9 p 17 89 percent increase
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could have figured that out. I loved that they had to think a little and listen to one another to figure out what information to plug into the formula. In the real world, thats how math is. And it meant they were making sense of the formula and were more likely to remember it. Looking at the completed chart gave us lots to talk about. We looked at the difference in the percent change experienced by men in the Senate vs. women in the Senate. I asked: Why is the same 14 seats turning over from men to women a 467 percent gain for women and only a 14 percent decrease for men? The men started out with almost all of the seats, and they still have almost all of the seats. Women still dont have very many seats in the Senate, but theyve gained almost five times as many as they started with. Thats a big change! I pushed a little more: Do you think that women feel differently now about their access to power than they did 30 years ago? Yes! a chorus shouted. What about men? Do you think they feel like they have less power? No, they said, shaking their heads. For me that is the essence of percent change. In all the years that I taught percent change via textbook problems, students never really understood why it mattered what you used as the original amount. I enjoy providing my students with a context in which to make sense of this. What do you think is a better way of talking about the progress that women have made in the Senate? I asked. Theyve gained 14 seats or their representation has increased by 467 percent? Four hundred and sixty-seven percent sounds like a lot more change. Fourteen seats doesnt sound like that much. I dont know, but women should have a lot more seats than we do. Maybe its important to tell both.
There is so much more we could have talked about, but we were out of time. It was a lively class filled with deep mathematical discussions, and my students were thinking critically about social inequities. I was excited to have helped them build more connections between math and the real world. And I was confident that this lesson would contribute to conversations with peers at the lunch table,
with the history teacher in current events class, and with parents at dinner. Choosing a Real-Life Question About Percent Change But we werent done. It is a priority for me to help my students learn how to connect their curiosity about the world to mathematics. Their homework assignment was
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to think of a question they would like to ask about the world that could be answered using percent change, and to find a data set with which to conduct the calculations. The goal was to make a poster about it during the next class. For some students this provided an opportunity to apply their new math skill to something that they were already wondering about. For others, this was a chance to think of a new question. Knowing that they would be spending at least 40 minutes of class time engaging with their questions and that their work was destined for display pushed my students to be creative and to take the process of developing an interesting question seriously. Students arrived at the next class with an exciting collection of questions and starts of questions. We began by sharing so I could give feedback on whether they were ready to move forward or needed to meet with me first. Hearing each others ideas helped stu-
dents focus on their own work by quelling their curiosity about their peers, and helped students who had struggled with the open-endedness of the assignment have a sense of the possibilities. The broad range of students questions reflected the racial and socioeconomic diversity of the student body as well as their engagement with a broader curriculum focused on social and environmen-
had found so much data he didnt know what to plug into the formula. It hadnt occurred to him that he got to decide which years he was interested in comparing. Thats the exciting part, I told him. Youre in charge and get to make decisions. I suggested that he pick a year from a long time ago and a recent year. When he decided to use data from 1980,
What do you think is a better way of talking about the progress that women have made in the Senate? Theyve gained 14 seats or their representation has increased by 467 percent?
tal justice, annual activism projects, and many weeks at the school farm. The posters needed to include their question, the process of answering their question, the findings, an image, and the source of their information. The target time frame was to have posters ready to present for the following class period. About half the class was ready to get straight to work and started gathering the materials they would use to make their posters. A few students had data sets but did not record the source of their data and were sent straight to the computers to find them. The rest of the students needed my help. Some students asked to use the computers. Since we have only a few computers in the room, I wouldnt let students use them until I was convinced that they had developed their question to a point at which they could be efficient. While I conferenced with students oneon-one, I asked those who were waiting for me to work with a partner to improve each others questions. Kyree impressed me with a list of average baseball player salaries for every year since 1916 and I was confused as to why he felt stuck. It turned out that he
I reminded him to compare data from this year with data from a long time ago. But Flannery, he objected, 1980 was 30 years ago! Youre right. Its fine, I said, feeling old for a second. Since Daphne volunteers at the animal shelter, trick-or-treats for the Worldwide Fund for Nature, and focused her Bat Mitzvah on endangered species, it was no surprise that she wanted to make a poster about animals, but she didnt know where to start. I told her to key in to a single species and make a choice between telling a story of a species in rapid decline or of a story about an intervention that has made a difference. She liked the idea of a story of hope, so I mentioned a rehabilitation project with the California condor population that has been successful. And she was off. Keyshawn wanted to draw attention to factory farming but wasnt sure how to go about it. I suggested that there are many quantifiable components of government guidelines and industry definitions, and listed a couple. He decided to focus on the space available to chickens. Madeline was so excited about graduating that she wanted to do a project
28 > SPRING 2013
featuring her class. She needed to know how many people were in the first class to graduate from our school. I asked her where she thought she could find that information. She considered looking for a staff member who has been connected to the school since its founding in 1966, but then she remembered a plaque in the library with the names of the members of the first class and asked if she could go have a look at it. Lucas wanted to focus on global warming but wasnt sure how to quantify it. He had a list of ideas, but didnt know which would be the best measure. I referred him to the 350.org project to see if he could understand why some scientists are looking at carbon dioxide parts per million as the best indicator of the health of our Earths atmosphere. Some students I conferenced with went off to find their data right away. Others needed more than one check-in before they met with success. One student was a few minutes late to his next class because he was recording data that he unearthed. But all students went home with the information they needed to complete their posters for homework. During the next class period, students took turns presenting their posters to the group. They were as impressed as I was by the range of questions and shocked by many of the findings. We looked at the percent change of the: height of wind turbines since the 1970s salaries of professional athletes since 1980 sales of organic foods in the last 10 years number of men and women in the Saturday Night Live cast since the first season living space available to freerange chickens compared to factory-farmed chickens audience size at Metallica concerts in the last 20 years size of the California condor
For some students this was an opportunity to apply their new math skill to something they were already wondering about. For others, this was a chance to think of a brand-new question about the world.
population since a rehabilitation program started breeding them in captivity in 1982 assets of the Apple Corporation in the last year global population in students lifetime number of undocumented immi grants deported from the United States since Obama was elected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution number of colors available in a Crayola crayon box since the original box of eight colors hit the market in 1903 teen pregnancy rates since the 1990s size of the graduating class at our school from the first 8th-grade class to this year abortion rates since abortion was legalized number of Yunnan golden monkeys since the opening of the Baima Snow Mountain Nature Reserve number of mountains in Appala chia since the start of mountaintop removal coal mining spent only three 45-minute class periods on percent change, my students appreciated the diversity of its applications in the world. They surprised me by deciding to use percent change to make sense of data in other contexts, like their projects for our social justice data fair. Their interest in percent change will also make it much easier for them to learn about exponential functions in 8th-grade math. Although this unit could be a standalone, for my students it does not exist in isolation; it is part of a series of ways in which I engage my students in making connections between social justice and math. And I am only one teacher in a community of educators at Manhattan Country School whose explicit mission is to create opportunities for our students to wrestle with themes of identity, community, diversity, sustainability, civil rights, activism, and justice. I hope that my students, as citizens of the world working to create positive change, will think of mathematics as one of the tools in their toolbox. n ________________________________
RESOURCES A frican Americans in Congress: http://history. house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/ Historical-Data/Historical-Data---Nav/ W omen in Congress: womenincongress.house. gov L atina/os in Congress: loc.gov/rr/hispanic/ congress/chron.html I nformation on redistricting: http://www. publicmapping.org/what-is-redistricting/ redistricting-criteria-the-voting-rights-act
After school I hung the posters in the staircase. Over the next several weeks I saw students from younger grades stopping to discuss the project; some even sought me out to ask whether they will get to do this project when they are in the 7th grade. Teachers at the lunch table told me they were excited to see the work. For my students, seeing their work on the wall elevated the importance of the skill that we learned. Although we
Responding to
BY DALE WEISS
hen significant news events occur, usually my first reaction is How will I teach this to my students? This was the question I asked myself on Aug. 5, 2012, when an assailant shot and killed six members of the Sikh community at their temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. I felt such sadness and horror on hearing of this atrocity. At the same time, I realized how very little I knew about Sikhs: Who are they? What do they believe? And why would someone kill them?
A week following the tragedy, the Sikh temple was reopened to the public. I felt compelled to attend this service, but I was nervous, too. Was it safe? I could barely imagine the fear that many Sikhs must have felt re-entering their temple. I arrived at 8 a.m. to hear the end of the 48-hour recitation of the 1,430 pages of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy scriptures. I planned to stay for an hour or two, but did not leave until well into the afternoon. There was grief. There was peace. People came and went, prayed, chatted, hugged, and cried. The gurdwara (Sikh place of worship) was filled to overflowing. I sat in a chair in the back, behind the area where most Sikhs sat cross-legged on a large white cloth covering the floor. I participated as best as I could, feeling the graciousness and love that seemed to permeate the temple. At one point Aisha Qidwae introduced herself to me as a Milwaukee Jour-
Dale Weiss (miskamarie@gmail.com) is a public school educator in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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DALE WEISS
Tragedy
nal Sentinel reporter. She wondered what brought me to the gurdwara that morning. I explained that I wanted to pay my respects and that, as a 2nd-grade teacher, I wanted to teach my students about the Sikhs and the atrocity of Aug. 5; I knew I needed to learn much more to be able to do so. Aisha had written many of the uncharacteristically substantial articles Id been reading in our local newspaper. As a Hindi speaker, she was able to interview many of the families in their native tongue. As I left the temple my eyes met a dime-sized bullet hole in a doorjamb near the main prayer room. A plaque above read, We Are One. 8-5-12. A few days later I attended a drumming circle for peace at the temple. The woman next to me introduced herself as Gurpreet, and we struck up a conversation. I told her I hoped to find someone from the Sikh community who might be willing to visit my classroom. Gurpreet
2nd graders reach out to the Sikh community

works with the youth group at the temple, and she offered to give me the names of people who could visit. As I made my usual preparations for the school year, I continued to read about Sikhism and to gather resources. I learned that nonviolence is at the core of Sikhism. I learned that many traditional Sikhs do not cut their hairof those, boys wear a patka, men and some women wear a turban, and many girls and women cover their head with a scarf. Other Sikhs decide to cut their hair and dont wear a head covering except in the gurdwara, where ones head is always covered. Like any religion or culture, there are core beliefs and a breadth of practices. Peacemakers The first day of school came with the usual blend of excitement and chaos. As I left school that day, I thought I must be crazy to start a unit on the Sikhs at the very beginning of the year. There were so many routines to teach, so many supplies to hand out, so much mandated curriculum to begin. But I remembered the faces of the people in the Sikh community, and I knew I needed to do this. The next morning, we gathered together in a circle on our classroom rug, our community meeting place. I asked the students to think about what a peaceful classroom would look and sound like. Many children enthusiastically raised their hands. I made a T-chart, labeling one side Examples of a Peaceful Classroom. I began writing down the students responses: We listen to each other. No pretend fighting or real fighting! Only one person talks at a time. We keep our hands to ourselves. We work hard at everything we do. On the other side of the T-chart I wrote Examples That Are Not a Peaceful Classroom and asked for ideas. Everybody is talking at the same time. We
dont use our inside voices. We fight and hurt each other. Nobody is learning anything. I placed a pile of post-it notes by our chart and explained to the students that if they thought of another idea, they should add it to our chart with a post-it note. Over the course of the day, several children did so. I then showed the students templates of cutout paper dolls with varying skin tones. I asked them to choose a doll that resembled their skin color and then create a person who looked like them by adding facial features, hair, and clothing. The students were excited to create their mini people and took great care in doing so. The following day we reviewed our T-chart. In pairs, the children roleplayed each of the items on the chart. As I gave each student a sheet of paper with the sentence starter I am a peacemaker because . . . , I asked them to think about
rible that recently happened at a religious temple. Jake replied, I heard on TV that some people got killed in Oak Creek. My mom was really sad about it. I think five or six people got killed, said Raul. Maura added, And the people werent doing anything wrong, they were just praying. Javonne piped in, But Ms. Dale, did that really happen? I responded: Yes, what Jake, Raul, and Maura said really did happen. I then began to share information about the Sikh people: There are communities of people all around the world who are called Sikhs. I placed a map of India on the board and pointed to the northern section that borders Pakistan. Many Sikhs come from a region in India called Punjab. I wrote Sikhs on the board and ex-
It had not dawned on me that others would not understand the pictures wed placed on our banner. Inadvertently, Id left the banner wide open to the perpetuation of stereotypes.
how they would complete that sentence. Once they had an idea, they were to return to their seats and complete the sentence. After I helped the students correct their spelling, they transferred their idea to a 3x5 index card. The completed index cards were either glued onto the front of their mini person or placed in their mini persons hand, and then displayed around the perimeter of our classroom. Examples included: I am a calm person. I keep the Earth clean. I am a nice friend. I play safely with my friends. plained: The word Sikh refers to a group of people. There is a community of Sikh people who have their temple in Oak Creek. One day a man who did not have love in his heart went into the temple and killed six people. Javonne cupped his head in his hands, shaking his head back and forth as he said, No, that shouldnt have happenedespecially in someones church. That is really, really wrong. Students began to raise their hands. What happened to the people? Did they die? Is the killer still around? Is that going to happen here? I reassured the children that we were safe and that the person who killed the people in the temple is no longer alive. I also shared that sadly, six of the Sikh people whod been shot in the temple
Did That Really Happen? The next day, as we sat in our community meeting place, I asked the students if anyone had heard about something hor-
died. I tried to comfort Javonne: I agree, Javonne, it is very sad that these people died in their temple. I feel like you do, that this was a very, very wrong thing to have happened. I took down the calendar posted in our classroom and pointed to the date Aug. 5. This is when this horrible event took place. How many days ago was that? asked Seanna. Lets count, I said, That was 31 days ago. I asked if anyone had heard of someone called the Dalai Lama. No one had. The Dalai Lama is a wise man who believes in working for world peace. He said, If you can see yourself in others, whom can you harm? I wrote the quote on the board and repeated it. I asked, Anybody want to try and explain what that means? Karla responded, I think it would mean that if someone is like you, you would not want to hurt them. Wow, Karla, you really explained that well. The Dalai Lama is telling us that if we can learn to understand other people, we will see the ways we are like them as well as respect the ways in which we might be different. And by doing that, we would never want to harm them. That makes sense because you shouldnt hurt your friends, Lorenzo said. Or even if theyre not your friends, commented Seanna, you shouldnt hurt them. Exactly. So our job during the next few days will be to learn about the Sikh people. And since all of you have thought of wonderful ways in which you can be peacemakers, you will be helping the world be a more peaceful place. I showed the students the childrens book I Belong to the Sikh Faith. We did a picture walk-through of the book; I stopped at each page to ask the students what they noticed in the pictures. After reading the book aloud, we reviewed the main principles of the Sikh religion: equality, service and generosity, peace and meditation, and belief in one God. I asked the students to comment on each
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principle: Did they agree or disagree? I like that the Sikhs think women and men, and boys and girls, should all be equal. Ive never meditated but it could be a good idea. My religion believes in one God, too. Why do you think I asked you to think about if you agreed or disagreed
Long Hair. This is the true story of a Sikh boy who was bullied because of wearing a patka. As we discussed the book, I introduced the idea of being curious about someone who seems different, rather than judging them for those differences. But Ms. Dale, were all different! said Silvie. So what we all have in common is that we are all different? I asked.
Its so interesting to do a unit for the rst time. There is no gauge of normalcy in terms of what might be learned or what the students level of interest might be.
cards for the Sikh community to tell them that we feel really sad about what happened. Thats a good idea, Karla, said one student. How can we make cards if we dont know their names? I think cards could help the people not feel so sad anymore and so that they know we are their friends. After a lengthy discussion, the students decided to make a book for the Sikh community. Each child would make three pages for the book: a letter, a drawing, and a copy of the photos Id taken the previous week. Work on the book began, and continued for two days. Here is one of the letters:
Dear friends in the Sikh community, I feel upset about what happened in your temple. I feel sorry that your friends and family died. We learned all about the Sikh people and the foods you like to eat. We all have something in common. It is that we are all different. I hope I can help make a difference around the world. I hope I can learn more about the Sikh people. Your friend, Samantha
with the beliefs of the Sikh people? I asked the students. Take a minute to think before responding. I often use this phrase when I want the students to really think about something, rather than blurting out their first thought. I think I figured it out, said Raul, You wanted us to see if we are like the Sikh people. But even if we did not agree with the Sikh people, it would be OK. We shouldnt hurt them if we dont agree, added Maura. Day four of our unit began with a showing of a 15-minute DVD, The Sikh Next Door. The DVD is narrated by middle and high school students who share their experiences of being a Sikh in the United States. Although the video is geared towards older students, I thought it would be useful for my students to see and hear Sikh children. After viewing the DVD, we sat in a circle and I asked the students what they remembered. They not only remembered a lot of images, they also understood much of the content. They were eager to write and draw about what they had learned. I think we learned a lot! said Jake. I could not have agreed more. The following day I read the students another childrens book, The Boy with the
There were many nods, after which Lorenzo added, We should make a big sign with those words on it so we could teach other people about this. We could write out the words and draw pictures of ourselves on a banner. Or Ms. Dale could take our pictures and we could put those on the banner. Ms. Dale, can we? My perfectly planned lesson was taking a different turn. Sure, we can make a banner. I wrote the sentence on the board: What we all have in common is that we are all different. Each student made several of the letters from the sentence and we glued them onto a long piece of butcher paper. I took everyones photo and we put those on the banner. We hung it in the front hallway of our school, where it remains today. We Build a Community Connection I began the sixth day by telling the students that two members of the Sikh community would be visiting our classroom, and that I wanted them to think of questions to ask our visitors. As they began to brainstorm questions, Karla raised her hand with great urgency. Ms. Dale, we should make
Sukhjinder Kaur and her college-age son, Paramveer Singh, visited our classroom the following day. It was a deeply moving experience. The students shared what theyd learned; asked questions; learned how to put on a turban, patka, and sari; listened to the tablas (drums); read a bilingual (English/Punjabi) book with our guests; sang peace songs; and presented the book they had made. The afternoon was summed up by Sukhjinder when she commented, The students know so much, and by Silvie when she said, Now I know I for sure have friends in the Sikh community! At Karens suggestion, we added
photos of Sukhjinder and Paramveer to the banner wed made. Be Curious, Instead A few days later, I was in the hallway near our banner as students from various classes were leaving school. Gabriel, a 2nd grader from another class, pointed to the photo of Raul in a turban (Sukhjinder had demonstrated on Raul how to put on a turban) and commented, Look! He looks like a genie! Javonne was standing near me, so I asked him to explain to Gabriel what Raul was wearing on his head. Its called a turban, Gabriel. People who wear a turban dont cut their hair because they believe their hair is a gift from God and gives them strength. The turban covers their hair. Oh. Sorry, Javonne. Sorry, Ms. Dale. I didnt know. Thats OK, Gabriel, said Javonne, but if you see someone you think looks different than you, dont make fun of them. Be curious about them instead. The next day, during our community circle time, I told what happened and said how proud I was of Javonne for the way he handled the situation. I was careful not to portray Gabriel as having done something wrong, but rather having made a comment about something he did not understand. As I was about to move on to our math lesson, Maura commented, But other people might say the same thing as Gabriel. We should put words by the pictures on our banner. She was absolutely right. Without enough forethought, it had not dawned on me that others would not understand the pictures wed placed on our banner. Inadvertently, Id left the banner wide open to the perpetuation of stereotypes. Later that day we added a description of the photos to the banner and put a reminder at the end:
If you see people who are differ-
ent than you, do not make fun of them! Instead, it would be a better idea to BE CURIOUS! Try to learn something new about them and maybe you will even become friends. This will help our school and communities, Milwaukee and our world, become a lot more peaceful.
Its so interesting to do a unit for the first time. There is no gauge of normalcy
Women and men from the community took off from work to make us a langar, a traditional community meal. This meal is prayer itself, commented one of the women as she stirred a pot of rice mixed with vegetables. Two men chanted as they made roti, a traditional Indian flatbread. Two days before our field trip, Id received an email from Sukhjinder asking if the students would like to eat traditional Indian food or pizza during their
Although we started out to learn about another group of people, in the end we built a relationship with them.
in terms of what might be learned or what the students level of interest might be. Although I had carefully planned my lessons, the children kept telling me that they wanted to go into more depth. Despite the fact Id thought our unit on the Sikhs had ended, the childrens interest kept the momentum going. They decided to raise money for the Sikh community by selling beaded jewelry and baked goods at parent/teacher conferences. Then, not content with our banner being the only way to share information about the Sikhs, they decided they wanted to teach all the students at our school about Sikh culture. Organized into mini-research groups, and with the assistance of myself and our schools literacy coach, the children read through the resources in our classroom about Sikhs, put the information into their own words, and created posters that would serve as presentation tools for other classes. On Nov. 19 we took a field trip to the Sikh temple in Oak Creek. We were greeted by Sukhjinder and Gurpreet, who gave us a tour of the gurdwara. We followed Sikh tradition by removing our shoes and wearing a head covering.
visit to the gurdwara. When I asked the students, Seanna summed it up best: We can eat pizza any day. But its not every day that we could eat Indian food made at the Sikh temple. And eat they did! The children ate many helpings of the delicious food and several even asked for recipes. The children also chose to eat in traditional styleseated on a carpet with their plate of food placed on the floor in front of them. Following lunch, we presented our monetary gift to family members who had lost a loved one on Aug. 5. Heritage Day Two days later, we celebrated Heritage Day in our classroom. Heritage Day is an initiative begun by members of the Sikh community who formed the organization Serve2Unite in an effort to end violence and hate through the appreciation of differences and practice of compassion. Amardeep Kaleka, his wife, and their 2-year-old son joined us in a potluck meal of foods from my students heritages. Amardeep lost his father on Aug. 5 and became a spokesperson for the victims
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families. Amidst their own sadness and grief, Amardeep and his brother Pardeep took it upon themselves to spread a message of peace and compassion locally, nationally, and internationally. The children immediately bonded with Amardeep. When it was time to say goodbye, they encircled him in a huge hug. Our unit on the Sikhs had come full circle. We began by learning about a tragedy and ended by sharing love with someone whom that tragedy had affected so deeply. Aug. 5, 2012, shattered the world of not only the Sikh community in Oak Creek, but the world of all of us who dream and work for justice and peace. Through participating in the unit on Sikhs, my 2nd graders learned that they not only can make a difference, they did make a difference. They embraced the other with openness and curiosity, and from that place were able to learn a great deal. And although we started out to learn about another group of people, in the end we built a relationship with them. I think back to a card Maura wrote me:
On the weekend I went to the mall and I saw a person with a patka on his head. I was being curious instead of making fun of him. His dad had on a turban and looked like Sukhjinders son. They were speaking Punjabi. I cant wait to go back to school and learn more about the Sikh people.
ceived to be different are often treated unfairlywhich can, sadly, even include death. But the students passion to keep digging deeper into something about which they felt such empathy and commitment, changed the course of the first few months of school. Through learning about the Sikh community, our classroom became a community. By developing curiosity and empathy about an
injustice, the students were able to more easily understand other injustices that we explored. The students also learned that when they believe an injustice to have taken place, there is always something they can do to make the world a better place. I hope this is a lesson that will remain with them throughout their lifetimes. n
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Each school year brings the unknown, and the unit on the Sikhs was certainly no exception. I had no idea how my young students would react to learning about a tragedy of the magnitude of the one at the Sikh temple. Their curiosity and deep desire to keep learning more surpassed anything I could ever have imagined. If anything, the unit I originally planned would have given a glimpse into Sikh culture and an understanding that people who are per-
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AN UNFORTUNATE
Saga of a promising new charter school
BY GRACE GONZALES
Misunderstanding
was nervous as I started the conversation. I was talking to a mentor of minean experienced teacher and administrator who I look up to as a staunch defender of public educationand I needed some sort of absolution. You see, although I think of myself as firmly against attempts to fragment and privatize public education, I was going to work for a charter school.
son with a strong vision for the school as child-centered and project-based. Though not from the neighborhood herself, she was African American and had a profound level of respect for the historically African American community in which we were working. She made deep connections with families and I loved watching her talk to the students. As I explained all of this to my mentor, a wistful look crossed her face. She didnt particularly like the idea, but told me, You have to do what you have to do. You have to see what its like. Im worried, I said, but its a once in a lifetime opportunity. Ill have the chance to help create this school from the ground up. Almost a year later I would find myself in a different room, talking to Carol, a board member and another powerful woman, and saying almost exactly the same words: When I took this job, I imagined that weteachers, parents,
I had a couple of ways of justifying that decision. The charter school, which was just starting up, had a wonderful educational philosophy and would be using first-rate curriculaworkshopbased, experiential, project-orienteda far cry from the scripted curricula I had been forced to work with in my previous school. It was located in a diverse urban neighborhood where many public schools had been shut down, presumably leaving families with few good options for where to send their children to elementary school. I was told this new school had ties to a successful community preschool that had been operating for many years. And the principal who had hired me was an open, welcoming per____________________________________ Grace Gonzales is a bilingual educator in San Francisco. Illustrator Spencer Walts can be contacted at eyewerks@tds.net.
administratorswould be able to shape this school into the kind of school we all really wanted. I didnt expect the structure to be so top-down. I thought we were all creating a school together. Her response, as she accepted my resignation, was succinct: Im sorry you misunderstood. If I began the year thinking that our school could be differenta small, innovative, independent charter school unaffiliated with the politics that make the charter school movement so problematicI ended it with a profound understanding of how pervasive many of the issues that arise around charter schools really are. There were a lot of concerns floating around in my head that I shoved back when I signed my contract. I worried that I would suffer from the lack of job security and union protections. I worried that we would not be able to equitably serve students with special needs. I worried that the school would ultimately turn out to be less community-based than it appeared. As it played out, those fears were founded. Underlying the beautiful language of the charter was a strong thread of deficit thinking about the students and their neighborhooda sort of missionary attitude whereby a group of privileged professionals, most of whom were not educators, were swooping into a neighborhood they thought needed saving, to play saviors to children they assumed needed protection from the public school system. When details about school operations had to be filled in, they drew on philosophies of the wider charter school movementat-will contracts, extended hours, extended school years, meritbased pay, strong reliance on private philanthropy, and a host of other policies that they labeled best practices. Although in name we were not affiliated with other
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charter schools, the ideological connections ran deep. I hope that the story of that first year can be useful to other educators, especially when it comes to understanding how what appears to be a community school can, in the hands of a few people, turn into something very different, ultimately disempowering the people teachers, administrators, and parents who are the key to its success. The Teachers Trying to be a union of three The school year got off to a rocky start. Converted from a small office building, our school was not the right size or shape for two classes of kindergartners and one class of 1st graders. The classroom walls were glass, creating constant distraction through the windows; the tiny lunchroom had terrible acoustics, making lunchtime a riotous din; and the yard was a rectangle of bare, white cement with no play structure. The children, all in a completely new place, were a tangle of fear, anxiety, and anger. It quickly became apparent that we would have our hands full when it came to behavior. To add to the chaos, after that first week, one of the three teachers quit. Right from the beginning, I started to notice things that felt wrong. Recruiting students had been a challenge and we were severely under-enrolledthe community we were supposed to be so connected to seemed distrustful of us, and something had happened at the board level to cut our ties to the preschool with which we theoretically worked so closely. It was not terribly surprising that the community viewed us as outsiders, especially once the preschool connection was lost. In a school that was predominantly African American, none of our teachers was African American, and all were from
SPENCER WALTS
outside of the area. Our board was overwhelmingly composed of white, well-todo professionals with very little connection to the community in which we were working. In this context, it seemed the board was relying on our principal to assuage any feelings that the community was not being represented. Yet the relationship between our principal and the board rapidly began to fray around the edges. Our principals strong vision for the school did not appear to be respected at the board level, and she was thrown an endless supply of tasks to complete that ultimately took her away from her role as an instructional leader and a much-needed support for the students. In addition, the president of the board of directors, who was not an educator herself, had no qualms about encouraging some families to enroll and discouraging others. When a child with borderline autism came to enroll in my
Underlying the beautiful language of the charter was a strong thread of decit thinking about the students and their neighborhood.
1st-grade class, my class list was suddenly artificially capped at 19. I was horrified by the implications, but also too scared to ask about it. I was uncomfortably aware that, with no full-time support staff and poor communication with the district, we were not going to be able to provide adequate services for students with special needs. We were so short-staffed that we were required to cover our own recesses and to come in before school twice a week to cover the before-school program. During the morning recess, the three teachers would try to rotate out so we could each get five minutes to run to the bathroom and back. If someone got stopped on their way by a phone call, a parent, or a child, the whole schedule would be thrown off and we would either have to stay out at recess longer or someone would miss their bathroom break. We had a 30-minute lunch break, but even that we were sometimes asked to forgo in cases of emergency. If we wanted to take our kids out for an afternoon recess, we were on our own. Thus, during a 7.5-hour school day (8.5 hours if it was a morning when we had to come in at 7 a.m. to monitor the yard before school), we had only one guaranteed 30-minute break. Taking a sick day was even harder than making it to the bathroom during recess, and personal days were out of the question. We were run ragged. Our students were as well. The extended days were too long for both teachers and children. The charter happily cited inspiration from Geoffrey Canadas Harlem Childrens Zone to explain the extended day and extended school year, but the result of these policies was that at 2 p.m., our office was full of kindergartners who had fallen asleep in class, some of whom would still be at school for another four hours if they participated in the after-school program. As a staff, we were frustrated and scared and so were our students. It was hard to sleep or eat right. We all started getting sick. When I came down with an infection, our principal asked me not to take the day off; when I protested, I was asked to tell her exactly what my medical condition was and to bring in a doctors note. I loved my principal and was shocked that she would violate my privacy in that way. This was the same woman who had won me over with her obvious love for children and respect for teachers. She came into my classroom daily with words of encouragement and of-
ATTEND
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SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 2013
9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Indian Community School
10405 W. Saint Martins Road Franklin, WI 53132
Workshops Resources Networking

Keynote: Kevin Kumashiro, Author of eight books
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Register at www.ensj.weebly.com
Sponsored by Educators Network for Social Justice
Register at ensj.weebly.com
Co-sponsors: Rethinking Schools; Indian Community School; UWMilwaukee School of Education; Milwaukee Area Academic Alliance in English: UW-M College of Letters and Science; Milwaukee Teachers Education Association; Alterra Coffee; National Louis University; Carroll University; The Plowshare Center, Waukesha; UW-Whitewater College of Education and Professional Studies; YWCA Southeast Wisconsin
38 > SPRING 2013
fered a hug when I was at my wits end. She took us out to coffee after school to make sure we were OK. But when I asked her about the sick-day incident, it became clear that she was not acting of her own accord. The board needed evidence that we were not overusing our sub days, she explained. And the board had not approved personal days. And the board wanted us to make do with the staff we had to cover our recesses. And the board wanted us to expand the services we were offering, using the current staff. I could see the pressure building as our principal was asked to do more and more with very limited resources and then shoulder the blame for our working conditions. I started to wonder what other pressures she might be shielding us from. In October, we finally got a permanent replacement for the teacher who had left. She came, looked around with fresh eyes, and asked if we could make some changes. We had been too overwhelmed to even think about how we could make things better for ourselves, but now, inspired, we decided to create our own union of three. We drew up a list of demands and went to our principal. She appreciated that we were advocating for ourselves. But if we wanted recess coverage, we would have to ask the board for more staffing. If we wanted personal days, we would have to ask the board to amend the school policy. So we did; we called a meeting with the board and made our demands. They gave us a lot of what we were asking for, and they gave it to us right away. Amazed by our success, it took us awhile to realize that, far from winning a workers victory, we had been placated because the board wanted to keep us happy and out of the way. They had a bigger fish to fry. Administration Smoke and mirrors In January, a strange item began appearing on the board agendas that were posted on the front gate: discussion of
dismissal, non-rehire, discipline, or resignation of a staff member. The whispered conversations startedoutside the front gate, in the break room with the doors closed, in our classrooms. We asked board members what was going on, and they told us apologetically that they were not legally at liberty to discuss it. However, we put two and two together and realized that the only person who the board had the power to hire or fire was the principal herself. A few weeks later our suspicions
dent evaluation cycles a year, training and use of a complex online system for formal evaluations of teachers, and staff focus groups around future implementation of a merit pay system. Our principal was trying to shield us and our students from the stress of these demands, asking questions, and pushing back. And because of that, she would have to go. Worried about the repercussions of a much-loved principals resignation in the middle of the year, the board had her stay on until the end, but with
If I began the year thinking that our school could be different, I ended it with a profound understanding of how pervasive many of the issues that arise around charter schools really are.
were confirmed when our principal sent out a letter explaining her voluntary resignation, effective at the end of the school year. The letter explained nothing. Here was a woman who was passionate about the school she was helping create, deeply committed to the community, and the textbook definition of a hard worker. She didnt have another job lined up or a better opportunity somewhere else. There wasnt an issue of fit, because she embraced the school philosophy and connected well with the families. She had been asked to resign, and presumably also asked not to speak about the circumstancesa distressing reminder that we were not the only ones suffering from a lack of union protection. As intelligent people who could read between the lines, though, the staff developed some ideas about what had happened. Our principal was pushing back when the board was demanding too much, too fast. At a time when our day-to-day operations were shaky at best and we lacked basic materials, the board wanted full implementation of the plans laid out in the charter, including five stu-
limited responsibilities. She would deal with the day-to-day operations of the schoolcalling subs, planning events, recruitment for the following yearbut she would no longer have anything to do with curriculum, teaching, or assessment. Instead, we would report directly to Carol, who already had a full-time job working with local and state charter school networks, was rarely onsite, and literally never visited our classrooms. Although this was disturbing, what happened next was perhaps most disturbing of all. A new head of school had to be selected. The board told staff and parents that the process would be fair and inclusive, and a committee was formed with teacher and parent representatives. Candidates were screened by the board president and interviews began. Sometime during this rapid process, Carol announced that she was stepping down from the board to interview for the position of head of school. This was when the parents began to play their part. They hadnt been fooled by our principals resignation letter or by Carols adept political language. The
Of great importance to all those concerned with how our society educates its children.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
parent representative on the committee stood up and said that he did not believe the screening and interview process had been fair, and that he thought it was inappropriate for an ex-board member to apply to be the head of school. But he was just one member of the committee, pitted directly against the president of the board. Carol was hired. Parents You think Im an idiot, but Im not. The parents, who had also been talking outside the front gate and reading between the lines of the board agendas, decided it was time to make a stand. Meetings were scheduled to introduce Carol to the parent community. Those
and after-school hours, instead of giving the school a community feel, put distance between parents and teachers, who were rarely able to interact, and meant that some children were with their family for only an hour or so in the evening before they went to bed. Parents were pressured to enroll their children in the intersessions; I had parents come to me in a state of agitation to ask if there was going to be a problem if they took their kids to visit family during winter or spring break instead of bringing them to school. By this point in the school year, some parents were starting to resent the implication that school was a happier, healthier place than home, and to wonder about a school that made such negative assumptions about the quality of
The story of Milwaukee is really the multilayered tale of how America has long avoided committing to the education of low-income students of color. A must read.
LISA DELPIT, AUTHOR OF MULTIPLICATION IS FOR WHITE PEOPLE AND OTHER PEOPLES CHILDREN
I wonder why, as a nation, we think that starting over again and again will solve our educational problems.
A compelling portrait of a city, a time, and a people on the edge. This is essential reading.
BILL AYERS, AUTHOR OF TO TEACH: THE JOURNEY, IN COMICS AND TEACHING TOWARD FREEDOM
A great read!
MIKE ROSE, AUTHOR OF BACK TO SCHOOL, WHY SCHOOL?, AND THE MIND AT WORK
Fascinating. . . . The current education politics of Wisconsin date back at least 50 years, and have important implications for education throughout the country.
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
THE NEW PRESS Publishing in the Public Interest www.thenewpress.com
THE NEW PRESS
meetings were taken over by parents who didnt mince words when it came to telling the board they had made a big mistake and lost the communitys trust. In a predominantly African American community, pushing out an African American principal partway through the year and hiring one of the people responsible for her forced resignationa white woman who didnt know the community, the families, or the kidsdid not go over well. Blatantly disregarding the opinion of the only parent on the hiring committee didnt go over well, either. Furthermore, the deficit thinking embedded in the charters philosophy was offending at least some of the parents. The school had an extended day, an extended school year, and intersessions during winter, spring, and summer break. The implication was that the children would do better if they were at school and protected from the potentially harmful influences of their own community. The long before-
time they could offer their own children. Some parents felt they were being talked down to and deliberately misinformed by the board. As one parent put it to me, I dont need anyone to save my son from me. He was relating a conversation he had with the president of the board. I told her: You think Im an idiot, you think Im some dumb n, but Im not. I dont need a white knight in shining armor to save my son. Thats my job. I do that. I give my son what he needs. And if you dont know that, you dont know anything about me. Who Runs the School? How did a supposed community school end up so estranged from members of the community? The charter claimed strong ties to the neighborhood and the community preschool, but our tepid reception, estrangement from the preschool,
40 > SPRING 2013
and under-enrollment told a different story. I began to realize that, when it came down to it, this school was the product of one womans vision. The president of the board had decided that the neighborhood needed a better elementary school and decided to found one. She was not from the neighborhood and she didnt know much about it. She was a well-to-do woman with connections in the worlds of education and business, so she drew on her own network to make it happen. She put together a board of directors composed of friends and colleaguesbusinesspeople, judges, college professors, a few people with experience in education, although mostly in the private school world. But, frankly, the board consisted of two key players: the president and Carol. Ultimately, the school was a project. The board president founded it, painted it the colors that she liked, cut the ribbon, and expected everything to go as planned. When the principal didnt fall into line, she brought in someone who would. When the children, families, and teachers didnt respond the way they were supposed to, she was frustrated and angry, and did not hesitate to show it in ways that both parents and teachers found disrespectful and insulting. Carol was different. She was a competent politician and a woman with well-established ties to the charter school movement. Her goal was to create a successful school that would serve as an example. Under her direction, the school had a chance at success in terms of publicity and test scores. But it would not be a community school. I learned that when I tendered my resignation and was informed that I had misunderstood when I thought that teachers and parents would be involved in shaping the school. In the same meeting, I was accused of insubordination for writing a letter about my resignation to the PTA, urging parents to continue fighting for the sort of school they wanted. In a functional school, Carol told me, there are things parents should not have to know about
and be involved in. A school where parents and teachers were not free to advocate for themselves or for each other was not the kind of school I wanted to work in, I told her. Reaping the Sour Rewards The school year ended nearly as chaotically as it had begun. With constant confusion about which principal made which decisions, multiple small power struggles broke out among staff members, and our previously functional team was reduced to rubble in a matter of days. Frustration among parents remained at a low simmer, with one mother collecting information for a possible district in-
worked teachers, inadequate services for students with special needs, confusing financial practices, questionable hiring and firing procedures, and corporatestyle practices like merit pay, bonuses, and at-will contracts. What stays with me is the realization that our students were not receiving the education they deserved in the stable environment they needed to flourish. Every minute we spent whispering behind closed doors, afraid for our jobs, angry at our work conditions, was time and energy taken away from teaching. It makes me wonder why, as a nation, we think that starting over again and again will solve our educational problemsespecially when new charter schools can be such unstable
Schools must be built by people who know and love the students and who understand the messy, dayto-day realities that are so hard to grasp from a comfortable desk chair in a distant room.
quiry and other parents evaluating their options for the following year. The numbers were telling. The previous August, five full-time staff members had been hired: one principal, three teachers, and an office manager. By July, only one of these original five was still working at the school. Of the three parttime staff members, only two remained. Several positions actually turned over twice during the school year. What is the impact of such an unstable school, run by outsiders, in a community where the need for solid supports and consistency runs deep? One wonders how children can get what they need out of a school environment that chews up and spits out adults. There is a lot that can be said about the problems inherent in the charter school model. We ran up against many of those problems in that first year: over-
places, and when we all know that both teachers and schools take years to grow into their full potential. The big lesson here is applicable not only to charter schools, but to any school where the people who end up calling the shots are not those on the ground working with and caring for the children. No school should be the project of one person or one small group of people, whether those people are politicians, philanthropists, board members, or highlevel administrators sitting in far-off offices. Schools must be built by people who know and love the students and who understand the messy, day-to-day realities that are so hard to grasp from a comfortable desk chair in a distant room. Schools must be built from the ground up, by teachers, parents, administrators, and students. No school is functional without that fundamental partnership. n
Creative Conict
Collaborative playwriting
T
BY KATHLEEN MELVILLE
___________________________________ Kathleen Melville (kathleen.melville@ gmail.com) teaches English, Spanish, and playwriting at a public high school in Philadelphia. She advocates for teachers as a founding member of Teachers Lead Philly. Artist Colin Matthes work can be found at colinmatthes.com and justseeds.org.
he conflict in my classroom was explosive: defiant teenagers, raging parents, broken promises, betrayal among friends. Students were on their feet, shoving furniture, glaring menacingly, raising their voices. As I surveyed the room, part of me was very pleased.
The students were also proving that they had a clear understanding of one of the foundational concepts in playwritingconflict. For the purposes of playwriting in our class, I had defined conflict in this way: Conflict = want + obstacle In order for an interesting conflict to develop, a character must have a want or need (for example, a young woman wants to play basketball), and there must also be something or someone standing in the way (for example, her grandma forbids her to leave the house). Students agreed that conflict is what makes drama interesting, and they quickly learned to incorporate it into the scenes they wrote in class.
In some ways, the project this class had undertakencreating collaborative plays about issues important in students liveswas going very well. The students, 20 high school seniors, seemed engaged and invested in the work, from brainstorming and improvising to writing and revising. The class had read and watched a variety of dramatic pieces, and students had already written and performed some excellent monologues and short scenes. For this unit, we had started by generating an exhaustive list of themes and issues that interested students in the class. In the end, the students narrowed the list down to three topicspeer pressure, sexuality, and domestic abuseand formed collaborative playwriting groups to explore each issue and create original plays.
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COLIN MATTHES
The Conict In the midst of this creative process, however, I was troubled. Many of the scenes being enacted in the room were scenes of violence, and it was hard for me to watch my students play this out. Some of the violence I saw in students work was physical violence taking place between characters. In one scene, two young women attacked each other in a dispute over a young man; in another, a mother beat her teenage daughter. I also noticed some vicious verbal abuse among characters who were spouses, siblings, and classmates. Given the topics students had chosen to explore, including peer pressure and domestic abuse, the violence was not surprising. I was committed to giving students authorial
and creative control, but I still worried about the impact of these representations of violence, both on my student playwrights and on a potential audience of community members. What would it say about my students if they wrote and performed plays full of verbal and physical violence? Wouldnt it reinforce some of the most pernicious stereotypes about urban youth? The first and simplest answer that occurred to me was to censor their work. I knew that if I tried this, they would lose some of their passion for playwriting, and we would all lose some of the integrity of the creative process. As a teacher, I was facing an important conflict. My want was for my students to experience the power of creative, collaborative work. I hoped that writing
plays would give them an opportunity to develop their voices and explore complex issues with one another. I imagined plays that could provide a more nuanced, authentic view of my students lives than a media that often portrays urban youth as reckless and destructive. The obstacle in my way was that their work, in fact, resembled many of the TV shows and movies that I hated for their flat, negative portrayals of young people. How could I push their thinking beyond the stereotypes they saw in the media? How could I bring this conflict in my teaching to a productive resolution? The Want In playwriting, the most powerful wants are those with high stakes. High stakes
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means there is a lot to gain and also a lot to lose. This is how I felt about my want for the playwriting class. It was my third year teaching this class, an elective that I designed in collaboration with Philadelphia Young Playwrights, a local arts education organization. My prior experience had taught me that playwriting could evoke powerful responses from my students. In creating characters and settings, students shared their perceptions of the worldwhat they found admirable, despicable, exciting, ideal. In crafting dialogue, they found a safe haven for the rhythms and vocabulary that best portrayed their realities; because plays often employ dialect, I was able to take a break from policing their writing and embrace the rich nuances of non-standard Eng-
The Obstacle In playwriting, the obstacle is what gets in the way of the want. Its the forbidding parent, the envious sibling, the mountain that must be climbed. For me, it was the violence being acted out all over my classroom. Students were enacting not only physical and emotional violence, but also a kind of violence of representation. The caricatures they put on stagefrom the obnoxious, aggressive mother to the single-mindedly promiscuous young womanstood in the way of my vision of a more authentic, nuanced portrayal. And instead of provoking thought, these caricatures elicited guffaws and groans from our class audience. My students and I had seen these characters before:
In crafting dialogue, the students found a safe haven for the rhythms and vocabulary that best portrayed their realities.
lish. And finally, in performing each others work, students built community and confidence as artists. Standing before a group of 20 restless seniors, I wanted all of this and more. I also wanted to give my seniors a space to address some of the issues that were on their minds as they contemplated the end of high school. Just as playwriting can create a safe space for students to express themselves in non-standard English, it can also create a space to explore the issues that are rarely discussed in school. In class, we looked at examples of plays that take on complex topics like race, sexuality, violence, and identity. We studied Fences, The Laramie Project, and the work of Anna Deveare Smith. We looked at ways playwrights draw on multiple sources (history, memory, interviews, music, news) to create a meaningful whole with a powerful message. I wanted my students to be able to harness this same creative power in their work. on TV or in movies. Re-enacted in our room, the stereotypes seemed familiar and amusing to some, predictable and boring to others. I was confronting what Marsha Pincus refers to as a moment of dissonance. My desire to promote real artistic control and a real creative process had led to stereotypes that made me cringe. How could I redirect my students toward creating more nuanced characters? How could I support them in teasing out more authentic portrayals? Luckily, thanks to a partnership with Philadelphia Young Playwrights, I shared this class with a brilliant teaching artist, John Jarboe. John and I talked together about our concerns and tried to address them with the class. We led a discussion about stereotypes and brainstormed a list of stereotypical characters from TV and film. Then, we challenged our students to go beyond the stereotypes, to dig deeper for more complex, realistic characters.
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Our students were attached to the characters they had created. Exaggerated stereotypes are funny, they contended. And in some ways, they were right. In the case of a play about sexuality, seeing the whore, the player, and the virgin parade across the stage did elicit laughter from the class in rehearsals. Another group argued that they had already defied a stereotype in their play on domestic violence. They had cast the abuser, a role typically filled by a man, as a woman, an aggressive mother who incessantly insulted her husband and daughter. Although I applauded them for exploring a new angle and their classmates rewarded them with hearty laughter during rehearsals, I still felt that their portrayal was more of a caricature than an authentic imagining of a real problem. I realized that my challenge now was to prove to my students that there could be a more gratifying response to drama than just laughter. I believed that if they were willing to leave the relative safety of stereotypes, they could move audiences with their work. I just wasnt sure how to get them to believe. Resolution and Final Product Every great conflict in a play must end in a satisfying resolution. The question must be answered, the tension dissolved. The resolution of the conflict in my practice was not neat or easy, but it was deeply satisfyingcertainly for me, and I hope for my students as well. It began when I found a way to invite my students to bring their own experiences into their work. Initially, this proved difficult. Students had intentionally chosen controversial topics because they wanted to use their plays to raise questions about things that dont get talked about. Many students had selected issues that were important to them for personal reasons, but very few were willing to share their personal experiences with sexuality, domestic abuse, and peer pressure. Without their authentic experi-
ences informing the plays, however, we were left with empty caricatures and recycled stereotypes. I talked with the students about the importance of taking risks in their work, and we agreed that the best way to make the plays more powerful and authentic was to incorporate real, lived experiences. For each play topic, I developed a set of writing prompts that I hoped would elicit a broad range of reflections and experiences. I realized that there were some assumptions in the class about whose voices mattered. For example, only those who had had sex could really speak meaningfully about sexuality; only those who had been abused could really speak meaningfully about domestic abuse. To counter these perceptions, I was careful to frame questions that everyone could answer. Writing prompts on the topic of sexuality, for example, included: How did you learn about sexuality? When? Where? Write about a time that you learned about sexuality in school. Write about someone you know who has been given a label (for example, player, whore, fag) that has to do with their sexuality. Why do you think this person was labeled? How do you think he or she feels? I posted the sexuality questions at the front of the room and gave students
ences into the fabric of their play. I made a point of including my own writing in the packet, and I asked if anyone wanted their writing removed from the packet. Surprisingly, no one did. We went through the same process for both domestic abuse and peer pressure. By the end of class, we had three packets of writing, each filled with student reflections on the play topics. The next day, students gathered into their collaborative playwriting groups, and I distributed each packet to the corresponding group. I passed out highlighters and asked the groups to pass each piece of writing around their table, reading silently and highlighting words or phrases that stood out to them. Inevitably, there was some speculation about the authors of different pieces of writing, but for the most part, students were engrossed in reading and respectful of their classmates honesty and willingness to take a risk for the sake of improving the plays. Once everyone had finished reading and highlighting, I asked the class to create mash-up poems made up of the highlighted words and phrases. Each group worked collaboratively to piece together their classmates words into rhythmic chains of impressions and reflections. The next day, members from
My desire to promote real artistic control and a real creative process had led to stereotypes that made me cringe. How could I redirect my students toward creating more nuanced characters?
time to write. I asked that they write anonymously so we might be able to use the writing to develop and revise our plays. Then I collected all the student writing into a packet. I told the class that I planned to give the packet of writing to the collaborative playwriting group that was working on the play about sexuality and that I hoped that the writing might help them weave more authentic experieach group performed the poems for the rest of the class. The performances were powerful, in part because many of us heard our own words echoed back to us as poetry. There was also a shared sense of working together to paint an authentic picture around these important issues. The poems were not cohesive or neat, but they were drawn from real voicesour voices.
After the poetry performances, the playwriting groups revised their plays. One group used their mash-up poem as the final scene in their play. Another used vignettes from the writing activity as transitions between the scenes in their play. All of the plays became richer and more nuanced. The group that had chosen sexuality as their topic decided to name their play As Told by Teens. It includes one scene that I find particularly moving and that I feel represents the resolution that my students and I were seeking: (Jerry, Sean, and Jahlil are walking into the locker room; all guys begin to get changed.) Jerry: Yo, fellas, I gotta tell yall something important and it has to stay between the three of us OK. (They all stop. Sean and Jahlil turn around and give Jerry a concerned look.) Jahlil: Uhh, OK, whats up? Jerry: So its like this, yall remember
that time we was out and I was talking to the dude who I said owed me money? Sean: Yeah, what about him? Jerry: Well, the thing is that he didnt really owe me money . . . I was kind of . . . sort of . . . getting his number. (There is a pause as all three boys look at each other.) Jahlil: So youre telling us . . . Sean: That you . . . Jerry: Yeah . . . Sean: How long have you known? Jerry: For about a couple years. Jahlil: (Harshly) So all these years weve been together, chilling and shit, you suddenly have these thoughts that damn, I think I wanna be gay from now on!? Sean: Yo, dude, chill. Jerry: Its not even like that. Its nothing that you can just decide like, oh, I feel like wearing sneaks today or flip-flops tomorrow. I didnt know. I wasnt sure. Jahlil: Naw, you know I dont play that gay stuff!
Sean: Yo, Jahlil, you way outta pocket right now, like what is your problem? Thats our friend right there. Jahlil: My problem is that this is someone we be hanging around. (Turns his attention to Jerry) And if you think to even try to come at me with that gay stuff, then best believe that it will be a problem. Without second-guessing, I will knock you out. Jerry: Really, though!? I told yall this in 100 percent confidence because I thought that both of yall was my friend. And then you snap on me like this. Some real friends yall are. Sean: (Getting between both of them) Will both of you shut the hell up for a minute! (The room gets silent for a moment then Sean continues to speak.) Now listen, Jerrys gay . . . who the hell cares? Hes been our friend since we was in grade school, hes had our back
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throughout the most difficult days that we had. Jerry: So why the hell Sean: Shut up. (Jerry gets quiet again.) Nothing about him changed . . . other than his sexual interest. Jahlil: Sean, you know I dont associate myself with those kind of people. Jerry: (Hitting his boiling point) Those people? (Trying to get past Sean but is stopped.) You know what, fine, I got you. Oh, I got you. (Picks up his stuff and walks out.) Sean: Dude, what the hell is wrong with you? Jahlil: Nothing is wrong with me. Im not going to sit around and wait for Jerry to try and pull some gay stuff on me. You know what, forget this. Im leaving. (Picks up his stuff and begins to walk out) Sean: Where are you going? We have to get changed for practice. Jahlil: Im going home. I aint gonna be around that gay stuff. Peace. (Jahlil exits. Sean picks up his things and leaves, shaking his head as he exits.) Reaction and Reection This scene, and many of the other scenes in the plays, show my students as they really are: passionate, thoughtful, complex, working hard to navigate the changing terrain of their relationships and their world. Jerry and Sean defy the stereotype of the homophobic black male, and by the end of the play, so does Jahlil; his loyalty to his friend Jerry triumphs over his initial discomfort. Still, I worried about how the play would be received. We had planned to perform it for an audience of family, friends, students, and teachers. I worried that parents and teachers might think these topics had no place in school. I worried that students in the audience might laugh or call out during some of
Acknowledging and embracing the conict in my practice felt risky and destabilizing at times. But the conict and questions opened the door to learning and creation for both me and my students.
the tenser scenes. I was worried that my student-performers might be disappointed if they didnt garner the applause and plaudits I thought they deserved. I stood nervously in the back of the auditorium as As Told by Teens unfolded. As the students performed what we called the coming out scene, I held my breath, anticipating some kind of explosion from the audience. There were gasps and a few giggles, but nothing extreme. Mostly, the audience seemed enthralled by the conflict on stage. In the scene directly following this one, Jerry delivers a monologue in which he claims his right to be open and feel comfortable about his sexuality. After his final words, the audience exploded into applause. The success of the plays is a testament to the brave creativity of the playwrightperformers and to the warm acceptance of our school community. I thought about the students in the audience who were gay, lesbian, or bisexual. How did it feel for them to hear that applause? To know that not just a few of their teachers, but a whole audience of peers and community members applauded the decision to come out? This message of acceptance was a unique and powerful result of the students work. It was not something that a teacher or a guest speaker or a school policyno matter how greatcould deliver. It was made possible only through the original work of students, writing and performing for and with their own community. In the end, both the plays and the conflict in my practice came to satisfying resolutions. But neither one ever felt like a foregone conclusion. Most days during the semester I felt overwhelmed by how many things could go wrong. I often felt like I was in over my head or that I had opened a Pandoras box that I couldnt shut. But Im glad I stuck with it, and I hope to do this type of work with students again in the future. I know that there will be new conflictsin the playwriting and in my practicebut I have a lot more faith in the process of working through them with my students. Freeing students to pursue the creative process and address controversial issues felt scary and even dangerous. Acknowledging and embracing the conflict in my practice felt risky and destabilizing at times. But the conflict and questions opened the door to real learning and creation for both me and my students. And working alongside them in that process is what makes my teaching feel vital, authentic, and important. n
____________________________________ REFERENCES Sean Harris, Nafis Pugh, Savon Goodman, Lynnae Edwards, Laborah Myles, Jordan Reese, and Oriana Principe. As Told by Teens. Unpublished play. Performed at National Constitution Center, Philadelphia. Jan. 24, 2012. Marsha Pincus. Playing with the Possible: Teaching, Learning, and Drama on the Second Stage, Going Public with Our Teaching: An Anthology of Practice. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2005.
Teaching the forgiveness poem
Hey, Mom, I Forgive You

BY LINDA CHRISTENSEN
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BEC YOUNG
was 13 when my father died. When I was in high school, my mother started dating other men. I resented this for many reasons. Partly, I suppose I wanted her to stay true to the memory of my father, whom I loved madly. But I also missed her; she was absent from my life during that time. My sisters and brother were grown, so our family consisted of Mom and me. She no longer cooked dinner. She drank more. She stayed out late. I was lonely and angry and hurt. Many years later, I realized that she was still a young woman in her mid-40s. She wasnt ready to be a widow for life, and there were few eligible prospects in our small town.
Teenagers often harbor resentment as well as love for their parents. Theirs is an age of rebellion and separation. During the last 40 years, Ive listened as my students stormed in anger at their parents, but Ive also witnessed their love and loyalty. As a daughter who has forgiven her mother, and as the mother of two daughters who I hope will forgive me all of my mistakes, I find the topic of forgiveness essentialand a recurring theme in literature and history. As students grow into adulthood, they need to see their parents as people as well as family members. Sometimes understanding the cultural and social pressures that shaped their parents helps them begin to resolve some of the issues that divide them from the significant adults in their lives. For some students the pain is still too close and too fresh to forgive. Both responses are legitimate. The forgiveness poem is a yearly
____________________________________ Linda Christensen directs the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She is a Rethinking Schools editor, and author of Reading, Writing, and Rising Up and Teaching for Joy and Justice. This article is based on a lesson plan included in Reading, Writing, and Rising Up. Illustrator Bec Youngs print work can be found at justseeds.org.
staple in my classes. I use it when I teach Sherman Alexies Smoke Signals in junior English, but it pairs well with many novels or historical periods. In Smoke Signals, Victor, the main character, struggles because his alcoholic father left the reservation, abandoning Victor and his mother. After his fathers death, Victor discovers the reason his father left, as well as his fathers guilt and pain. At the end of the play, Alexie uses part of a Dick Lourie poem, Forgiving Our Fathers, as Victors friend Thomas mourns the death of Victors father, Arnold, as well as his own:
Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often or forever when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage or making us nervous because there seemed never to be any rage there at all Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying our mothers For divorcing or not divorcing our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Louries questions float through the class as we read the end of the play, just as Victors fathers ashes float on the Spokane River. Beyond the curricular connections, I use this poetic prompt early in the year because it cracks my classes open. Instead of being cardboard charactersthe basketball player, the dancer, the high achieverstudents become real people whose veins pump equal parts hope and pain. As one of Bill Bigelows and my former students said, When you hear peoples stories, you cant hate them anymore. Writing and sharing our lives builds a community in the classroom that allows students to risk more, to lose their fear of looking or sounding wrong. We live in a society that is increasingly exploitative and unequal. As jobs fade into perpetual unemployment, the loss of self-worth spins into alcohol, drug, and physical abuse. Families separate and fall apart under the pressure. Too often these issues are not addressed in school, and students take out their anger and grief on each other, creating disruptive and unproductive classrooms. The forgiveness poem gives students space to voice the ways these pressures have played out in their lives. I begin by reading my poem about my mother to students. Sharing my stories helps build the bond between us. I make myself vulnerable when Im asking them to be vulnerable.
Dear Mom, I forgive you for all the nights you chose men over me, the nights you stayed out late. I forgive you for all the evenings I ate TV dinners, watching reruns of Maverick and roamed our lonely house, only my voice cracking the silence.
I use this poetic prompt early in the year because it cracks my classes open. Instead of being cardboard charactersthe basketball player, the dancer, the high achieverstudents become real people whose veins pump equal parts hope and pain.
I forgive you for all the days when your anger tumbled out coating me with curses. I forgive you, Mother, for I know your heart. I know your loneliness. I know the tender ache that wakes us, alone in the dark when the foghorn reminds me that Dad died and all that is left is emptiness.
dents have tragic lives, but some do, and this assignment allows them to speak bitterness about it. For others, the assignment lets them lay down some of the resentment theyve been carrying. One student was placed in foster care after his grandparents were arrested for selling drugs. He wrote:
Hey, Mom, I forgive you For all the times you didnt come home For all the times you left us At strangers houses. For all the times you left us At our grandparents house For days on end and then forever. Yes, Mom, I forgive you For all the times you let Dope come first. For all the times that I found you Passed out on the couch, Thinking that you were dead, I forgive you. For all the times you let me down, Mom, I forgive you.
Once I share my poem, we read Lucille Cliftons poem forgiving my father. She berates her father for not giving her mother what she was due. Her poem weaves in both understanding and anger:
but you were the son of a needy father, the father of a needy son; you gave her all you had which was nothing.
We discuss the twin emotions that rise up from Cliftons poem and compare it to how Victor feels about his father.
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Then we read two student poems: Forgiving My Mother, by Tanya Park, and Forgiving My Father, by Justin Morris. (See p. 51.) After reading Tanyas poem, I ask students, What do you notice about Tanyas poem? Whats it about? Can you relate to it? Students discuss the specific detailspushing her father away, the packing and unpacking. They dont think that having breakfast for dinner is something to be angry about. Then I push students to notice how the poem is put together. How did she move her poem forward? Students note the repeating lines, For all the times . . . I forgive you. This is an effective pattern for students. We follow the same procedure for Justins poem. Many students identify with his poem to his absent father. They quickly pick out detailsnot knowing what his father looks like, not having the same last name, no cards or presents for his birthday or Christmas. Again, I ask them to notice the repetition in Justins poem, Id like to forgive you, but . . . . I tell students to take out a sheet of paper and write a list of people they would like to forgiveor notincluding themselves. Then to select one of those people and think about specific reasons or events that need forgiving, like Tanya and Justin did. Students write ferociously. Very few get stuck on this assignment. Some use the repeating lines from the students models, but others create their own. Most students write to their mother or father. One girl wrote to the man who murdered her cousin, one boy wrote to Hitler, but this is typically a poem between intimatesrelatives and close friends. Let me say that not all of my stu-
Another student is high achieving, but hes pushed hard by his parents to achieve even more. His poem scorched the pages with his anger at being both yelled at and paraded by his mother:
Id like to think youve learned From the history textbook of your anger Or maybe that a teacher would appear to help you learn And Id like to think that your atomic bomb Of rage had broken and wouldnt explode again. But wishful thinking wont change your world. I dream of a morning When your werewolf screams of
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fury are nowhere to be heard When your ceaseless gunfire wont rip me up And I dream of a day when you dont thrust spears through the bars of my cage of misery then show me off to admiring mothers like a trophy But dreaming wont make a better morning. I wish you wouldnt say, I love you, Like you mean it. Then tromp on me like Im dirt I wish I could forgive you, But I cant, and for that I am sorry, Mother.
sometimes painful content, we do not require everyone to share, but most do. Franz Kafka wrote, A book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us. For me, the forgiveness poem is that axe. This poem allows the class to address those who have harmed us so that we can move on, hold hands with others who have also been wronged, come to new insights about each other and
our lives, understand that we are not alone in our pain. The assignment is not a command to forgive, but an invitation to understandas Victor comes to understand his fathers alcoholism and disappearancean invitation to name our hurt and make sense of it. n
Forgiving My Mother For all the times you yelled and all the times you screamed I forgive you. For all the nights we had breakfast for dinner and dinner for breakfast I forgive you. For all the times I felt you pushed my daddy away I forgive you. For all the times we ran away and came back, For all the times we packed and unpacked, for all the friends Ive lost and all the schools Ive seen, for all the times I was the new kid on the scene, I forgive you. Tanya Park
Forgiving My Father Id like to forgive you, Father, but I dont know your heart. Your face, is it a mirror image of mine? Id like to forgive you, Father, but I find your absence a fire that your face might be able to extinguish. Id like to forgive you, Father, but my last name isnt the same as yours like its supposed to be. You rejected me, Dad, but can I sympathize with your ignorance? For all the birthdays you didnt send me a card, for the Christmases when Id wake up, and you werent sitting by the tree waiting for me I cant forgive you. What about the summer nights where prospects of you began to fade? Fade like you did 17 years ago. Out of my life. Id like to forgive you, Father, but I dont know you. And for that, I hate you. Justin Morris
Absent fathers, like Justins, are a common theme in the poems. This poem reflects a familiar refrain:
For all the times you came In at 2 in the morning yelling At my mom, I forgive you. For the time you left for 11 years without telling me I forgive you.
Many students demonstrate the conflict evident in Lucille Cliftons poem. They are angry, but also curious and willing to stretch out a hand:
If I could forgive you, Father, I would. But who are you? I dont have a clue. Youve got my inquiries stuck like a flame to a fuse. Only you can extinguish them. I never got a hug from Daddy. You know what? Its fine.
We share the poems in class during a read-around, where each student shares their piece and others comment. Students are kind and thoughtful. Because of the
A Pure Medley
BY ADELINE NIETO
Who choose to remember roots for the sake of diversity And to forget them for the joyous sake of simplicity This is for those of us who long for strong family reunions That flower from our branch on the cactus Delicately settled atop spines For those who have never witnessed their mothers relatives and their fathers relatives Relate And who consequently forfeited world peace at a young age This is for the ones who pump tangoing mixed blood Of entities not quite white and not quite black Not quite indigenous and not quite invasive For the dancers who mirror twisting kaleidoscopes Morphing into beautiful, seemingly graceful patterns of colorful beads For the chameleons in this world occupying myriad bodies of land Inquisitive to live beyond, and therefore leave, the familiar This is for my journeys to a motherland and to my imperialist forefather That only resulted in more exclusion and confusion This is for fighting against being commodified and exotified For overcoming triple the stereotypes Triple the ignorant remarks And triple the caricatures This is for educating schoolmates that Filipino is spelled with an F And caf owners that Colombia is spelled with an O This is for the understanding that a half or a quarter of an ethnicity More often eliminates me from the group rather than adding me in This is for the ability to choose which facet to identify with Only after I analyze which would be most convenient For calculating a witty response to Where are you from? And for becoming so damn confused when Offering a literal response to the philosophical question What are you? This is for those of us who have inevitably become accepting of all walks of life After our own walk in life For those whose half-life, and even quarter-life, crisis Never quite leaves shore because the identity crisis is still out at bay Running the length of the marathon This is for those of us who have the knowledge of nomads
n a class on culturally responsive teaching at Ithaca College, my professor, Jeff Claus, asked us to create poems of introduction. He was modeling how to use two of Linda Christensens poetry lessons: Where Im From: Inviting Students Lives into the Classroom (from Reading, Writing, and Rising Up) and For My People: Celebrating Community Through Poetry (from Teaching for Joy and Justice). My poem was inspired by Margaret Walkers For My People. A Pure Medley This is not about the debated clash of civilizations But about the vibrant, continuous bleeding of cultures This is for the Americanized, assimilated immigrants children The evolving, eclectic generation Who never purposely left behind an identity Who never purposely decided to plow forward and Who never purposely stopped reflecting back This is for those who inhale the desire to recount histories And exhale the desire to discount them This is not for my grandparents, or even for my mother or for my father, Jorge This is for my sister and for my brother, George Who eat lumpia and kare-kare, and pollo saltado and arepa in the same week Who say Ay naku po and Ay ay ay, and Tita and Ta Who tan and freckle, drawing constellations on exposed flesh Attempting to connect fleeting shooting stars Who sit side by side and are mistaken for Not brother and sister, or even cousins But friends This is for those of us who are the artifacts of a marriage Of two humans who originated on opposite sides of the world ___________________________________________________ Adeline Nieto (adeline.nieto@gmail.com) is a student at Ithaca College.
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Thumb tacking trails of tears and visited validations Learning to hate The borders and unforgiving definitions Society stresses to create and uphold To construct contrasts to outshine the shadowed And the ethnocentricism and xenophobia That scares and scars Learning to love The transcendence and ambiguity That comes with linked journeys and linked fates With shared middles and shared tenses And the self-discovery and self-acceptance Initiating genuine engagement Yet this is primarily for those of us who While we may have sacrificed world peace Still find the energy to nurture inner peace Because we know that with deep-rooted discoveries We may extrapolate our findings and our amends From a sample of self to a population of plenty n
FAVIANNA RODRIGUEZ
F R O M
R E T H I N K I N G
S C H O O L S !
In these pages, Linda Christensen consummate teacher and brilliant writer shows us that, in the end, teaching well is about awakening and transformation. Through lively vignettes and stirring writing by both teacher and students, this book exudes hope and possibility.
Sonia Nieto, professor emerita, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
TEACHING FOR JOY AND JUSTICE

Re-imagining the Language Arts Classroom
By Linda Christensen
art autobiography, part curriculum guide, part critique of todays numbing standardized mandates, Teaching for Joy and Justice sings with hopeborn of Christensens more than 30 years as a classroom teacher, language arts specialist, and teacher educator. In it she demonstrates how she draws on students lives and the world to teach poetry, essays, narratives, and critical literacy. Practical, inspirational, passionate: this is a musthave book for every language arts teacher.
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T
LOST
BY BRADY BENNON
his country has been the basis of my being. And when its no longer there, you know, its unthinkable. Ueantabo Mackenzies haunting words in the PBS NOW documentary Paradise Lost shook me. I knew I wanted to teach a unit on global warming, especially after participating in the Portland-area Rethinking Schools curriculum group, Earth in Crisis. I didnt have to be convinced that students need to learn about global warming. Its one of the defining issues of our time. But Mackenzies message startled me: Global warming is here, right now, and it is uprooting people and destroying nations today, starting with Mackenzies home on the island nation of Kiribati (pronounced KIRR-i-bas).
I grew up thousands of miles from Kiribati in Arizona. My memories of the changing seasons usually boiled down to something like a shorts season and a jeans-with-sweatshirt season. So in the mid-1990s, when I started learning about the potential climate changes global warming might bring, I was vaguely nervous about the concept, but the danger seemed remote and distant. What difference can a degree or two really make, I thought. At the time I didnt grasp the rippling effects of global warming, including sea level rise, melting glaciers, and crop failures. As I was planning my global warming unitwhich I first taught to a freshman global studies class and later to a senior humanities classit was important to ensure that my students didnt miss the point as I had. I didnt want them jumping straight into an investiga____________________________________ Brady Bennon (b.bennon@gmail.com) teaches at Madison High School in Portland, Oregon.
Paradise
Introducing students to climate change through story
tion of the connections between carbon dioxide and rising temperatures, I didnt want them getting mired in the muck of political debates and international summitswithout first hearing about stories like Mackenzies. I wanted them to see that, beyond the environmental damage, global warming is about people. Ultimately, I wanted them to care. I decided that, before we watched Paradise Lost, I would help my students build empathy for climate change refugees and for people whose places are being altered by the changing climate. We started by reading the first chapter of Edward Abbeys Desert Solitaire, The First Morning. I asked students to highlight or underline words or phrases that were powerful, that spoke to them, or that were particularly descriptive. The piece begins:
This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the im-
54 > SPRING 2013
age of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.
Abbey continues with a beautiful description of his first moments in his new home in a trailer near Moab, Utah, and the way in which the sights, sounds, and smells of the area fill him with a powerful sense of connection to that land as home. After reading the chapter together, my students created a collective found poem by calling out the words or lines they highlighted when the moment felt right. The result was a poetic group effort that helped them explore Abbeys use of language to explain the power of place: Landscape, the appeal of home, humps of pale rock, like petrified elephants, red dust and burnt cliffs, a cabin on the shore, known or unknown, such places, calling to me, apparent to me, beautiful. Words and phrases hung in the air until it felt right to end. Then I explained to students that some of the places Abbey wrote about were under attack by developers and dam builders. After our oral poem, I asked my students why they think places have such a profound effect on people. Alex said: Places are important because they can make us feel like we belong. We all need a home. I think a lot of my memories of people are mixed in with the places they took place. Like, when I think of my mom, I remember the house we lived in together and the food she made there, added Tori. I loved that some of my students were beginning to personalize the idea of place. To help them go deeper, I borrowed an idea from our Earth in Crisis
curriculum group and asked them to do some place writing of their own. We started by brainstorming places they care deeply abouta special place in their home, at school, or even somewhere outdoors, where they felt like they could be who they wanted to be and felt at peace. It could be someplace from their past or from their lives today. To prime the pump, I listed a few of my own examples: a trail through the forest, a particular soccer field where I enjoy playing pick-up soccer, the garden in my backyard. After picking one of the places on their list, students closed their eyes and imagined themselves in that place
this place important? What do they look like or sound like? What feelings do they evoke in you? Students opened their eyes and wrote for the next 15 minutes. Afterward, they shared their pieces with a partner. Then, I asked students to go back to their piece and write about what it would feel like to lose that place, to have that place taken or destroyed. I could tell this last task troubled many students from the sounds of their groans, but they dove into their writing with intensity. Then, we read our stories together as a read-around. Students writing
Is anyone trying to save Kiribati, or are they just going to drown?

so they could absorb all the details like Edward Abbey did. I guided their visualization with prompts: Let your mind be a video camera. What do you see? What colors are there and how do those colors make you feel? Are there birds or animals? Maybe people you are close to? W hat do you smell as you look around you? Is it fragrant and floral like the flowers in the background? Does it smell like fresh rain or fried chicken? W hat about the sounds that fill this place? A chirp? The wind blowing through the trees? The ocean lapping at the shore? Your friend or family members soothing voice? A re there people who help make showed a deep connection to place, and they surfaced some powerful memories. Keesha, who was born in Liberia, wrote about a special tree from her village: Every time I sit under this tree, it feels like nothing exists but nature, no cars, bikes, or smoke. This tree is not just the tree of peace, but the tree of home for many different animals, birds, and bugs. When it rains, I dont feel it much, so its also the tree of protection. At age 9, I lost that tree. I came to the United States, hoping to find another tree like that one, but theres nothing like it. Shana, who lives in foster care, wrote: Every day I pass by it to and from school and I get a glimpse of my old place I used to call home. I see my mom and me laughing again. I can smell the
350.0RG
incense. I can see us singing together as we cook dinner. At times, I just want to run and open the door to my home like I did as a kid. I am no longer that kid and that is no longer my home. Ericas piece was eerily reminiscent of Mackenzies words about Kiribati: I look at that trailer and see my childhood, my laughter, my fear, my balance, my thrills, my questions, my imagination, my safety, my saving grace, my youth. I see the place we ran to when the world wasnt what we wanted it to be, the place where everything was OK. Some of my heart sings to that trailer. To take it away would be to take part of me away from my soul. When the places we love are destroyed or taken away, we lose more than land. We lose part of our identity. Paradise Lost Without delving into details about global warming, I had my students jump right into the 25-minute video Paradise Lost. I told them it was an introduction to global warming, and would serve to help them understand why were learning about the topic in social studies class in the first place. But it would not go deeply into the politics or science of the issue. I passed out a four-column chart and directed them to take notes about each of the four categories: people/things/ objects, actions that happened, sensory details shown or described, and important words spoken. I mentioned that they would be using their notes to do some writing after the video. The 2008 video begins with a United Nations assessment that within the next 50 years, 6 million people a year will be displaced because of sea level rise and storms. The film follows reporter Mona Iskander as she tours the island nation of Kiribati, which is less than 2 meters above sea level. Thirty-three separate islands make up this country east of Australia, which is disappearing because of rising sea levels. Iskander walks along sandy beaches surrounded by opalescent blue
waters. Children play along the surf as fishermen throw their nets into the water nearby. The scene is idyllic and relaxed. Several students said thats a place theyd want to live. Noa, a recent immigrant from Tonga, said, That looks like where Im from. The gentle voice of Anote Tong, president of Kiribati, breaks the spell of the enchanting island: Its too late for countries like us. If we could achieve zero emission as a planet, still we would go down. The rising sea level from climate change is swallowing up the island right now. In her first interview with Tong, Iskander exposes the injustice of the circumstances surrounding the islands demise: What does it say to you that the poorest and the smallest countries, which are contributing the least to global warming, are the first ones to be affected by it? Tongs response is compelling: Unless it hits you in the stomach, it means nothing to you. Later, he adds, While the international community continues to point fingers at each other regarding the responsibility for and leadership on the issue, our people continue to experience the impact of climate change. Tongs words cut straight through to the essence of why I decided to lead off my unit with this film. I wanted to inspire my students to care about climate change and also to begin grappling with critical moral questions. For example, is it fair that per capita, the United States emits more than 17 tons of carbon dioxide annually, compared to .3 for the average Kiribati resident, but their land is among the first to disappear? Later in the unit, this foundation would enable us to investigate reasons why U.S. society is structured in ways that encourage and even require such fossil fuel use, to the benefit of multinational energy corporations. Throughout the film, Iskander documents the parts of the country already destroyed. By the time the film was made, Kiribati had to move 21 homes, a church, even their soccer field, or they would have been swallowed by the sea.
The latest scientific reports say that within the century, the sea level will rise between 1 and 2 feet. That means much of this land will be gone. The first-person accounts by Kiribati residents are disturbing. MacKenzie explains that the coconut trees, which are a crucial part of their diet and culture, are dying because of the saltwater intrusion. Linda Uan, a local tour guide, shows how the village water sources are now salty and unusable. These interviews frequently lead to deeply moving statements about how profoundly sad it is to witness ones place get destroyed. My students were particularly moved by a brief interview with a Kiribati elder named Batee Baikitea who says: I love my land. If it is going to disappear, I will go with my land. Uan adds: Its our culture, our lands, its everything. Everythings going to be lost. How would you take that? Losing ones land is emotional. Theres no joking way about it; it is emotional. The movie ends with Tongs decision to ask the wealthy nearby nations of New Zealand and Australia to take in thousands of Kiribati residents fleeing their island homes. The film raises questions about the obligations that wealthy countries emitting massive amounts of carbon dioxide have to climate refugees, as well as how climate refugees can prepare for the shock of such a move. Its a challenge the world will increasingly need to grapple with; 6 million refugees a year is no small matter. When I turned on the lights, I let the power of the film sink in for a few seconds as my students looked around at each other in astonished silence. Kiribati Poems While the impact of the film was still fresh, I wanted students to put words to Kiribatis situation, so I asked them to write poems. I discussed several types of poems they could choose to write. They could write a found poem, like the one we collectively constructed as a class af-
56 > SPRING 2013
ter reading Abbeys piece. Another option was a persona poem written from the perspective of someone or something in the film. What are some examples of people or things whose perspectives you could write from? I asked. Students listed options as I wrote them on the board. I was pleased when, after listing some of the Kiribati residents interviewed in the film, students made more creative suggestions: a palm tree, the ocean, the freshwater well, the manieba (Kiribati village meeting center). As new ideas were added to the list, I could see some of my reluctant writers get more interested and less nervous about the assignment. Wanting to help students think about potential structures for their poems, I provided two models: Linda Christensens persona poem, Molly Craig (from Teaching for Joy and Justice), and a student example of a found poem. I asked students to notice repeating lines, punctuation and line breaks, and sensory details. We talked about how each of those elements help make the models interesting and add a sense of rhythm. I told students that they didnt have to choose either of those poetry forms, as long as they conveyed the sense of place, the loss, and the injustice of climate change in Kiribati. Finally, I provided students with a transcript of the film, so they could revisit parts of the video that spoke to them. While students wrote, I projected my computer screen onto the board and wrote my own poem from the perspective of President Tong. Students who initially struggled seemed to settle into their own writing when they were able to watch me work on my own writing. I use this strategy for several reasons. My mid-thought pauses and occasional struggles demonstrate an element of solidarity with the students. Writing is not easy for anyone, me included, but its worthwhile to work through the puzzling moments. It also sends a message to students that we are a community of writers, supportive of and respectful of each others words. Finally, it helps to establish a culture in which we
share our work with each other so that we can grow from each others ideas and feedback. When students finished writing their poems, we took turns reading them out loud. Veronicas poem, Dancing as I Go, was written from the perspective of one of the traditional Kiribati dancers shown in the video:
Dancing as I go With my feet buried in the sand,
I breathe in the rhythm of the wind and the waves And wonder: how long? As I perform the dance of my people to those who visit I ask myself: will this be my last? The last of my culture, The last to pass on the traditions and ways of life, The last to drink what is left of the remaining Kiribati water,
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And the last to benefit from the bearings of the coconut tree. Will those who I dance for return for me? Save me? Must I disappear with the land I love, The land that is my home Dancing as I go?
Tell them of its lush green palm leaves trailing Across white beaches, Right up to the blinking blue sea. Tell them our ways are simple. We let the suns rays walk down our backs, And we are peaceful, We are beautiful.
Lilys poem was both a celebration of Kiribati culture and a call to action:
Before we see the last of the tides come in, Tell them we are here. Before these waves beat down the last coconut tree, Tell them we know. We knew all along. Before our everything is flooding away, Tell them about our home.
Before the read-around, I had asked the students to write down lines that evoke emotions or cause you to want to take action, and write down themes that come up in the poems. After the readings, I asked the students: So what? Your poems sound like you care about Kiribati. Why? Tyler said, If my house was flooded because of something someone else did, Id be mad. Erica asked, Is anyone trying to save Kiribati, or are they just going to drown? This was the place I wanted my stu-
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dents to get to before we dove deeper into global warming. During the rest of the unit, I hoped their concern for Kiribati would stay with them as they learned that pseudo-scientists were paid to present false information about climate change. They would learn that corporations have tried to point the finger at individual consumers when, in fact, corporate practices are the lions share of the problem. They would learn that oil companies spend far less than 1 percent of their budgets on renewable energy development, while making billions in profit and painting themselves green. They would learn that a modern form of colonialism, climate colonialism, continues to exploit our atmosphere and impoverish and destroy countries like Kiribati. They would learn that, despite the warnings and urgent calls for help, nations have not passed binding treaties. In the end, through role plays, simulations, and community action with organizations such as Bill McKibbens 350.org, I hoped students would see themselves as truth-tellers and changemakers. But it all starts with caring. The places where we live have a profound effect on our lives. They influence our ideas, beliefs, and how we see the world. Places give us meaning. Our memories make us who we are and are inseparable from the places where they are made. So what happens when our place gets destroyed? What happens to the people who are uprooted, ripped from their homes, torn from their place? We need to stop thinking of global warming as an abstraction. It is Kiribati. It is Katrina. It is Superstorm Sandy. Here in Oregon, it is a future of coastal towns inundated at high tide; increased wildfires, insect outbreaks, and tree diseases; and increased risk of heat stress on crops. Global warming is you and me and all of us. Kiribati is just the beginning. n ________________________________
RESOURCES Edward Abbey. Desert Solitaire. Touchstone: NYC, 1968. PBS NOW. Paradise Lost. NOW on PBS Video, 2008.
60 > SPRING 2013
Good Stuff
Encounters
BY HERB KOHL
Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings By Craig Brown Simon & Schuster, 2012 A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward By Isaac Metzker Schocken Books, 1971
ello Goodbye Hello is, according to the book jacket, a circle of 101 remarkable meetings, and indeed it is. Each of the meetings portrayed in the book is between two interesting people, most of whom you would not connect with each other. It is not fiction. No meeting is more than three pages long and the writing is simple and elegant, but the content is complex and sometime troublingthese encounters are best used in the context of high school. Some are loving, others violent, but each one is a beautifully rendered and provoking conversation. As a reader, I felt I was having a peek into the authentic lives of strangers. Here is a short sampler of the encounters in the book with the delightful titles provided by author Craig Brown: Salvador Dal sketches Sigmund Freud Charlie Chaplin plays straight man to Groucho Marx Groucho Marx wants to be taken seriously by TS Eliot Martha Graham silences Madonna One of my favorite selections is Helen Kellers encounter with Martha Graham. In the course of the conversa-
tion Helen Keller asks Martha Graham, Martha, what is jumping? I dont understand. They are at a rehearsal, and Helen Keller can only feel the sound of dancing in the studio. Graham draws upon the skills of her student Merce Cunningham. She asks him to stand at the barre in her studio and puts Helen Kellers hands on his waist. Then Cunningham jumps as Kellers hands rise and fall with his body. He performs small leaps with her holding on and she is experiencing dance. How like thought, Keller says. How like the mind it is! That is wonderful teaching, without needing a word or a lesson planjust sensitivity, intuition, and intelligence. We can always use more of that in our work with children. Recently, Dear Abby died at the age of 92. She was born Pauline Esther Friedman. She and her identical twin, Esther Pauline Friedman, were born in Sioux City, Iowa, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in 1918. They became pioneers in writing popular advice columns as Abigail Van Buren and Ann Landers. They were both masters at pithy, unsentimental advice. They offered direct, no-nonsense responses to sensitive ques-
tionsoften with a dose of humor and a pinch of cynicism. It is what I call the Yiddish in them. Ive seen media claims that they created this genre, but the first advice column I have found was A Bintel Brief, an advice column in the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish-language newspaper published in the United States beginning in 1906, during the great East European Jewish migration. Yiddish was the language of Russian Jews. A Bintel Brief had the same form as the Dear Abby and Ann Landers columns, and much the same tone to the answers. The issues were focused on advice to immigrants coming to a new world, but I find they still resonate. A letter from 1906 begins: Honorable Editor, I have a grievous wound in my heart and maybe through the Bintel Brief will find relief. . . . Other letters (both from 1914) start: I am old woman of 70, write you with my hearts blood, because I am distressed and I am a girl, 22 years of age, but Ive already undergone a great deal in my life. These are just teasers. If you would like to read the answers, have a historical adventure, and learn good folk psychology, I urge you to get copy of the collection A Bintel Brief. n
Resources
and open guide, inviting viewers into her family, her culture, and her struggles. Forces of Nature Stories from the Brower Youth Awards (Vol. 2) New Leaders Initiative of the Earth Island Institute (Video Project, 2012) videoproject.com 51 min. >> DVDs Here are three titles from the Video Project, a distributor of excellent lms dealing with urgent environmental themes. The Hungry Tide By Tom Zubrycki (Video Project, 2012) videoproject.com 53 min. The Hungry Tide focuses on the life and work of Maria Tiimon, a climate activist living in Australia. Tiimon is from Kiribati (see Paradise Lost, p. 54), a chain of small islands in the Pacic that is already suffering from the effects of global warming. The Hungry Tide is many lms at once, which makes this an especially valuable classroom resource. Its an intimate story of how climate change is affecting Kiribati, a place we visit with Tiimon after her mother dies and, later, when her father becomes ill. Its the story of recent climate conferences in Copenhagen and Cancun, and the attempt of island nation activists like Tiimon to speak truth to wealth and power. And it is about the choices being made daily by climate victimsto stay and move farther inland, to relocate to another island, or to ee to a so-called developed country. Throughout, Tiimon is a warm For those of us concerned that teaching about the enormity of the worlds environmental crises might defeat rather than motivate students, here is a tailor-made resource. In shortfour- or ve-minute segments, Forces of Nature introduces us to Brower Youth Award winners. These inspiring young people are not organizing classroom recycling programs: They ght mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, work for green corridors and against naturewrecking hotel development in Puerto Rico, develop organic youth-run farms in north Philadelphia, work on the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin to revitalize the Menominee language and traditional foods, and seek to ban the use of rainforest-destroying palm oil in Girl Scout cookies. These mini-lms can be used in class separately or as a whole to show students diverse ways that young people make a difference. Nuclear Savage The Islands of Secret Project 4.1 By Adam Jonas Horowitz (Video Project, 2012) videoproject.com 60 and 87 min. This is a disturbing lm that helps students grasp how U.S. nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, beginning in 1946, terrorized and traumatized people there, in the words of a Marshallese government official. Its hard to overstate the racism and depravity of U.S. officials who intentionally treated Marshalleseespecially those from the island of Rongelapas human guinea pigs. In 1956, Merril Eisenbud, director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Agencys health and safety laboratory, described the governments plans for sending Marshallese back to Rongelap, just three years after the largest nuclear test in history: That island is by far the most contaminated place on Earth and it will be very interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment. Eisenbud added, While it is true that these people do not live the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is nevertheless also true that these people are more like us than the mice. Nuclear Savage not only chronicles the experimentation on the Marshallese but also introduces us to individuals who continue to work for justice. Its a lm that needs to be a staple in U.S. and modern world history curricula.
the Chinese didnt distinguish between Canada and the United States when they referred to Gam Saan (Gold Mountainthe Chinese term for North America). That blending of U.S. and Canadian history is one of the delightful and unusual aspects of this important book. Told as the history of the Wong family, this accessible volume offers readers a panoramic but also an intimate look at the Chinese experience in North America. No doubt, this is a story of racism, exploitation, and violence; but its also a story of warmth and solidarity.
>> NOVELS Ship of Souls By Zetta Elliott (AmazonEncore, 2012) 132 pp., $10 Imagine a sophisticated mix of the Magic Tree House series with science ction, magical realism, adventure
>> CURRICULUM Escape to Gold Mountain A Graphic History of the Chinese in North America By David H.T. Wong (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012) escapetogoldmountain.com 240 pp., $19.95 In this remarkable graphic novel, writer and illustrator David H.T. Wong tells us that
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stories, rites of passage, and a peoples history of the Revolutionary War and slavery. You end up with a gripping young adult book called Ship of Souls. In both Ship of Souls and Elliotts earlier A Wish After Midnight, the protagonists are Brooklyn teenagers facing typical complications with family and school. They are whisked away on a magical trip into the past, where the harsh realities of the Civil War (Wish After Midnight) and Revolutionary War (Ship of Souls) are revealed. In Ship of Souls, the protagonists are asked to help the dead from the African Burial Ground to nd safe passage. Among the many interesting aspects of both books are the placement of slavery in the North, and the invitation to learn more about these historic events and their contemporary relevance.
phone and typewriter, have your students read Homeland and then explain it to you.
>> PICTURE BOOK Harlems Little Blackbird: The Story of Florence Mills By Rene Watson, illustrations by Christian Robinson (Random House, 2012) 40 pp., $17.99 (a high school student in Little Brother) is given a ash drive of WikiLeaks-like documents and has to gure out how to expose the contents before he and the ash drive are destroyed. Doctorow weaves in contemporary issues: the military-industrial complex, internet privacy, election nances, and extraordinary rendition. At one point, Marcus talks with a political candidate who says: Youve got progressive Democratic presidents who believe its legal to assassinate American citizens overseas, who think we should all be spying on phone calls and email without warrants. The book is written for the internet generation. If you grew up with a landline In this beautifully illustrated picture book, Rene Watson tells the story of Florence Mills, a singer who used her voice to ght against racism in the early 20th century. Watsons lyrical prose provides poetic images that sing as clearly as Florence Mills. When Florence discovered that her friends were not allowed to attend her performance because the theater was a whites only establishment, Mills refused to perform: Florence used her voice to stand up for whats right. If they cant go in there, Im staying out here! Watson includes several incidents that depict both the racism of the times and Mills determination to use her position and talent to ght back. The story of segregation and the Harlem Renaissance are told in age appropriate ways that encourage young readers to ask questions about the times. At the end, Watson brings the message home: Florences dream lives on in the singers and dancers who came after her. It lives on in the heart of every boy and girl from a teenytiny, itsy-bitsy place who dreams of doing great big, gigantic, enormous things.
Homeland By Cory Doctorow (TorTeen, 2013) 400 pp. $17.99 In this sequel to Little Brother, Doctorow continues to write cutting-edge 21st-century realistic ction. Marcus Yallow
Reviewed by Bill Bigelow, Linda Christensen, and Deborah Menkart.
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re thinking schools

SPRING 2013, VOLUME 27 NO. 3

LEARNING MATH LEARNING JUSTICE

Climate Change Through Story

Saga of a Promising Charter

Learning Math, Learning Justice

Terry Burant, Rita Tenorio, Dyan Watson, Kathy Xiong

11 Whose Community Is This?

Michael Trokan Tegan Dowling Kris Collett

RETHINKING SCHOOLS Vol. 27, No. 3 (ISSN 0895-

Vol. 27, No. 3

9 Letters to the Editor 61 Good Stuff

42 Creative Conict Collaborative playwriting

48 Hey, Mom, I forgive you

RETHINKING SCHOOLS > 3

EYES ON MATH A Visual Approach to Teaching Math Concepts Marian Small

SEX ED FOR CARING SCHOOLS Creating an EthicsBased Curriculum Sharon Lamb

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LEARNING MATH LEARNING JUSTICE

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Seattle Test Boycott:

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LEARNING MATH LEARNING JUSTICE

Whose Community Is This?

150,000 291,000 = 92,000

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Lawndale Foreclosures per Year

0 2000 2001 2002 2003

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Concentration of USDA Corn Subsidies to Agribusiness

Remaining 80% of recips. 13% 1,258,332 $7,336,588,731

Corn and Tortilla Prices in the Mexican Market

- 500 - 400 - 300

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LEARNING MATH LEARNING JUSTICE

A workshop on math, water, and justice

BY SELENE GONZALEZ-CARILLO AND MARTHA MERSON

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Distrust of tap water can run deep in communities of color.

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Elliott maintained that when a hand-

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made me doublethink about what happened during that time period.

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LEARNING MATH LEARNING JUSTICE

Diversity Diversity in in U.S. U.S. Congress Congress

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Percent Change in Diversity in U.S. Congress

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42 Creative Conict Collaborative playwriting