Word Cloud for Wounded Knee

Since we're reading Sherman Alexie next, I wanted to do some background readings on the history of Native Americans in North America. We read this short "glimpse" and then read two chapters of the comic book based on the work of Howard Zinn. As we read, I asked students to write down the words they felt were the most important or powerful. At the end of the class, I took up the lists and made a word cloud out of them. The bigger words mean that more people wrote down those words. The underscores are what I (think I) had to do to keep two-word entries together.

Here it is.

Today, I asked students to take a look at it and see if any words should be bigger than they are. Quite a few added "unfair" and "colonialism." Next, we'll read a section from the Young People's History of the U.S. that discusses Wounded Knee, the occupation of Alcatraz, and the American Indian Movement. Then we start The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian!

Opinion Sentence Frames

Cleaning off my desk for spring break, I found a good example of social justice ELD.

The target was "Expressing Needs, Likes, and Opinions" (NLO). After practicing some of the language forms and important words with more personal, basic subjects, we started focusing on the needs and opinions around educational issues.

This assignment was about writing your opinion and using NLO verbs and lead-ins. Students were given this sentence frame:

(In my opinion,)/(I think that) ___________________________ (need to/have to/should) _____________________________ because ______________________________ ________________________________.

My examples: In my opinion, schools should hire more teachers because the classes are too big and students don't get enough attention. I think that schools need to hire more teachers because the classes are too big and students don't get enough attention.

The assignment I found is from an 11th grade Mexican student who frequently skips classes, has been in trouble for drugs, has been suspended, and underachieves like you wouldn't believe. He is incredibly smart and personable. For me, he's a perfect example of how student behaviors are actually symptoms of a deeply flawed school system. The vast majority of the time, he's labeled as a trouble student, given work that is beyond his academic English knowledge with little support, sits through course after course of irrelevant curriculum that doesn't represent his culture, and either punished for responding, in my opinion, pretty appropriately to a racist, classist system, or else asked to jump through hoops for meaningless rewards that completely degrade the concept of education (i.e. Positive Behavior Support).

Anyway, let me stop my rant and give you the answers this student wrote.

Should undocumented students be allowed to attend public schools? In my opinion, undocumented students should be allowed to attend school because they want to learn and have a better future.

If you were in charge, what would you change at this school? I think that if I was in charge, I would have to change the classes schedule because this one we have doesn't work for me.

What could public schools do to honor ALL their students' cultures? I think that public schools should at least put other flags along the side with the USA flag.

My Lai and Afghanistan

Our current ELD target is "Retelling Past Events." I had recently been reading James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

I decided it would definitely be interesting to get students not just to retell past events, but also to look at the ways that past events get retold differently. I chose the Vietnam War because there is a stark difference between the way our school's history textbooks discuss the war compared to the way it's discussed in A Young People's History of the United States, adapted for younger folks from Howard Zinn's book.

This was also a great chance to read through difficult texts together. Some students are especially quick to rely on translators instead of looking for context or word clues that could help with comprehension. Reading as a group means I can point out everything that the students DO know about English.

One thing we focused on was the massacre in My Lai. This was a situation where American soldiers killed unarmed South Vietnamese civilians. The textbook tells students that 250 people were killed, a single American lieutenant was responsible, he was incarcerated for his crime, and shows no pictures. The People's History tells us the murder count was 450-500, that Lt. Calley was sentenced to life in prison but served only three years house arrest, and that this incident was just one distillation of the U.S. government's larger anti-Vietnamese, colonialist narrative.

When I drove away from school, NPR was covering the recent killing of 16 Afghan civilians by a U.S. soldier. The language surrounding this was so shockingly similar to what we had read about My Lai. The military and media were quick to point out that this soldier had suffered a brain injury on a previous tour of duty. Just like the textbook's minimization of the events at My Lai as the tragic actions of a troubled individual, as opposed to the fruition of ongoing American policies.

When we were reading a bit more about Lt. Calley on Wikipedia in class (don't worry, we question the validity of Wikipedia's facts, too), we came across a powerful quote from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, released in regards to the scapegoating nature of Lt. Calley's conviction:

We intend to tell who it was that gave us those orders; that created that policy; that set that standard of war bordering on full and final genocide. We intend to demonstrate that My Lai was no unusual occurrence, other than, perhaps, the number of victims killed all in one place, all at one time, all by one platoon of us. We intend to show that the policies of Americal Division which inevitably resulted in My Lai were the policies of other Army and Marine Divisions as well. We intend to show that war crimes in Vietnam did not start in March 1968, or in the village of Son My or with one Lieutenant William Calley. We intend to indict those really responsible for My Lai, for Vietnam, for attempted genocide.

I pulled up BBC coverage of the Afghanistan killings for students to read, which includes this:

"This is not the first time something like this has happened," a young man called Salih Mohammad said to me in anger. For many villagers, the actions of the American soldier were part of a larger narrative of night raids and battles between Nato-led troops and the Taliban in which civilians end up being collateral damage.

It even uses the word "narrative," which we had been using the previous day to compare and contrast the different retellings of My Lai. A sad validation of the real-world applicability of critical pedagogy...

Using Lenses for Literary Criticism

One of my favorite teaching books is Deborah Appleman's Critical Encounters in High School English. Her book lays out how to get high school students started on literary criticism by using different "lenses" to focus on gender, race, or class.

I won't get into the nuts and bolts about how easy it is to get students to use lenses because it's all in the book. Suffice it to say, it is very easy to get kids to start doing literary analyses from perspectives based in different structures of social power, either on texts or real-world situations. They pretty much know it all, they just need to be given the language to describe what they see and feel.

I'd used lenses very successfully when student teaching a Language Arts class at a high school of relative privilege with mostly white, middle-class students. When I got thrown a sheltered (designed for ELLs) Language Arts class at my poorer school, I was excited to get back to the lenses.

This is the reference handout that students get for using lenses, including Reader Response.

This is an example of the handouts they get to use lenses to respond to/analyze the book we're reading, in this case, Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street.

The only lens that I used while student teaching that I haven't introduced in my current class is a Post-Colonial lens we worked with while reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Finally, here are some of the comments students have made using lenses...
“Money always matters with people—with money you can do anything you want. With this story they need money to take care of their children.” - Nam
“Mothers are important because they take of the babies. Money is important because the babies have to eat.” - Tania
“The poor always have a dream. They want to have money to save their life from being poor.” - Nam
“Poor people have more rules than rich people. Rich people can't do whatever they want.” - Karen
“A house with so many mice—poor families always face a lot of struggles and challenges every day.” - Nhung
“If you have money, you can support your family...Women who are rich can study anything they want, but poor people have to take care of their families.” - Erika
“She wants to get a better life than her mom. She doesn't care how hard it is.” - Anh Tuan
“...because women have to be submissive.” - Tania
“The girl wants to change her life, fight with “gender.” She wants a good job.” - Thinh

An Empty Grading Folder

Too bad the the only way teachers can get paid for all of our work is by proctoring an SAT at the same time.....

Letter From the White House

Obviously a form letter, but the students were pumped and so was I when I got White House mail in my staff room mailbox!

Compare and Contrast: Gender

Since we were talking about gender in Language Arts, I decided it might be a good time to ease my ELD students into some gender exploration as well. Our current target is Compare and Contrast. Here's how the class went...

Language Objective: I will say and write sentences that compare and contrast toy ads using important C&C vocabulary
Learning Objective: I will consider (think about) the ways companies use gender to sell toys





(1) Read the objectives for the day. Explain "ads" and "advertisements."
(2) Break students into groups of 3, with mixed languages as much as possible.
(3) Explain that we'll be writing sentences that compare and contrast toy ads that show boys and toy ads that show girls.
(4) Gender recap: Since all the students don't have Language Arts with me, I wrote up "sex" and "gender" and went over the differences between those.
(5) Give each group a couple pages of toy ads (Fred Meyer, Target, Toys R Us). These are easy to find, they are always among those sheets and sheets of ads in newspapers.
(6) Tell students we need to come up with a list of words that we will probably use when we're writing about these ads. Get them started with "feminine," "masculine," , "maternal," "girly..." then each group has to pick two words and add them to the list. Our lists ended up including things like dolls, cars, cooking, weapons, guns, violent, cute, pretty, tough, and creative.
(7) Put up a sentence frame. Each group has one sheet of paper and needs to complete the sentence frame together with one person writing.
(8) Call on groups for 3-4 examples for each sentence frame, then move to the next one.
(9) In the end, I asked if anyone wanted to put their ad on the doc cam and share anything they saw, and a couple groups did have some more things to say.

When I redo this, I will try to get more speaking practice in before the groups write, or make them do some "Give One, Get One," type things where they move around the room and actually have to speak.

Here are some sentences groups came up with using the sentence frames, I won't correct anything:

These blue toys encurage boys to masculine, whereas those pink toys encurage grils to feminine.

The toys that are shown with boys are weapons and cars whereas the toys shown with girls tend to be about beautty or babbies.

The toys that are shown with the boys are powerful and masculine, whereaes the toys shown with girls tend to be feminine and cute.

These weapon toys encourage boys to be violent, whereas those fantasy toys encourage girls to imagine.

The advertisements for girls toys have to do with how to pet a dogs; however, the advertisement for boys toys are about heroes and cars.

The advertisements for girls toys are home aplaneses [appliances]; however, the advertisements for boys toys are game, car, and killing zombies. P.S. Thes toys are very sexist.

It was a pretty fun day. For tomorrow, I've typed up some of the sentences with common mistakes for us to practice correcting.

The hard thing about having a target that guides your curriculum is that you have so many amazing topics that you could be using. Other great Compare and Contrast units could be built around guiding questions about racism, social services/taxes in different countries, sustainability, indigenous issues and colonization...the list could go on and on. The hardest part is focusing your topic enough that students get repeated practice with the same group of academic vocabulary words.