My Anti-Racist Journey continues.
Reading: I finished Between You and Me that I mentioned in the last post. It was life-changing. I'm having realizations all the time, and they're not pleasant. I picked up a phrase from my research: "sitting in discomfort." I've been doing a lot of sitting in my own discomfort this week. I guess my biggest discomfort is that I never thought of racism as happening all the time, a constant. I thought of it as events or acts or words. I didn't understand how it doesn't end. It's not sporadic. It's pervasive and universal for Black people in America. I'm ashamed I didn't get that before. The next book I'll be reading is Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby. I already bought it, and it's on my Kindle.
Movies: Andrew and I watched Harriet and Just Mercy. We really loved them both. I only knew the very basics about Harriet Tubman, and all I can say after watching that movie is WHAT A BADASS!!! I want to know more and more and more. The movie (and the book) Just Mercy had been recommended to me for possible use in the classroom. Wow, wow, wow. So powerful. Again, it was inspiring, and it made me want to know so much more. I highly recommend both of these movies.
Teaching: This is a big one. I've decided to scrap my Mark Twain unit. I inherited the Mark Twain unit because the 7th grade GOAL field trip had always been to Hannibal, MO. It is a great field trip... so fun, educational, only a 2-hour drive away. Huckleberry Finn had been taught in it until the high school English department wanted to use the book in their curriculum. I decided to use parts of Tom Sawyer for my part. The more I've been thinking about it, the more I know it has to go. What the kids get out of it is not much, and I haven't been spending enough time (because I really don't have it) to go into depth about the history and the setting of the book. It's not worth keeping it to justify the trip. I don't know what I'm going to put in its place, and I don't know how I can find an equally fun trip for the price and distance, but I'm going to do it. It's the right thing to do.
Purchases: More books. Lots more books. Per the final project of the class I just took, I'm going to modify my Culture Clash unit to be more timely and focus on the topic of Black Lives Matter. I'm going to be reading a lot of books this summer in preparation for this change. I guess this "Purchases" topic is also about "Teaching," but oh well. Titles that have arrived so far include: How High the Moon by Karyn Parsons, The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, The Season of Styx Malone by Kekla Magoon, Watch Us Rise by Renee Watson, The Rock and the River by Kekla Magoon, Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia, and Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. Even if these books don't make the cut for the unit, they'll be important additions to my classroom library.
In other news, I baked and shared a peach pie, I got together and chatted socially distanced with my friends Cathy and Dee Ann, I caught up on laundry, and Andrew started rereading me Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome. It's just a happy book for me, and we haven't read out loud to each other in awhile. When we first started dating, we read out loud a lot, and we're just out of the habit. It's nice to get back into it. If you've never tried this with your significant other, quarantine might be a great time to give it a try.
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