1. When I was "told" my theme would be "Home Sweet Home" in my 5th unit of study in 1st grade I thought of this book. Though I am not asked to think of anything. We read it for years gone by in primary classroom instruction, and I ordered it again to read when I had a moment for this unit. That time came today as the children in Room 10 listened for our "key vocabulary" and were enchanted as children have been since the 1940's release of a story about a house becoming obsolete, aging, being replaced by future building while in her day representing the best of her times and quite possibly representing a kind of beauty that can only be understood and appreciated within her true and original context.

    This is a story of a beautiful Little House written by the genius of Virginia Lee Burton. She sits "way out in the country" built strong and sturdy, never to be sold for generations of a family to endure within her safe haven. She is happy, she is stable, but she “sees” the lights of the city and she is curious. At this point I feel it safe to interject as a young girl growing up in West Virginia far from city and growing up in the peace of country these words spoke to my heart. I wondered about the city too, wanted to know. I saw the changes in my world, saw future, recall first days seeing a tape recorder, recall the ideas of fast food and the movement of our life into the age of rocket and moon. A great story to explore metaphor with children. How are we like the Little House, how am I?

    In the story the Little House watched the seasons, learned the cycles of nature and the book does such a lovely job placing the child reader or listener into this rural setting. For me it is a perfect telling of the naive Garden of Eden before the Fall construct, gamboling, rural, naturalistic with the seasons each illustrated and reinforced with charming traditional illustration for the child. But as the story unfolds the lights of city grow closer with changes entering text and illustration. I grew up with many of these changes, but it tells of horses replaced by roads and machine....Time is passing in the story, an age of mechanized progress enters the pictures.

    Gasoline, speed, faster and faster are introduced as concepts that drive the forward progress around the Little House. She is now shown surrounded by track homes, darker clouds, and telephone poles. Crowding enters the page. Artistically it is busy, congested, more active visually, less peaceful. Now the Little House can't be sold, not because of the eternity of a family staying on her piece of land, but because a city has engulfed her and she has no worth relative to the expansion. She sits surrounded now pictorially by building. Written as it is, my classroom children found this "sad”, or asked repeatedly if she would "die". I kept saying let's wait a bit and see....but I knew their concern. It would seem headed for sad death. If I were to relate to the Little House metaphorically I feel myself as a teacher as these pages represent, surrounded by the mindless march of time. Looked at as valueless, seen as out of place in a world of "progress”. And the Little House misses her fields and flowers accepts this must be "the city" and wonders if she likes it or not.

    I must admit I did stop reading here to ask children if they thought this was the life the Little House was "supposed " to live. One child speaking carefully said, " It is the life that she must accept." Another commented, "I know the Little House wanted to see the city but now she can't go back." Such it is when we leave Eden, such it is when the march of progress strips our naivety. Such is taking on our adulthood. Now we are to reconcile truth, reflect, make meaning and find ways to face what we must. To decide based on our rational mind combined with an awareness of things we could never have fathomed and indeed may not understand fully once revealed. The Little House stands swallowed by city, speed, time, and unable to feel season or know her truths at all.

    Buildings are torn, replaced and destroyed around he….r as progress destroys what was replacing it with what is. Here my students shook with, "Oh no's" and statements like this one, "Oh she's going to die and never know her happiness." It is a point of despair, and interesting thing to place before children. Certainly this is the point in the story that I feel speaks with greatest power. And she decides that she cannot like this place that has grown around her. She has no way to relate to it. It is not a city able to even remotely understand what this Little House knew. Not even listening they are of two different worlds. And she admits sadness. She is filled with sorrow and becomes really broken down and lost.

    The ending of the story is about hope. A many generation removed child of this house buys her again, restores and moves her far from city, back to country where she takes her knowledge within her walls and in the calm of the beauty of nature silently resumes her peaceful balance. Once more able to be who she is. Understanding in some way where she has been. Understanding now no longing for that other place. She has conquered longing.

    To this tale my students sat in silence and in contemplation. I asked if they would like to draw this little house and all students, all, represented her in the country, in bucolic setting and at the bottom all wrote Home at Peace a phrase they asked me to spell. I'll post these when I find the digital camera. It’s a wonderful story fit for any 1st grade as relevant now as ever.

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  2. I WANTED TO THINK Tonight ABOUT A POST OR A COMMENT ON Borderland I read a good while ago that I have been trying to frame in my mind.

    It was triggered through a line of dialog and made by a very thoughtful and often I find quite eloquent blog poster, MarcoPolo and related to the DE-SKILLING of teachers.

    I had heard the term DE-SKILLING, read it in the past regarding teacher autonomy. Now I have to really consider what it means to me as I am working in an Under-Performing School, our scores dipping below growth targets due to our ELL(English Language Learners) Population scores, a school called Hathaway in CA where all programs are “scripted”. I’ve never had to just read a script before and it’s very hard to do. Much doesn’t fit the students, some is just plain poorly written and much reminds me of a very poor cookbook. These textbook created scripts are very generic and very flavorless. We might see a person of color on a page, but the content would never lead to a discussion of honest human issues. It’s definitely watered down pabulum. And this makes an experienced, highly effective teacher madder than hell most of the time. So that’s one of my issues, another is it seems so clearly about producing children to ……I think be “workers” or somehow some kind of following non self motivated individual, because the material is so drill and follow it, surely it will not produce thinking ….not as far as I can see. Definitely a reversal of what my first 24 years of teaching worked to do, I’ve been empowering children.

    I realize instruction is only “as good as” what they give you, when they won’t give you room to create. But the problems are more complex than this, of course, because I see younger teachers coming out of training programs in Universities who operate under their own form of coercion. In Universities this lies in-accreditation- and other systems regarding their own funding reinforcing training young teachers to be thoroughly entrenched in the following of the script. It’s impossible now really to have too much of a discussion of the value of these state tests, except to hear calls for a national one, such is the buy-in to this nonsense.

    Of course I suppose starting my career in art education and rapidly going to work in South Central LA at 93rd Street School with no books, nothing…. and not much more in the Salinas Valley in Greenfield, I learned how to teach by invention, by using the state and district goals(standards) as road maps.

    And of course I had my past education to rely on…. I read too, and I invented. I hadn’t thought about the current moves in NCLB as de-skilling, but of course, it is exactly this, while hauling huge sums of money to those showing up to lead the “trainings” for teachers. These trainings take the form of showing you how to read the teacher manual and read scripts to the tune of mega bucks. It’s really a very sad time..

    And of course this led me to ask my husband today for his take , he is a CA School Superintendent and below I had him write out some of his thoughts. I follow this with an article I found which I sent to him to provoke some thoughts. It was pretty enlightening for me. Tomorrow I will try and post what De-skilling is saying to me about TEACHER ROLES redefined in NCLB school programs, at least as I SEE IT.

    Sarah, here are my thoughts on the deskilling of teachers and the de-schooling of children and adults...


    any endeavor we embark on is based on a purpose.
    or more aptly put..., by Nel Noddings, our AIMS (purposes).

    Since the advent of the Sputnik era...... as you know your favorite guy Postman has long commented on,

    National economic AIMS, have dominated
    the discourse on public schooling and with the passage of time has had greater influence on the curriculum, instruction, and most recently the day to day logistics
    of schooling.

    Within this very limited aim..... having America be the most powerful economic nation,
    our schools have clung to the industrialization model that purported to prepare more folks for factory work
    helping the nation, helping the individual through trickle down methods......

    Meanwhile the economy changed to an information processing and analysis economy
    that required new and more complex skills and literacies and schools pretty much clung to the old factory model
    changing the books a bit and not much more..

    Throughout, it was the teacher that was required and needed to adapt to the new environment and the new types of kids....

    Lately, it has become apparent that if we stick to the strictly economic and national concern aim, it turns out that creativity, is likely our greatest economic engine
    and now teachers, as many have done for a long time, need to adapt to this new insight and help develop and expand the new creative class-
    our new economic engine.

    However, in the last 20 years, federal and state government have insinuated themselves to greater depths in the basics how’s and what’s
    of what’s being taught... and in this process, they have not only brought a more antiquated notion of learning to the forefront
    but they have also brought forces to bear that would like to privatize and corporatize the entire endeavor and make money the easy way...
    as you have said Sarah so often, by eating our children.

    Schools, like hospitals, roadways, and the airwaves.. are the last bastions of the American
    commons, the last spaces of democracy. These neo conservative forces suggest that everything that operates in the so called free market, but what I called privileged class' market,
    works more efficiently through a Darwinian sense of natural economic order.

    This of course is hogwash.. Our systems, monetary, educational and otherwise, work as we design them.

    In this new context, the deskilling of teachers to be technicians, deliverers of canned curriculum somehow emerges
    as the rhetorical salvation of our national economic supremacy...not.........
    but also tends to oppressively quell one of the last large unions in the nation
    and set up a transition from public to private that will likely occur as easily as has happened
    with air traffic controllers or other groups.

    This done, some folks will make a whole lot of money without very much transitional resistance from the deskilled
    teachers and the deskilled kids and their parents.....

    However.....what is not counted on... is the obvious fact that this will cause a greater division of class and race in this country
    and make people mad..... sheep do awaken after the 20th beating to do some bleating of their own

    this same creative class that has emerged as our new money and power engine.. is growing and reaping benefits in plain view of the other 70% of Americans
    that want the same but have less and less access....

    The 70% know that things ain't trickling down

    they know that learning to read and type on a pc isn’t enough

    they want their kids to be able to analyze, to think, to create and to muck around in the cultural elements and economic relationships
    that the creative class are provided......

    all this said.......it is clear that the deskilling doesn't serve the limited economic aim......

    moreover... the aim itself is problematic....

    educational aims.....need to be founded in both the societal and the individual need
    they must be founded in the family and the community....
    these are the strengths of the American democracy... our democracy is our strength
    although it is under attack.

    our aims should be founded in principles and universal truths

    once done

    and if pursued and accomplished well in schools for the majority of citizens

    our economic power (albeit in a new multi national -power context)

    and global leadership will likely continue into the future.......

    however, if the classroom fails to develop and nurture skills of democracy, creativity, community, and universal human ideals,

    than we will, as we are now trending towards, smother the flames of what America really is... it is the human species struggling to
    evolve towards principles of equality, equity, justice, fairness, kindness, love, and peace

    what has emerged in this schooling and other political processes

    as it has many times before in our species' civilizations and history

    is the fact that individuals and interest groups, who do not share this sense of the potential goodness of man, but rather who see man as a beast

    can take the opportunity in the Machiavellian short run, to dominate and influence goings on ,sway public opinion, obfuscate, confuse, and make a lot of money
    garner a lot of power, etc.....

    This entire matter and dialogue is circular and complex in that

    people need to be educated enough to discuss aims, philosophy etc...

    in order to take action democratically...

    however... when things become too obviously unbalanced and unjust
    regardless of their ability to reflect, they act viscerally and express deep seated things
    which cause the rest of us to recontemplate the big issues like aims in front of us.....

    Most people have a gut sense that
    they want their kids to be happy in the short run
    and in the long run as adults..

    yet few people have a good touch on how to get this done in today's world
    or in any world..
    that’s why we have just tended to slough it off onto the folks we call teachers

    the young and old women of the past... the saints and martyrs and excellent students

    and later the children of middle class

    and now a few of just about every class.......

    who either see teaching as step up
    or a return to a place of safety from their past
    or a place to make a difference
    or a place to get a paycheck with a short day and a lot of vacation

    once in, though, unless they are completely blind or hopeless

    they realize that they are earning their check at the crossroads/ and battle fields
    of American politics, economics and the survival of democracy

    our system is based on Greek notions of education

    with some other stuff thrown in

    these notions too have their own polarities... differences between Aristotle and Plato etc....

    here in the u.s. we have Jefferson and Hamilton to sort out......... among others

    So I suggest that the deskilling is an obviously bad thing on every level.

    It is destructive

    and not what anyone would want for their own children..
    We all want our kids guided by the best thinkers the most kind and the best prepared......

    that’s why all of the aims stuff is best done at the local level... in community......

    where the people in charge should be accessible and truly accountable for the day to day goings on in school as possible.

    Why is my kid not doing art?
    Why is my kid not reading real books?
    Why is my kid not doing science?
    Why is everything about the test?
    Why can't my kid pass the test?
    Why doesn't my kid like school?
    Why is my kid not safe at school?
    How can I help?

    these are the questions of the American citizenry/parents.....

    JP

    NCLB: Taylor-Made for De-Skilling Teachers
    Marilyn Wilson
    Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures and Department of English
    Michigan State University

    When Reid Lyon, an advisor to President Bush, said in November 2002, "You, know, if there was any piece of legislation that I could pass, it would be to blow up colleges of education" (McCracken, 104), many educators blanched, some were appalled, and others downright angry�but none were surprised by the sentiment. Colleges of education as a whole have been under attack for years�for not preparing teachers adequately, for less than stringent requirements for teacher certification, for methods that have swung with the shifts of paradigms in educational philosophies. The surprise was in the violence of the metaphor Lyon used so soon after 9/11.

    And then, in early 2004, when Rod Paige, Education Secretary, referred to the National Education Association as a "terrorist organization" (King), the bashing went beyond generalizations about colleges of education to teachers themselves.

    Nothing new here either, of course: teachers have been under fire for decades. They are easy targets because accountability in educating children is more complicated than in measuring the quality of nuts and bolts, the results aren't often predictable, and the variables outside of their control enormous. And the public assumes expertise in teaching because they are products of the school system.

    One can dismiss these comments as off-the-cuff remarks and accept the lame apologies that followed, or one can look at them as symptomatic of the general agenda of the Bush administration. Reg Weaver, NEA President, sees this as policy: "This is the kind of rhetoric we have come to expect from this administration whenever one challenges its world view" (King, 2). What is most troublesome is that teacher bashing now has official government sanction--from the public remarks made by the administration denigrating teachers on one hand and from the policies being enacted by the administration on the other.

    NCLB and Teacher-Bashing

    NCLB is at the heart of policies designed to accomplish precisely what Lyon and Paige are calling for. NCLB has been critiqued on a number of fronts: the problems inherent in a single assessment measure of student performance, issues of equity, insufficient funding, false expectations about alternatives�and the list goes on. These arguments address the nature of the law itself and its problematic application. But what is less apparent in these arguments is the potential effect it will have on teaching and learning. One of the most insidious consequences of NCLB is the erosion of teacher agency and control over instructional decisions.

    Ironically, numerous studies indicate a strong correlation between teacher preparation and certification and student achievement, suggesting that strong pedagogical preparation is often what makes the difference between a weak and a strong teacher (Darling-Hammond). And yet the Bush administration has developed policies designed to "de-skill" teachers and to strip them of control.

    The "de-skilling" of teachers has been happening for some time, but it's on an accelerated trajectory under the current administration. Even as teachers and educators claim that children cannot be taught like robots and lessons cannot be mass-produced and delivered, educational philosophies that fit the model of efficiency, first proposed by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford for the mass production of the automobile, have strengthened their tenacious hold on the educational establishment. Standardization of assessment leads naturally to the standardization of teaching. Politicians and publishing companies are eager to promote measures that proclaim efficiency and expediency--and as a result ensure corporate profits. All this comes with a price for teachers and learners. As Nelson suggests:

    One of the problems associated with the standardization of the teaching profession, is that by its very nature, teaching cannot be standardized. Good teaching is a highly complex intellectual activity requiring keen insight into the world in which students live, understanding of the multiple ways of thinking about curriculum problems, having a strong grasp of developmentally responsive strategies, negotiating the myriad of perspectives associated with the relationship between content and context, all with a command of pedagogical content knowledge aimed at connecting students with the world of ideas in and across subject matter disciplines." (Nelson, 4-5)

    NCLB is Taylor-made for the push for efficiency and mass-production of instructional materials and assessments. And it's Taylor-made for the de-skilling of teachers. It mandates that school systems select reading programs reflecting NCLB's narrow definition of "scientifically-based research," empirical in nature and focused on the aspects of reading most amenable to quantitative assessment, while ignoring hundreds of valid studies that look at literacy and reading acquisition in more richly complex ways. The content of curriculum in early reading programs is reduced to narrowly defined skills that can be taught from a script and assessed "objectively." It pays lip service to comprehension and ignores the teaching of critical thinking skills. Teachers no longer need to plan their reading curriculum or consider the variability of their learners; the script must be followed. "Scripted curriculum" says Linda Rice, "has the effect of deskilling teachers who become simple deliverers of content and skill processes rather than those who intricately synthesize content, skills, and concepts to create sophisticated curriculum designed to meet the needs of their particular students." (1)

    Consider the comments reported by the Delaware Education Research and Development Center. Says one teacher, "Years ago we used to be able to pilot programs and curriculums and decide [what was best] for all students�now it is district mandated curriculum saying that we must teach on grade level, this specific curriculum, because we want everybody teaching the same thing" (Banicky and Noble, 17). Says another, "We are not being trusted to teach these children" (17).

    It's a feeling of being overwhelmed by forces out of your control and about which you are powerless to change, creating as the Delaware report says, "a culture of compliance" and a resignation that teachers are powerless to change things (18). One teacher says, "Well, this is what the state has mandated. This what you have, do it." And another reflects on the teaching profession at large, "Teachers will do anything you tell them to do. Isn't that sad?" (18). With the opinions and judgments of teachers across the nation systematically ignored, teachers no longer feel in control of their own instruction.

    Taking Back the Right to Teach

    Standardization of the curriculum can result in the standardization of the teaching profession, but does it have to? Must the goals of critical thinking and imaginative thinking always be jettisoned in favor of a curriculum designed to mass produce cogs in the system? Must we allow the efficiency experts, the cog-producers, the test-makers, the scriptwriters, and the federal watchdogs that monitor the Annual Yearly Progress of schools to wrest control away from teachers, or can teachers assume their rightful place as decision-makers?

    Accountability systems do not have to be impediments to good teaching. But inadequate accountability systems do need to be addressed and dealt with in sophisticated ways. Good teaching, we must be able to demonstrate, will produce students who hold up well under any accountability system.

    One suggestion, advocated by Rice, is that teachers tie the activities they want to use with their students to the state or district standards that will demonstrate the educational value of the activities: "As teachers, we often inherently 'know' that what we have our students do is 'valuable,' but we fail to clearly articulate this value . . .Our failure to clearly articulate their educational value . . . is often the very thing that causes us to appear as though we are working on hunches and feelings rather than deliberately established rationales" (4) We know that when students are engaged in their own learning, and when that learning is grounded in solid methodologies, the learning pays off in higher student achievement. Students who build knowledge and expertise in a subject rather than accumulate bits of information for passing tests are going to perform better regardless of the assessment measure used.

    McCracken promotes the use of classroom research as a way of reflecting on teaching and its impact on student learning. Particularly important in this era where informal classroom research tends to be dismissed, as McCracken suggests, is the need for teachers to understand they can provide their own evidence of student success--and failure, perhaps--as they begin their own "kid-watching" classroom research projects: what works (or doesn't) about particular activities, how writing changes as students revise drafts, how self-selection of reading materials influences student responses to their reading, for example. Local research projects that result in the demonstration of student success--student projects that reflect strong writing, writing projects that involve community issues, student-produced web pages reflecting strong literacy skills--can go a long way to convincing parents, administrators and the public that good teaching goes well beyond the narrowness of state-mandated assessment measures. It's a way of recruiting the public and building grass roots support for what English language arts teachers know to be high-quality teaching.

    Teacher educators can also make sure that their teacher education students are more aware of the power they rightfully have as teachers. That means bringing the issues of politics and education right into education classrooms. It means providing the kinds of arguments necessary to counteract negative publicity about teachers who question the NCLB initiative. It means working on committees, talking with colleagues, and questioning the rationale of the NCLB and other initiatives based on a faulty understanding of children and learning.

    In a sense we are, as Kampol argues, re-skilling teachers by helping them become "both aware of and critical of the multiple forms of de-skilling"--finding ways to subvert narrowly conceived methodologies, challenging reductive assumptions about teaching and learning, and taking back their right to teach their subject matter effectively.

    And finally, we need to fight fire with fire. If NCLB advocates keep insisting on the use of "research-based evidence" about what works in classrooms, teachers need to use existing quantitative research data to develop their own arguments (McCracken). All teachers should be aware of the massive review of research conducted by Linda Darling-Hammond as she looked at and critiqued a wide range of quantitative research studies focusing on the relationship between teacher quality and student achievement. Her conclusion is that quantitative studies indicate that "measures of teacher preparation and certification are by far the strongest correlates of student achievement in reading and mathematics, both before and after controlling for student poverty and language status" (2). Teacher preparation in research, teaching methodologies, and classroom practice is essential to good teaching. Excellent teacher preparation matters in the achievement of students.

    Teachers also need to publicize the research of Richard Ingersoll, reported by Crabtree that discusses two competing views of contemporary schools and the role that teachers play in them. The factory model on one hand centralizes decision-making with teachers playing a minor role; the professional model, on the other hand, considers teachers as professionals who need and deserve considerable autonomy to teach effectively. Ingersoll's nation-wide panel of 13-17 year-olds clearly underscores students' willingness to work hard and to learn from teachers who are passionate and creative. The prerequisite for passion and creativity in teaching is teacher agency.

    Good teachers will understand how the politics of education affects them as teachers and their students as learners. It should help them see that it is their moral responsibility to take stands against institutional practices that see them and their students as mere cogs in a system promoting simplicity over complexity, information over understanding, and numbers over individual human beings.

    I had hoped that Reid Lyon and Rod Paige would have been forced to consider the research like Darling-Hammond's and Richard Ingersoll's on the importance of strong teacher preparation and teacher agency, to consider its implications for the teaching profession and for educational policy makers, and to retract--not just apologize for--their silly, but damaging words. Unfortunately, just a few weeks ago, Paige made a comment at the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce's annual Mackinac Policy Conference that NCLB critics are "whiners" (Flesher).

    Name-calling, however, is often the last bastion of defense. I think our "whining" is paying off. As teachers, we're taking strong stands against the Taylor-mentality of education policies and practices. I believe we're taking back our right to teach.

    Works Cited

    Banicky, Lisa, and Audrey Noble. "Detours on the Road to Reform: When Standards Take a Back Seat to Testing." Delaware Education Research and Development Center, July 2001.

    Crabtree, Steve. "Teachers Who Care Get Most from Kids." Detroit News. June 4, 2004.

    Darling-Hammond, Linda. "Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: A Review of state Policy Evidence." Educational Policy Analysis Archives. 8:1: January 1, 2000. http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n1

    Flesher, John. "Education Secretary Says 'No Child Left Behind' Critics are 'Whiners.'" Associated Press, June 3, 2004.

    Ingersoll, Richard. Who Controls Teachers' Work?: Power and Accountability in America's Schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

    Kampol, Barry. "Critical Pedagogy for Beginning Teachers: the Movement from Despair to Hope."
    http://www.paulofreireinstitute.org/Documents/the_movement_of_hope_by_kanpol.html

    King, John. "Paige Calls NEA 'terrorist organization.'" February 23, 2004
    http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/02/23/paige.terrorist.nea/ .

    McCracken, Nancy. "Surviving Shock and Awe: NCLB vs. Colleges of Education." English Education, January 2004, 104-118.

    Nelson, Thomas, ed. "Editor's Introduction: In Response to Increasing State and National Control over the Teacher Education Profession." Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2003, 3-8.

    Rice, Linda. SLATE Newsletter, National Council of Teachers of English. http://www.ncte.org/about/issues/slate/115817.htm

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  3. Story Painter: The Life of Jacob Lawrence (Hardcover)
    by John Duggleby

    This book was one I was able to get in years prior to NCLB take-over motifs,
    as an elementary teacher in CA in an Under-Performing school now it seems ages ago but it was just 5 years. I selected it when my Principal, Helen Cosgrove who came in using rich literature and connecting school to key literature, gave us the money and sent us shopping for books for our room. So I bought this and Lawrence's Harriet Tubman story and his Aesop's Fables which I'm putting below(the most beautiful version ever rendered of Aesop) along with Ringgold and a slew of Langston Hughes. And this was just a wonderful biography to get. I really recommend it to third grade and above.

    It tells of the life of an inspirational artist. Everytime I share this with children or use it, as I will this spring in After School arts programming, I recall just how much of a genius he was. Childen respond and love the art of his times, love Stuart Davis work and the life that one sees within the pictorial space -the images scream American life through the 20th century and elevate us into a compositional place of such beauty and truth, it doesn't get much better than this. Fortunately for children learning a new artist this book is filled with good images and a very readable yet rich life story. No pulling punches but no twisty-turny story. It reads well orally. I had the good fortune of seeing Lawrence work on exhibit years ago, seeing things contained here. I still regret being so poor in those years I did not buy the catalog...it was that or dinner and I made a poor choice.

    As I work with children I have to share something. Friday five of my powerhouses were in my room early, girls I taught now in the 4th grade, some of the most powerful young ladies ever, they come into my 1st grade program every AM to help. One was bemoaning no words in her class this year on Dr. King. "Not a peep", prior to the holiday she says, while looking through this very book from my African American Wonderful You Experience Box, and then she added, "And you know what, I'm African American and I resent not learning about my people." And then she turned to me and said, "When I had you last year I was a somebody."

    All I can say is this book belongs in the hands of chldren. They are somebody and they need to learn about their artistic traditions...and they certainly need to find that art is made by those with something to say to them. This book is truly a great one.

    Harriet and the Promised Land (Paperback)
    by Jacob Lawrence

    My daughter Sylvia once noted to me this was her favorite book when we refound it unboxing my things from storage. I worked for two years up in the San Diego Mountains on a reservation servicing school three years ago and we were coming back to Hueneme with books to re-orient and organize. She did a report on Tubman and indeed that day I listened to her tell the story of this remarkable figure. Hathaway several times had an assembly for the children with an actress portraying Tubman and I believe this was how my daughter connected to choose her for further study. Lawrence a premier artist shows in these pages why his composition, color, ability to convey the power of her story is best left to his genius. Wow. Every child should experience this work.

    Aesop's Fables (Hardcover)
    by Jacob Lawrence

    Not only the fables but the best black and white illustrations by Jacob Lawrence. Every spring I stage my puppets Aesop Theater and use this text to teach the fable an assign a group to re-write and make Fandango-esque puppets to act it out. It's fun and we talk of moral and lesson. Sufi tales are a good next step when your class connects.



    The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (Paperback)
    by Langston Hughes

    I think this collection is among those I consider a child's "right" , it is a beautiful collection to share with an awareness of the importance of celebrating Hughes and his voice for America.

    The First Book of Jazz (Dark Tower Series) (Paperback)
    by Langston Hughes, Cliff Roberts (Illustrator)

    When I introduce Jazz, and of course I do this throughout my year this is a book I return to. Hughes chronicaled Jazz, loved and supported it, so it's a place to take students.


    Now for ADULT READERS I'd like to recommend this book:
    I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (American Century Series) (Paperback)
    by Langston Hughes
    I hate to do it a disservice and I'm inadequate to the task, and yet the book is among my most favorite ever read. I'm surprised that it isn't known by many more , this volume for me one of the most amazing secrets ever kept. It is an autobiographical journey, a tale from Hughes life; it serves to create inner spaces, viseral visual ones, to consider Hughes and to look upon his perspectives. All I can conclude is something I find tonight as I type, it's daunting to write to the book and do it any real justice. It is worth purchasing for anyone, especially for someone who loves to read of the times of our lives in the 20th century..

    Hughes opens the book, which covers time from 1931 to 1938 as a piece to carry on from The Big Sea his first autobiographical work. As I read them out of order I cannot say I am sorry this was my first. It stays solidly in my head. He tells of traveling in a car on a reading tour in the South and the west. On opening the tale of wandering we are where he was reading his work in small often rural settings and revealing black community and his meager circumstances as he was essentially becoming the writer. He becomes involved in a film project and goes to the Soviet Union which is such an amazing thing to read....it is a project that doesn't work out and he stays and continues traveling. Just to know more about this time in history from his perspective in areas we could not know enough about is worth the book....and it is these observations and how he finally returns to the US, I found the most compelling of the narrative. I felt I was wandering, wandering free of some of the limitations of American political shaping, looking at the Soviets as they took on the start of building their country, listening to Hughes describe the adventure, what he sees. Hughes is not given to excessive internal dialog, he is almost remarkably absent of this-which of course is a vehicle he creates-he relates what he sees and it has a kind of universal journey construction...almost ...so perfectly of those times, so completely crafted that I lose my "self" in the pages...I am a train, or a days delicious seafood with boiled bananas and Spanish rice learning to rumba. I am ill equipped to summarize but Hughes is a genius, creating a kind of tableau that for me stands as visually there as the great human artists of these times, this he does so easily. And I feel this trip across Russia as an experience. I think what moves me is that Hughes recounts human interaction, the simplicity, the everyday as it might be felt by myself or was felt by himself. I've spent most all of my life living in teaching in ordinary everyday, poorer worlds by choice learning of the dignity and indignity, suffering, laughing, discovering others, in the valid and real lives of ordinary people. It makes me anecdotal and determined to honor lives. And I note in the book foreword him stating, "I've now cut out all the impersonal stuff down to a running narrative with me in the middle of every page...the kind of intense condensation that, of course, keeps an autobiography from being entirely true, in that nobody's life is pure essence without pulp, waste matter , and rind-which art, of course, throws in the trash can." Ah always genius.

    Because I had read a great deal of these times interested in Lillian Hellman and many other figures, his recounting his story with Arthur Koestler was so interesting. Again threaded through this personal anecdote was so much good information and his perspective. He talks of Haiti and I've given these pages many times to friends connected to this country, of Cuba, China and Japan ending in Carmel in an area I lived with close life there for 9 years, which was remarkable for me as I first encountered the book reading it sitting in a bookshop in Carmel and wandering the streets reading and thinking and enjoying thoughts of his times there. These were times of Communism, Marxism, the Scottsboro Boys, and only a bit becomes part of the book though I was discerning much because I did know of the times from my interests, reading and from reading more to understand his times.

    I have stated in writing I've done of my teaching life that Hughes lived writing of black America, of politics, of difficult constructs, from his background, then his education, from his broadening views, from traveling, meeting such a wide spectrum, he was writing of the lives of the poor, living the lives, but also a writer, thinker, a man apart. I sense his frustration as much as I can from my inadequacies in trying to speak to these issues of fairness, of poverty, of the travesty of greed, of human lives affected by prejudice and economic and political failure. I write anecdotally of teaching in South Central, in migrant areas trying to reach out and tell the stories of kids hoping those that read can draw conclusions and understand better their real realities. I sense Hughes left to his readers a responsibility to use his journey, his insights, to think about how to make America a fairer place. How to work to create a just world. And to understand how broad a world it is.

    I read in the forward about the books reception as "shallow". And I wonder....as I too wander. There is an elegant powerful truth that Hughes carries, a silent power in a poets voice spoken in the face of revealing things no one can hear or will hear. There is a basic return to the voyage as meaning itself, a telling of a life, a looking at life as a movement forward. I just cannot find that shallow. I find Hughes as ever one of the touchstones of my life.

    And Finally the best book ever written.....on LOVE, by a genius
    Strength to Love (Paperback)
    by Martin Luther, Jr. King

    In 1983 I entered teaching in West Virginia and recieved this book as a present from one of my teachers. In two years I moved to South Central to teach at 93rd Street School then into the Salinas valley and now in Oxnard. It has proved itself to be of great use to a teacher. I say this by way of explaining that as an elementary teacher, one working with a variety of settings, children, cultures, families, many kinds of educational issues I've come to believe that the book King wrote, this book, is a true helpmate to anyone trying to deal with inequity and injustice.

    Teaching is an act that requires a very deep understanding of who you are, your strengths, purpose, and this volume supports the evolution of your social conscious. For me the text allowed me to solidify who I am as a teacher and why I do what I do.

    One example might be the difficult job it is to teach in schools under assault for doing poorly, seemingly being deconstructed by politics without enough valid insight into ways to guide real improvement and coming up against ignorance in many forms-including the disparity in economic means permitted in America. It's not easy to teach children with vast dental decay, families out of work and watch a nation laud this as positive "welfare reform" when stranding these children in worse fixes. Sometimes I find it infinitely difficult to love my neighbor,well, my voucher loving neighbor, or even find commonality with those in million dollar homes feeling botox might make them both more appealing and more interesting.

    The child as a commodity construct which is now prevelent in educational dialog, among many other kinds of views, I find difficult to separate from the individuals telling me( in often rude and hurtful ways) that my efforts educationally are a failure and that schools don't work. In my world it's a constant Lou Dobbs immigration rant that somehow is hiding vaguely words that really seem to be saying something else. I tire of watching the reality of racism, classism acted out in the lives of children-and this is a fatigue that easily becomes anger-King speaks to this.... I find myself lacking the strength to love positions taken by those that really don't know what they are talking about, and don't care other than for personal advantaging anyway....

    There is something truely fascinating about having a book that describes both your situation and your feelings as well as frames this into affective forward action-King can give you individual empowerment quite readily.And he can help you address your mindset. And that in this world of mine is a beautiful thing. I frame my work with principles that are able to outweigh the personal likes and dislikes levels...so I bring to school dealings my thoughts that I am there to help Anthony be the best Anthony he can be...not to condemn Anthony to my judgement about him.

    Let us say then King's is an active lexicon and this volume is insightful for someone wishing to everyday face injustice and difficulty with positive reaction and action. For me as a person I find the book more helpful than any I ever had.

    If anyone underestimates MLK's true intellectual ability, or simply wants to revisit the kind of person he was, a read of this book should serve to illustrate that America has had a prophet in my lifetime. Truely this should be required reading in high school and college programs for the young persons of our country to become acquainted with and use in working on social issues.

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  4. A perfect discussion of this great book would be like the painting "White on White" a blank to consider as a metaphor for snow, that's really what the book is constructing, a paper representation of a first snowfall.

    And it would fit Shulevitz to leave a blank page for "Snow," I think he might "get it."
    As a teacher, I have several of his books and each has a particular quality I like to call "internal space," borrowing from the language of my painting training.
    They are creations of places that seem frozen and afar, a kind of wonder always over takes me as I read Shulevitz' books to kids. The reader becomes superfluous somehow. It's a very hard thing to find words for, his stories connect in another place, beyond text, "in place." In general if you are a teacher of young children, children coming from a second language as I am, working on the construct of "the setting" with young children, his books will allow you to focus on this in a way where internal images can be discussed. 1st graders after reading this book always tell me they can "go inside" his spaces and find a "reality. Of course they say this in their own way. "I like to see this one, read it some more." "I want to go to the snows, can we read this one today." Or my favorite, " I sees snow when you reads, I really do." But that is always the voice of Gabriela who gots in very big trouble Friday for being too bossy and not "listening" nicely.


    Lately I have spent a great deal of time thinking about reality.
    Thinking of what that means, what we are often doing in teaching is avoiding deep discussions of our and other realities. Ours and others. Going inside of writing and images and finding a "reality" is a unique construct to work to build with students. It is the heart of literature pieces use in classrooms, something I see being stripped away now. It's unique to talk about with students and this author allows you to go to a "there." If for no other reason I think this thread is one that should exist in classrooms to help bind together a kind of understanding of purpose, meaning, awareness of other's understandings, I suppose it is an expanded sense of literacy not just a phonetic literacy. This is cultural, historical artistic,political, psychological, individual, human and I suppose when I work, literature is the place I go to talk about our "understandings" as plural as that is, and as rich as this makes us as a people. It is there we go to a great mind's eye for looking at our lives and the world we might wish to transform. Build a new education from this place, not economic bean counting.

    And in SNOW the there is not a there of this earth, it is a there entirely of literary creation. As a teacher of children in a second language I notice they connect to these images and created worlds in books. Really connect. With "SNOW" they had me read it twice and insisted on writing poems. Insisted. It was a poetic step-stone. Now I wish to be heard, now I have something to share too.

    As for "Snow" it is the telling of adult and child perspectives. In snow. When I grew up in West Virginia as flakes fell my brother and I would go out to see, to see if they were sticking, praying of course for their layering our world. Crying out as we first saw them melt, folded over our radio predictions and armed with thermometer out the door we went. I introduced the thermometer with this story Friday. And the rest of the day we charted a fall in temperature from 61 to 43. It was a perfect way to begin to think about "cold". Mum and Dad in my childhood days would of course sit so far from our child perspectives, praying to be left in peace. Their world of inconvenience so much a part of having to deal with it in traveling to work. Two views I now "understand" and now share out with children.


    Here in the story a boy, who remains just "a boy", watches the flakes and listens to the adults predict the possiblity of getting a blanket of snow. For my students who live coastal in CA with no possiblity of snow, despite the current snap of cold killing our beautiful tropical plants, these children need to read of this wonderous time in order to experience it. That is such a thing for me to create for them. I find it remarkable to have to construct it through literature. It's amazing. It invites a teacher sharing of experience. I cannot overstate the beauty of the book's illustrations as they show the snows arrival to this world, he is, page by page unfolding this, the place "somewhere" which by "reading" the image grows into an internal space place.
    Ah....he is so good.

    Snow is a purity so many forget, humans need this. It places us in the world, stills our power, reminds of nature, is other worldly. It is transformative. And this text goes to that. Children know weather. It is real to them in a way I like to call a naive understanding. They are feeling "SNOW" like poets..

    When reading this book I always fold and cut snowflakes with the kids. This year no child had ever done this before in my room. Not a single one. There is a champion book of snowflake cutting patterns in a Scholastic book. It's remarkable to cut snowflakes with 1st graders, study the crystal forms from internet images, look inside this text to see the images in "Snow" of snowflakes, gentle, beautiful forms to grace the classroom windows. I really can't imagine not using this book it is that much a part of my program with 1st graders here in Oxnard at Hathaway......
    Snow comes. It transforms. It is the silence and white blanket. Beautifully celebrated here in his book. Get SNOW.

    And now some thoughts from children's voices...(I mostly corrected spellings)

    snows white
    and it can bite me on my toes
    because it can it does

    Snow said my Mom
    Falls on the ground
    But we don't see it here
    So we read it and see it there

    Up a hill
    Over the field
    I pulled a sled
    In the snow
    So I could
    Slide

    Yous are sos lucky if you have snows
    We dont
    We have a new Vons my Mom took me too
    I saws a snowman I wanted there
    It costs too much

    Flake fall
    Snow drops
    Watrer freeze
    Wind blows

    I want to see the snow
    I want to ski down a hill
    I want to snowboard too
    But we jive here in the sun
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  5. December Yields

    Red raspberries
    Picked out of the
    Chambers of my
    Heart

    You gorged and spit
    Seeds to lie
    Awaiting another
    Spring with possibility
    Of fruit.



    Pomegranates

    filled with sticky sweet bud
    and slime

    seed planted to return to dark
    underworld

    to a being with no light
    and form

    passion red fruit eaten in December
    juice splashing hope of love

    given by a thief
    a map back to nowhere.



    Abandoned

    Because you might be
    Caught eating in this
    Heart field with
    Stolen fruit.
    A cowardice of retreat

    Gorged fruit left rotting.


    Parenthetical Relating

    ( Inside the boundaries of your parameters, held by the words , "On another note" , I found I existed alongside a mark called parenthetically that was easily addend-ed and so, was lost inside another story)


    Can You Have Any Label

    Love
    Can you exist beating on a door that sees you,
    "Borderline, dysfunctional, PDD, Mood disordered "
    and worse,
    "I'm making your situation worse, through our relating."

    Love,
    Can you connect the sticky fruits of charms
    Moments of buzzing discovery to such twist and turn
    and vomit,
    Vomiting away feeling, away the touch.

    Love,
    Are you real?
    Real never the construction of this love.
    and charade,
    Living this charade, I can no longer carry my label.


    Coward

    You sit behind an encyclopedia of mind
    feeling afraid.

    Of phone ,connection, voice, of real and time.
    A kind of scrolling typeface you sit choosing a font.

    You ask nothing.Offer a thing spelled LOVE,
    A chimera.

    Coward. So turn to your "work"

    What is the work of a coward?
    Oh, the explanation of life.
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I'm a public school elementary teacher from W.V. beginning my career in poverty schools in the 1980's. (I have GIST cancer-small intestinal and syringomyelia which isn't what I want to define me but does help define how I view the meaning of my life.) I am a mom of 3 great children-now grown. I teach 3rd grade in an Underperforming school, teaching mostly immigrant 2nd Lang. children. I majored in art, as well as teaching. Art informs all I do. Teaching is a driving part of my life energy. But I am turning to art soon. I'm married to an artist I coaxed into teaching- now a Superintendent of one of the bigger Districts in the area. Similar population. We both have dedicated inordinate amounts of our life to the field of teaching in areas of poverty hoping to give students opportunities to make better lives. I'm trying to write as I can to the issues of PUBLIC education , trying to gain the sophistication to address the issues in written forms so they can be understood from my teaching contexts.I like to blog from daily experiences. My work is my own, not reflective of any school district.
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