I had some extra time with my sixth grade history class today, so we talked about the State of the Union address. I had some definite favorite and least favorite parts (though I was watching by myself, I said both “blech” and “thank you!” out loud over the course of the speech), but I wasn’t sure what to think of Obama’s educational vision of forcing kids to stay in school until they graduate or turn eighteen.  So I asked my students how they thought we should be addressing the high school dropout problem.

These were some of my favorite thoughts to come out of the team proposal-writing process (remember that these are 11/12-year-old kids):

I agree with Obama that dropping out should be illegal because it affects everyone if they have a hard time finding jobs and supporting themselves and it might lead to crime. Usually I believe in letting people do whatever they want if it doesn’t hurt anyone, but this could actually affect other people.

(Our resident libertarian spent a long time seriously thinking about this one, and may be on the way to changing his world view.)

Kids are committing suicide because they hate high school so much. Why would we force them to stay if it’s so stressful for them? There should be a way for them to continue their learning outside of school, online or something.

(For some reason, his groupmates thought this was ridiculous. I’m pretty sure they weren’t listening.)

Sometimes people drop out because their families need the money. There should be a special high school for adults who need to go back and finish when they’re thirty.

(I love how ancient thirty is to them.)

They should only be allowed to drop out of high school if they have a really good reason and good grades. They would have to apply with their guidance counselor. If their grades are really bad, they should be given a tutor instead of dropping out.

(This group said doing poorly in school does not count as a good reason to leave - if you have bad grades, they thought, you need school all the more)

Teenagers don’t know how to make good decisions. They shouldn’t be allowed to quit school.

(They know what they’re becoming.)

People who want to drop out should have to take a class about what could happen to them if they don’t finish school. Or at least listen to a talk about it.

(Can’t wait for these kids to encounter the joys of motivational speakers at high school assemblies)

Wow, no one in our group has ever gone to a public school. We are a bunch of spoiled brats!

(No comment.)

(Okay, actually, I told them that private school doesn’t (necessarily) make them spoiled brats, but I was impressed they were challenging their worldview and pushing towards empathy.)

Transformation and Transcendence: The Power of Female Friendship at The Rumpus

I love female friendships and also I loved this essay. Read it! It features a group of women called The Wrinklies… not sure what more you could want.

morecoffee:

via a softer world

thenewinquiry:

“I’m sure that you have read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving entitled Rip Van Winkle. The thing that we usually remember about this story is that Rip Van Winkle slept 20 years. But there is another point in that story that is almost always completely overlooked: it was a sign on the inn in the little town on the Hudson from which Rip went up into the mountain for his long sleep. When he went up, the sign had a picture of King George III of England. When he came down, years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. When Rip looked up at the picture of George Washington, he was completely lost; he knew not who he was. This reveals to us that the most striking fact about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not that he slept 20 years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up on the mountain, a great revolution was taking place in the world - indeed, a revolution which would, at points, change the course of history. And Rip Van Winkle knew nothing about it; he was asleep.

There are all too many people who, in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in our world today. It is a social revolution, sweeping away the old order of colonialism. And in our own nation it is sweeping away the old order of slavery and racial segregation. The wind of change is blowing, and we see in our day and our age a significant development. Victor Hugo said on one occasion that there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. In a real sense, the idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and human dignity. Wherever men are assembled today, the cry is always the same, ‘We want to be free.’ And so we see in our own world a revolution of rising expectations. The great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake through this social revolution.”

Oberlin College Commencement Address, 1965

Leah is blogging about being a first-year middle school teacher!!!

decomposingclassroom:

1. Tell them to stand on their chair and “get high” so they can see the demo going on.

2. Over enunciate “quantitative” when we’re talking about quantitative and qualitative observations.

3. In bringing in trash to make conclusions and deductions, bring in an empty cardboard container from a women’s multivitamin that promises, in big letters, “Increased bone and breast health.”

This reminds me of the time I tried to get fourth graders’ attention - “If you can hear me, put your hands on your knees. If you can hear me, put your hands on your heart.” When I got to “If you can hear me, put your hands on your head,” I got a rousing chorus of yells about the po-po.

I learned to stick to, “If you can hear me, put your hands over your mouth.”

amaliadahlia:

stophatingyourbody:

BE BRAVE! JOIN THE BODY PEACE REVOLUTION!

omg love.

chriskelly:

“Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, Two”

By Jenny Slate & Dean Fleischer-Camp

 

It does not get much better than this.

Guess why I smile a lot.

When my friend Leah originally told me this story over the phone, the rendition was repeatedly interrupted with my cackling and shocked exclamations. Hope you enjoy as much as I did!

I taught myself how to juggle when I was ten, went to circus camp at 13, and ultimately served as president of my college’s juggling club: the Anti-Gravity Society. So, when the patriarchy tells me that girls can’t juggle, I decide to play a little joke on it.

I’m at a local evening gathering when somebody busts out the juggling equipment. Of course, this catches my attention. I mosey on over and started squeezing various balls, testing what sort of different weights and sizes are around. Apparently, one male bystander interprets this as me yearning to juggle but currently merely able to — at first I wrote “fondle the balls” here. Then I changed it to “play around with the equipment.” Still not sure what to write, but you get the drift.

“The best way to learn is to start with just one ball,” he says kindly. “Here, let me show you.”

Fortunately, this kind of thing has happened before. And I love it.

“Thank you,” I say sweetly. “Like this?” Playing dumb, I toss the ball back and forth, sometimes really high, sometimes dramatically off to the side, clenching and unclenching my fingers robotically.

“Try to relax a little,” he says.

“Ah yes,” I say. “I think it’s just so easy to get stressed when it’s your first time learning how to juggle.”

He says of course, he understands. Do I want to try two?

Yes indeed! With two, I am sure to do a couple of the “cheater’s juggling” method, where you only actually throw from one hand and the other just passes it sneakily over.

My teacher cuts in to correct me gently and give a little reprimanding finger wag.

I make sure to throw a couple of really awful tosses and I see him smiling a bit. “It just takes time,” he says graciously. “I‘ve seen worse.”

“I think I’m ready for three now!” I exclaim. I know he is thinking that I couldn’t be further away from ready, but I sort of snatch the third ball out of his hand. I fling them all into the air and watch them come plopping down. “Hmm,” I say, sort of puzzled. I do this a few more times. Then, I start juggling for real, throwing in a couple of tricks tricks—tennis, yo yo, reverse cascade—juggling faster and faster.

For a moment, my teacher stares, astonished. Then it sinks in. “Screw you,” he says.

“What?!” I exclaim. “You’re just a really great teacher!”

“You already knew how to juggle!” he cries.

“No, be proud,” I said. “Not anybody can teach a total klutz how to juggle. And especially not in such short time. You‘re good.” I stop with the balls and innocently pick up a club. “Which end do I hold this bat anyways?” I ask.

He walks away. Take that, patriarchy!

One charming aspect of my new neighborhood in Oakland is that people block the streets. If my neighbors can’t find an open spot by the sidewalk, they park where they are and throw on their hazard lights while they run in to take care of something. When I pull out of the driveway so that my roommate can get into the garage, other cars just have to pass against traffic. A couple weeks ago, drivers were stopped on both sides of the street chatting, apparently realizing only when they crossed each other that they needed to converse. I had to wait just a moment before they moved to let me pass. My favorite was my neighbor blocking me in so that he could move some stuff from a car into his truck. Setting his truck in the middle of the road, he put some cones out as if that made it legit. He told me it would only be a few minutes, so I waited; I wasn’t in a rush. Though it can be inconvenient, I love this about my neighborhood because it makes me feel like it’s ours - we all live here together and sometimes that means taking up space and sometimes that means going around.

I was out of town last week when the police rioted against the Oakland Occupiers, but my roommate said that even though we live over a mile away it felt like a war zone when she stepped outside, with the floating gas and the exploding noises and the helicopters that hung around for days. She asked me, why are we talking about shutting down schools when we can afford this much police action? If they were worried about sanitation, wouldn’t it have been cheaper to put out some porta-potties? Why are these people being treated like they’re worthless?

I was thinking about all this on Wednesday as I walked to the Port of Oakland in a group of thousands, joining in the chant of “Whose streets? Our streets! Whose town? Our town!” I felt a little bad for cars trapped at intersections, and sometimes marchers would pause to let the cars through and sometimes other marchers would yell LET’S GO and weave through the vehicles. One commuter turned into the middle of the march and we laughed, knowing he wasn’t getting anywhere. Usually cars control the streets but sometimes pedestrians can. I saw children and rabbis and drummers and teachers and unemployed people and artists and people with disabilities taking a special protest bus and some guy in a devil costume I disagreed with and a dude in a blue bodysuit and American flag shorts who used to be my roommate’s neighbor. I saw some police on motorcycles hanging back, seeming afraid to engage, not wanting to provoke more outrage. Usually police control the city but sometimes people can.

We found friends as soon as we got to the plaza, and as we approached the port there was one open space in the crush and a friend I really needed to catch up with was standing right in the middle of it. We talked about teaching history, and the temptation to teach current events instead. I had just told my 6^th graders that class hierarchy is a primary characteristic of civilization, to set them up to study Mesopotamia. We wondered how young is too young to teach power analysis. I wondered how many times in history police forces have tried to brutally knock down a movement, and then had to quietly stand back as the movement clogged the streets the next week, that’s how many people cared.

At the port, a woman in a union t-shirt found a drummer and broke into West African dance, shouting, “A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.” Around the corner, a crowd gathered around a live performance of Redemption Song. People climbed on top of trucks and shouted. There was a memorial to Oscar Grant and other victims of police brutality. Protesters walked around complimenting each other’s signs. A man yelled into a microphone: “The port is supposed to have a shift change in ten minutes! Is that going to happen? No!” We passed by a sign that reminded me, COMPASSION IS REVOLUTIONARY. I took it literally.

On our way out, we danced to some Lady Gaga blasting out of a bicycle stereo. The man voguing next to us yelled, “you go San Francisco” and we yelled, “we’re in Oakland! Oakland!” Personally, I wasn’t interested in shutting down the port for too long. The workers and the city both need the money. But I was happy to help shut it down for a little while, to show that we could, to give a reminder: There are a lot of people in this city, and these streets are our streets too.