Teachers Unite Newsletter, September 2006
STMs: Sunday Teacher Motivators
Dear Readers,
Fight teacher burnout with Teachers Unite! STMs (Sunday Teacher Motivators a.k.a. Shit, Tomorrow’s Monday!) are drop-in sessions for teachers to plan lessons, grade papers, write progress reports and research curriculum ideas in an educator-friendly atmosphere on the most dreaded afternoon of the week. Think of it as a space for teachers who care about social change to get work done. Yes, this meeting space has a wireless internet connection and a photocopy machine (for small copy jobs). STMs start at 12:00 p.m. and close at 4:00 p.m. at The Institute for Labor and the Community--home of The Girls Project--535 East 12th Street between Avenues A and B. Please see the calendar at the bottom of this letter for a schedule of STMs throughout the school year. If you’re interested in dropping by an STM please RSVP during the week at sally@teachersunite.net and check this website for any scheduling changes. At STMs you will find like-minded teachers, curricular resources and bagels to inspire and support your planning. Half of New York City’s public school teachers quit in their first five years due to stress, isolation and exhaustion. Most of these “burnouts” are those whose motivation to teach comes from an inspiration to serve communities failed by social inequities.
Teachers Unite is dedicated to supporting educators working for social justice. We live and work in a climate where the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education responded to conservative criticism by dropping language relating to social justice from its accrediting standards for teacher-preparation programs. These standards had stated that teacher candidates’ "dispositions" should be guided by beliefs and attitudes such as caring, honesty and social justice. One would hope that educators are driven to teach because they are committed to impacting society positively, and yet many find this concept inappropriately political. Often, stress is compounded for teachers dedicated to educational justice because of the time and effort needed to prepare a rich lesson that invites active student inquiry (rather than follow a prescribed curriculum), develop rubrics that evaluate student work with more depth than a conventional letter grade, or write extensive narratives on each student’s development instead of tabulating a final grade for a traditional report card. These professionals often struggle to carve out time from their well-deserved weekend and attend to schoolwork. The Sparkplug Foundation recognized the need to support these educators and awarded Teachers Unite with its first grant to support the creation of STMs!
STMs will be held most Sundays during the school year. Click on the attachment below to see the STM calendar.
Best wishes for the 2006-2007 school year!
In solidarity,
Sally Lee
Founder
Teachers Unite
Test Prep Against the War (or Why the President Will Never Have a Press Conference in Bushwick)
By Jessica Klonsky
“Are you trying to colonize Iraq?” ”You said, ‘sometimes peace must be defended.’ When shouldn't peace be defended?” ”If your theory is wrong about Saddam Hussein and there are no weapons of mass destruction, what will your actions be then?” ”How many wmd's does the United States have?” ”Didn't we sell anthrax to Iraq?” ”If we ignored Hussein's use of chemical weapons in the past, why do we care now when he isn't using them?” ...These are some of the questions my students asked me as I pretended to be the President during our “press conference” after reading aloud the President Bush’s State of the Union address from 2003, a few months before the Iraq War began.
I teach 11th grade English in Brooklyn, New York. Every year I am faced with preparing my students to take the English Language Arts Regents Exam which they must pass in order to graduate. Regardless of what I think about the quality of the exams and the increased push for more standardized testing, I know that while I fight and argue against the overuse and unfair use of standardized tests, I still have to prepare my students as best as I can to pass that exam. At the same time, I want to sabotage the dry and stultifying effect test prep has on the classroom and find ways to make what I’m teaching relevant to students’ lives. Because the first half of the Regents Exam is based on non-fiction writing, I decided to create a non-fiction unit in my Regents Prep course that focused around the War in Iraq, using documents, articles, speeches and video to have students compare the justifications for and the criticisms of the War in Iraq, and that also enabled them to practice the skills they needed in note-taking, summarizing, annotating and responding to non-fiction writing.
The unit started with a variation on the K-W-L chart, where students wrote down everything they knew about the war and then shared that information and then as a whole class we made a list of questions we had about the war. A debate began over what really was the reason for the war: Students came up with a number of possibilities ranging from stopping terrorism and bringing democracy to Iraq to U.S. political control over the region and its oil. I posed the question: How do we know what is true about the war?
Many students expressed their frustration over this question: “You can’t believe anything the television tells you.” “The president says this and somebody else says that, it’s impossible to know who to believe?” “The government always lies.”
Following that discussion, we watched the first twenty minutes of Control Room a documentary about Al-Jazeera and discussed the viewpoints on the war expressed in the film. For homework, students were to find an American newspaper story about the war and summarize it using the S-W-B-S strategy—a summarizing strategy we had used in the past. In the following class, we discussed how the viewpoints differed. Students found that understandably Al-Jazeera was much more concerned with Iraqi lives, interests and the Arab world and that U.S. newspapers were more concerned with lives of soldiers and debates within the U.S. government about what to do in Iraq.
Building off our understanding of the viewpoints of various news sources, I explained to students that in order to know who is telling the “truth” or what information is useful to you, it is important to have some background information. I adapted an exercise from Whose Wars? Teaching About the Iraq War and the War on Terrorism by Rethinking Schools ( I relied heavily on this resource during this unit and highly recommend it) on the history of Iraq/ U.S. Relations. I selected six situations of interactions between Iraq and the U.S. in the past and students had to select the response they thought the U.S. government would take from a list of choices: 1) use military force, 2) use economic sanctions, 3) officially criticize actions, 4) support with military aid, 5) support with economic and humanitarian aid, and 6) other. For each situation, students were given a brief paragraph explaining the situation. Students had to annotate each paragraph –underlining key ideas and writing their thoughts and questions in the margins. The next day, students were given a one-page document with the actual U.S. responses to the situations which we went over as a whole class with students continuing to annotate. Afterwards, students wrote in-class personal responses to what they had learned choosing from a list of questions I provided them.
Next students watched the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. While they watched they kept notes on what they heard and saw on an organizer I provided for them—in particular I had students keep notes on lines that either Michael Moore or the people he interviewed said. Afterward, I put some of the lines they selected (along with some of my own) on pieces of chart paper for a “silent discussion” (another exercise from Whose Wars?). Students selected three of the quotes and wrote their own responses to them. Then students read each others responses without speaking. Then they chose three of their peers responses to respond to. After they had done that, we opened it up to a whole class discussion of the movie and its explanation for the war. Depending on the class, these discussions spanned a number of topics from students' concerns about military recruitment, to whether things would be different if we had a black president.
The following day, I told students we would be hearing George Bush’s justification for the war from his 2003 State of the Union Address. In another exercise from Whose Wars?, I pretended I was the president and my students were the media. They listened to me read the speech, while they had a copy in front of them, and made notes in preparation for a press conference where they could ask me questions about the speech and any other information they had about the war. After the press conference, students wrote in-class response papers about their thoughts and opinions on the war.
Lastly, in groups of three or four, students selected one specific topic about the war in Iraq from a list: Islam, U.S. media coverage, cultural/ethnic tensions in Iraq, international law and war, the insurgent groups, the role of oil, the domestic cost of the war, military recruitment and the role of economic sanctions. Each group received an article and a map, chart or graph about their topic. They each had to annotate their article and make sure they came to a common understanding of it as a group. Then they were each given a Regents exam-style essay assignment based on their article.
Overall, I felt this unit was successful in engaging my students with something they were hungry to understand. While the students in my classes were overwhelmingly opposed to the war and critical of the President and his foreign policies, they were still eager to be sharper in their arguments and have more information at their fingertips to defend what they thought. At the same time, they were able to practice the same skills they would have had to practice in normal test preparation lessons. I hope that sharing this unit will encourage other teachers to share their ways of dealing with the dreariness of test prep in the classroom while still keeping their teaching vibrant and their curriculum relevant.
Resources:
Video
Control Room
Director: Jehane Noujaim Studio: Lions Gate 2003
Fahrenheit 9/11
Director: Michael Moore Studio: Sony Pictures 2003
Lesson Plan Ideas and Reading/Writing Strategies
Whose Wars? Teaching about the Iraq War and the War on Terrorism
2005 Rethinking Schools, Ltd.
K-W-L chart, S-W-B-S Summarizing Strategy and annotation from
When Kids Can’t Read What Teachers Can Do
Kylene Biers, Heinemann 2003
Film Notes Sheet from
Teaching Viewing
ECS Learning Systems 2004
www.Educyberstor.com
Web Resources for reports/graphs, maps and charts on Iraq
http://nationalpriorities.org
http://www.rferl.org
http://www.globalpolicy.org
http://www.nationalgeographic.com
http://www.csmonitor.com
ELA Regents Exams
http://www.nysedregents.org/testing/engre/regenteng.html
NYCoRE Presents: CAMOUFLAGED
By Seth Rader
New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) is pleased to announce a new resource guide designed by teachers. Camouflaged: Investigating How the U.S. Military Affects You and Your Community challenges educators and students to embark on a critical inquiry into the role of the US military. Teachers working with NYCoRE expanded the 2003 curriculum Military Myths: Combating Military Recruitment in the Classroom that was originally created to accompany the Military Myths video from Paper Tiger Television and ROOTS (of the War Resisters League). The resource guide, created in 2006, provides lessons designed to be incorporated into existing curriculum and provide a balance to the information young people receive from the media and direct contact with military recruiters. Language arts, social studies and mathematics teachers as well as guidance counselors, advisors and other service providers will be able to use this resource guide.
NYCoRE will begin the school year resisting No Child Left Behind's policy that forces schools to hand over students' personal information to military recruiters. We oppose the increased efforts of military recruitment in New York City public schools. These efforts unfairly target the recruitment of low-income communities and make false promises about educational and career opportunities. We feel that schools should not be recruiting grounds, but should focus on preparing our youth for a career that will not involve them risking their own lives or taking the lives of others.
We would like to challenge teachers and support their efforts to organize "Opt -Out" campaigns in their schools, collecting as many opt-out forms as possible which prevent students' information from being released to military recruiters. Camouflaged, the resource guide, and Military Myths video can help educators initiate conversations about military recruitment in their classes and schools. We also ask educators to join NYCoRE in going beyond the school level to pressure the Department of Education to push back the deadline for collecting forms beyond October, and ultimately deny recruiters access to schools by adopting an "Opt-In" policy where only students who request it would have their information released to recruiters. We feel that school administrators should enforce existing regulations on access granted to military recruiters and focus efforts on providing students with viable educational and economic alternatives without risking their lives or serving in unjust military actions abroad. For more information visit the NYCoRe website at www.nycore.org or email info@nycore.org.
Save JREC
by Cathy Tomaszewki Burce
JREC Leadership Team
Teachers at the Julia Richman Education Complex (JREC) have become accustomed to a daily, familiar sight in our classrooms and hallways: a stream of visiting educators coming to see firsthand what has been called “the crown jewel of urban secondary education” and the “best example in the United States of a multiplex.”
Imagine the shock, then, that JREC teachers like myself felt when we learned that Hunter College and the Department of Education have secretly developed plans to demolish our complex, relocate our schools to a campus on 25th Street, and build Hunter a high-rise facility on our current site. Our schools are now in grave danger.
Visitors to JREC marvel at the sense of comfort and familiarity the students feel in our six schools: Ella Baker Elementary School, Vanguard, Manhattan International, Urban Academy, and Talent Unlimited high schools, and P226, a junior high school for students with autism. Educators take away with them the strong sense of collaboration and professionalism that exists between JREC teachers and applaud the outstanding academic achievements of our students. They are amazed at the architectural soundness and beauty of JREC’s infrastructure: our lobby, auditorium, specialized classrooms, and renovated library and gallery. They leave knowing that enormous time and dedication have gone into creating a safe haven and second home to our nearly two thousand students.
Yet now, without any consultation with JREC staff, plans have been developed that will significantly upset the ecosystem we have carefully crafted – plans by some who have never even set foot in our building.
Having had the privilege of teaching in JREC, questions have angrily flown through my mind. Why would the Department of Education and Hunter College ever consider disrupting JREC’s nationally recognized, thriving academic and professional community? Why, at a time when school space is so scarce in our city, would the Department of Education jeopardize one of its already existing crown jewels? Why, in a city that claims to “put children first,” are the needs of JREC students considered less important than Hunter’s desire for convenience?
Nearly twelve years ago, JREC teachers worked together to reclaim and redesign what had been a failing and troubled large high school. Currently JREC’s schools consist largely of students who have previously been seriously underserved by the system. Were these schools comprised of mostly white and upper middle class families, we have little doubt that the city would be celebrating their success and using the building as a model for other schools across the city. Instead, Hunter’s proposed destruction reveals a gross disregard for our city’s low-income and families of color.
Please stand together with JREC teachers in opposing Hunter’s plans. Visit the JREC website and click on “Save JREC”. Attend our Open House on October 4th from 6pm – 8pm (317 East 67th Street). Contact Hunter President Jennifer Raab (president@hunter.cuny.edu) and NYC Chancellor Joel Klein (jklein@nycboe.net). Let them know that we, as teachers, we will not sit by quietly in the face of this discriminatory and unethical proposal.
