A review of a Planet Money Podcast episode focused on the spread of 4-day school weeks.
An ongoing list of resources for Antiracism Teaching in International Schools
What Antiracist Teachers do Differently - The Atlantic; June 17, 2020.
Becoming an Antiracist Educator - Wheaton College, a full curriculum to go from understanding to action.
The Antiracist Educator Workbook - Link to Purchase a workbook.
Antiracism Education In and Out of Schools - Link to Download PDF of EBook
Committee Against Bias and Racism in the Teaching of English - From the National Council of Teachers of English (United States) - Download Resource PDFs
This resource isn’t great, it’s a couple of PDFs which give some broad value statements about what it means to be an Anti-Racist Language teacher, but there isn’t much more than that.
British Columbia Teacher’s Federation Antiracism Resources - Classroom strategies, handbooks, background information, and reference material
Performing an Antiracist Pedagogy - PDF of book.
I Can Do Better
I think of myself as an ally. I can be a better one. My journey to becoming an ally was long, but it wasn’t actually that difficult, it was mostly luck. While completing an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing, I needed an elective credit and decided the most entertaining thing would be to take a Women’s Studies class. I freely admit my motivation was to be an asshole. I like arguing. I intended to argue every point the professor and class made, purely for my own entertainment.
I was incredibly fortunate to end up with an amazing professor - who’s name I’ve forgotten, I’m afraid - and shockingly tolerant classmates who took my arguments at face value and engaged directly with them. I came out of the class, not changed fundamentally, but definitely intrigued. From then on, whenever I needed an elective credit, I would take more Women’s Studies classes. In the end I took quite a few, including an Intro class, History of Feminism, Minority Feminism, Irish Women’s Literature (awesome), and Women in Fiction. By the end of these courses I was undeniably changed. I had become aware of my own privilege.
At that point, despite the work I’d done, I don’t think I was a particularly good ally. I was aware of my privilege, but that was as far as it went. I wore my Women’s Studies experience like a Boy Scout Badge. Look, I’d say, I read these books, I had these conversations, I understand.
I applied the work of self-assessment I’d done through these courses to look at not just my male privilege, but my white privilege as well. I knew well enough not to claim minority friends as a badge the way I claimed my education. I moved overseas and became a visible minority. I recognized that being a visible minority but I hadn’t done the deep thinking or self-reflection that’s really needed to make the kinds of change within myself I want to make.
I vividly recall one night my friends and I ended up talking about the issue of gun violence in the United States. I am of the opinion the resolution to that issue is the repeal of the Second Amendment and said so. One of my friends, who’s opinion I value deeply, asked if I thought the police should be disarmed as well. I was surprised. It hadn’t occurred to me to even think the police should be disarmed. I said no, of course not, thinking it’s not hard to have peaceful interactions with police. My friend, a minority herself, stared at me with wide eyes, like I was an idiot. She pointed out the issues minorities face in their interactions with the police, the issues which result when the State is structurally racist and also maintains a monopoly on violence. She’s always been a more deeply thoughtful and empathetic person than I am.
It’s been over ten years since I finished that degree and I honestly don’t know how much use I’ve really made of those classes. I have definitely made chances in my behavior, sure, but I’m not really interested in a list of what I’ve done. I want to be better. I believe I can be better.
Generally when I write I know what I'm doing wrong. When I produce something, I'm capable of identifying those parts of it which are not working, which need improvement, which are still unfinished. This is true whether it's a fiction story, an essay, a play, a newsletter for a business, really any prose.
Poetry is another matter entirely.
I took some poetry classes while I was completing a BA in Creative Writing, I've read pretty much everything Shakespeare ever produced, I have my personal favourite poems and lines of poetry (Hsieh Lin Yun, Dwelling in the Mountains). But I have a very hard time gaining perspective or having any objectivity about my own poetry.
So recently I've been teaching a poetry unit to my Grade 7, 8, and 9 students. They are almost all students for whom English is a Second Language and they struggle with the things English Language Learners (ELL) usually struggle with. In particular, they struggle with reading comprehension. They can decode but they have a hard time understanding. Decoding is the ability to pronounce words correctly, you see trochaic hexameter and you pronounce it properly, but you couldn't tell a soul what it means ... a ruler of some sort? You've just decoded.
I decided I wanted to see what would happen if I pushed my students as hard as I could for a month in order to improve their reading comprehension, so I decided to launch into a month-long unit on poetry. We read poems, we learned about poets, we watched Dead Poets Society, and ultimately the students wrote several hundred lines of poetry each.
Over the course of the unit, I wanted to show them the process of editing, so I wrote a first draft of a poem.
The Lake
A pair of mating dragonflies.
The smell of pine needles in the sun.
Mirrors might lie, time is fleeting.
The glass surface of the water,
Tells me I have come back.
A loon at night and junebugs.
Bare feet and frogs.
I wish I were ten years old again
This is not a good poem. That I can tell immediately, and I didn't want it to be. It was supposed to help me show my students the process a writer goes through as they make decisions about editing and revising.
Things I talked about with my students: these kids have no idea what pine needles smell like, they've grown up in South East Asia, that's an image I might want to look at. The "mirrors might lie, time is fleeting" is just... gak... that line is awful, it's way too direct, too on the nose, there's a hint at something profound, but really it's just trite. Likewise, these kids have never seen junebugs nor heard a loon. There is no verb in the sentence "Bare feet and frogs." The "I" in the poem is totally inactive, they do nothing other than wish to be ten. That last line is also way too direct, too on the nose. The first line is iambic quadrameter: A pair of mating dragonflies, but the rest of the poem isn't - does that set up an expectation which isn't paid off in the poem?
I don't expect my students to go to that level with their own work - I care about concrete details and purposefulness - but I wanted to show them how ... neurotic? ... a writer can get about their work if they want to.
One thing I do like about this poem: the idea of a mirrored lake reflecting an older person thinking about their youth.
Anyone who knows me has probably heard about Boshkung Lake, the place I spent 15 of the first 18 summers of my life.
It's a very important place to me and the setting of this poem. So I kept playing with it, I want to have something to show the students, something to share with them to show them that I'm going through the same process (with many of the same struggles) they're going through.
Here's the second draft.
A pair of dragonflies
Oil-shimmer windowed wings.
A loon's high, long, ache.
I stand and watch
The purpling sky
Reflected in
The antique mirror-glass lake
Reflected in
The pale pink dawn.
Ducks clatter in time
With bare feet
Scampering, chasing
Glass-winged shards of rainbows:
A pair of dragonflies.
This is the beginning of something, I think. The basic idea is to have the older, passive, present poet standing above the lake and within the lake is reflected the younger, active, child. Dusk and dawn reflect on either side of the line about the mirror-glass lake, likewise the sad, lonely call of the loon and the happier, more social 'clatter of ducks' and, of course, at the top and bottom of the poem we have the pair of dragonflies. It still needs work, I need to look at the rhythms of each line and make some decisions there. I need to look at where I break the lines, if I'm talking about the passage of time, I think I need to find some places where it makes sense for the lines to flow onto each other, like time or water flowing, and then specific places where the lines come to an end. Points of demarcation in a life.
One idea I am thinking about playing with is whether or not to highlight the solitude of the poet, both in age and youth by drawing attention to the fact that it is a pair of dragonflies, but that's just an idea rattling around my head.
One very serious problem right now is that there are six lines above the mirror and seven below it, a possible place above the mirror for the hint at the poet's solitude compared to the pair of dragonflies?
Anyway, that's where I'm at with this poem. A little insight into both the madness of teaching and the method of writing. I'll come back to this and re-work it some as we wrap-up the poetry unit over the next couple of weeks.
An actual website, mostly to hold my name down as a domain, in case I ever do anything worth having an actual website. Also, a place to make my writing available, should anyone want to read it.