Still Open to Interpretation: Questions about César Chávez and the United Farm Workers Movement

There are so many books about César Chávez that it might seem as if we don’t need any more, but we do.  Now we have Larry Dane Brimmer’s Strike: The Farm Worker’s Fight for Their Rights, which can add even more texture to our talk. This book serves as a reminder to us all that historical accounts are always incomplete because of the different questions authors ask and the information they choose to include. Brimmer has asked some new questions—at least new to me—and because of this he provides information that is missing in other titles.

Here are some “what if?” questions Brimmer is raising:

·      What if the Filipino agricultural labor organizers had not staged a strike before Chávez began his work? Would he still be the hero he is today? In other words, the role of Filipino laborers and their leaders needs to be part of our remembered history.

·      If members had been willing to speak up against Chávez when necessary, would the United Farm Workers (UFW) union have remained a strong voice in agricultural labor policy? It seems like members were too often unwilling to oppose him.

As a reader, I am grateful to Larry Brimmer for showing me that César Chávez was—and still is—a controversial figure—someone we can continue to discuss and think about. This well-written, well-illustrated, and thought-provoking book can easily be used by teachers and librarians to discuss CCSS topics like finding the author’s point of view and evidence for this view. The author’s note at the end is perfect for getting this conversation started. This is truly a book to check out because it can help us and our students see that history is a vibrant, living subject. 

Change, Just as We Lose an Agent of Change

Did you all see this study: http://www.nationaljournal.com/next-america/education/school-is-over-for-the-summer-so-is-the-era-of-majority-white-u-s-public-schools-20140701 the article summarizes a National Center for Education Statistics study which says we are at a moment of fundamental change. From now on, the majority of students in our K-12 schools will be Latino, African-American, Asian-American, or Indian. The article framed this as the last year of white majority, but that defines the moment as an ending rather than as a beginning -- a moment of possibility. How ironic, then, that Walter Dean Myers passed away on Tuesday, July 1.

Walter -- I did not know him well, but well enough to call out "Walter" as I'd pass him at a conference (the long line being a sure sign that I was near his booth) and he'd nod, and we'd chat -- was in a way that Moses who saw the promised land. He not only wrote about the African-American world in which he had grown up, his writing changed the world. He established an uncompromising voice of honesty, depth, and fearlessness -- he showed what was possible. I always teach Monster, which I think is his masterwork, to my graduate students in library school. It is, I claim, one of those perfect books everyone must read. It took so many risks -- in form, in theme, in approach -- and got everything right. Walter wrote in the time when he had to counter a silence, an absence of work about the world that meant so much to him. He was a clarion voice.

Now, though, this July, we read that our schools are changing. What do our students need to read? And how is this new majority distributed? I have seen assessments of Brown V Board of Ed that suggest we have re-segregated -- and it is Latinos in the West who are the most isolated: http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/brown-at-60-great-progress-a-long-retreat-and-an-uncertain-future.

What is the literature for our changing school? Who will be our new Walter? Our many new Walters? It is the time for curiosity -- we are all together as a society, as a world, we need to be together in our classrooms, our bookshelves our reading. Walter led -- who will follow?

Marc

Monarch Butterflies and Summer Reading

Early last fall, a teacher in southern Maine was looking for a monarch chrysalis for her annual study of the monarch butterfly life cycle and migration. The literacy coach at her school happened to mention to me that they couldn't find any in the school garden. I hadn't seen any in my garden all summer, either. Soon, we were curating stories of the disappearance of the monarch butterfly to share with the third grade students. From there, along with my Lesley colleague Erika Thulin Dawes, we developed a series of text sets on the challenges facing the monarch butterfly.
 
For any of you participating in the "Fizz Boom Read" science-focused summer reading program this year, teaching summer school or camp, or simply looking for great nonfiction books to share with elementary-aged children, please feel free to make use of this four-part text set, which Erika and I posted on our website: http://teachingwithtextsets.blogspot.com/p/monarch-text-setbibliography-frost-h.html. This text set begins with public radio stories in New England; I imagine wherever you are in North America, there's been a local story over the past year about the dwindling monarch population. If you have questions or wind up using these text sets, please let me know! They are ideal for use with 3rd-5th graders.

Get a Grip: We Need to Focus This Conversation about Including Parents

Marc’s latest post reinforces what I have been thinking: We need to focus our conversations about teaching and learning on—guess what?—teaching and learning, not on who’s in the CCSS club and who’s out.

One overlooked segment of the interested population is parents. I was reminded of this by a recent New York Times opinion piece entitled, “But I Want to Do Your Homework” by Judith Newman. Please read this piece at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/helping-kids-with-homework.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C[%22RI%3A9%22%2C%22RI%3A17%22] You won’t be sorry. It’s not only amusing, it also makes an important point: Many parents want to participate in their children’s education, but they don’t know how.

Heaven knows, we educators could use their help, but for this to happen there are problems that need solving. Children both want their parents’ help, but they also fear that their parents don’t know the “right” way to help them. Parents, in turn, are often clueless about so-called newer approaches to learning. It’s no fun to learn that your understanding of math, science, and social studies is hopelessly out-of-date.

I remember when I was teaching seventh grade American history and the parents of one of my students came for a parent-teacher conference. I told them they were both doing very well in my course, but I wasn’t so sure about how their daughter was doing. They—competent professionals with graduate school degrees—were doing my assignments, even after a long, hard day at work. That’s dedication and caring, but it’s misguided. Instead, I suggested that they could have conversations about the content of what their daughter was learning and supplement it further, but not under any circumstances do the assignments for her because they were designed to stimulate their child’s thinking. That was why she was in school, right?

Enough about me. Someone else has already come up with a grand solution to this problem, and that person is Paula Rogovin. Her book, Why Can’t You Behave? The Teacher’s Guide to Creative Classroom Management, K-3, is one of the most sensible, down-to-earth guides for teachers ever written. It is not just for primary grade teachers either. Her chapter 4, “Family Involvement” has the information we need to move forward in this CCSS era. Among the many suggestions she offers is Family Homework. Here’s how she describes it:

This is our main vehicle for keeping families informed about our curriculum, about issues to discuss with their child, about class and school activities, and about ways they can help at home and in the classroom.

This is one promising idea. We need to include parents in their children’s education, not make them feel inadequate or give them the idea that the curriculum is mysteriously inaccessible and out-of-bounds for them.

I am just back from speaking at the Shenandoah University Children's Literature Conference -- a gathering of some 300 local teachers and librarians that has taken place annually for nearly 30 years. Brian Floca gave a wonderful talk about the creation of Locomotive -- perhaps a hint of what he will say to the world at the Newbery-Caldecott banquet. Chris Soenpiet then gave us a guided tour through his books and how he creates them. I of course had no wonderful paintings and deeply-researched drawings to share -- I got to be the lecture guy speaking about Common Core and NF. The twist being that Virginia is not a CC state. But when I read through the Virginia Standards of Learning they turned out to be -- at least in the areas that I was examining -- simply a more detailed, spelled out, version of the exact same emphasis on evidence, argument, POV, comparing and contrasting different nonfiction sources. I was encouraged.

I think we need to shift some of our attention away from the CC heat -- objections on the Left, objections on the Right; this state changing the name of the standards, that state delaying the assessments, this governor trying to win his national political bones by loudly resisting CC -- to the fact that the mode of selecting, sharing, and reading NF that we discuss here in this blog is now required in essentially every state. The key point is not "common" -- shared terminology -- but "core" -- a basic approach.

There is a key "turning the ship" part of this approach: we are asking educators, parents, administrators, librarians who may themselves have experienced NF as textbooks, and "information" as data to be passively absorbed, to now see NF as active inquiry involving comparing sources, questioning ideas, probing for the research and argument behind any claim -- in math, science, history, as well as poetry, fiction, drama. The kinds of books -- and approach to books we feature here can help. But only when the adult professionals using those materials recognize that NF is now playing an entirely new role: it is not imparting knowledge to be absorbed, it is, rather, introducing students to the rules by which knowledge is created.

The attendees at the conference seemed receptive to these ideas. Marina Budhos, my wife, gave a separate talk on her dual roles as a fiction and nonfiction writer -- and thus the claims and needs of fiction and nonfiction -- which also went well. I hope others will be as willing to ignore the political heat over what we call our standards and focus on how adult professionals need to think in new ways to serve their students. 

Nonfiction Book Festivals for Kids

I was at the very, very marvelous Nantucket Book Festival this past weekend, a really well-run and interesting event (in a beautiful place, on a perfect summer weekend). It was heart-warming to see people walking about town, pausing on street corners to talk, carrying their tote bags and piles of books, and crowding into rooms despite the gorgeous weather outside, in order to hear author's speak about their work. 

To be truthful, I go to far more conferences than book festivals. At these conferences, I'm used to seeing people walking around in similar fashion, simultaneously glazed over from information overload and giddy with anticipation. 

So what about having book festivals in school, separate from any fundraising efforts (as in NOT the book fair)?  What if there was a nonfiction book festival that kicked off the school year as a catalyst for creating a culture of conversation about nonfiction with your school community? School librarians are a great starting point for such planning, with a core team of perhaps a teacher from every grade level. Perhaps there is a local author who can come and speak, or a writer for children or young adults who could Skype into the session. If it happened early in the year, teachers could work with students from the previous year (i.e. the ones you know very well) and have the students on panels talking about their writing. You could have different panels for different grade spans, but mix up the students on the panels to still have younger (emerging writers!) and older students (established writers!) mixing and mingling in some way.

It's pie-in-the-sky ideal, but isn't that the kind of culture we want to create in school? Where writing is serious and joyful all at the same time? An avocation? Something worth spending time inside for on a gorgeous summer day, because it's that awesome?

Math

This week I'm posting a two-part blog -- and in ways the parts are contradictory, so stay with me, and see what you think.

Part One
Sue Bartle -- who posts here -- forwarded to me a wonderful post which I now want to share with you. The post centered on an interview with Jordan Ellenberg, a math professor who has a new book out titled How Not to Be Wrong.

Read what he says, then think about how you encountered Math, how it is taught anywhere you know, and, if you have read them, about the CC Math standards. The interview with Ellenberg was conducted, I believe, by Annie Murphy Paul:

Why does math fill so many of us with dread? I put that question to Ellenberg when we spoke by phone last week. “We teach math as if it’s about applying a prescribed formula, circlingthe right answer, and going on to the next problem without thinking about what it is we're
doing,” Ellenberg replied. “But that’s so not what math is. Math is a fundamentally creative enterprise, a fundamentally humanistic enterprise. It’s a lens through which we can see the world better.”>
> > Ellenberg sees the results of rote mathematics instruction in his
undergraduates: “It can be hard for my students to get into the mindset of
trying different things. Often, during my office hours, I'll get a student who
says of an assignment, ‘I didn't know where to start.’ I tell them, ‘Of course
you didn't know where to start! You're doing this for the first time, so try a
few things and see what works.’ But this approach is foreign to students who
have been taught that math is a series of formulas. They don't realize that math
is all about trial and error, about experimenting. That's true of advanced math,
but I think we can push that mindset down into the earlier grades as well.”> >
> Ellenberg acknowledges that his approach would require a paradigm shift.
“People are not used to taking a loose and easy approach to math. They get very
tight and tense around math because they have so much fear and anxiety about
it,” he noted. In addition, he said, “People dislike math because they don't
like being told that they're wrong. And it's not incorrect to see math as a
realm where there are right and wrong answers. But the thing is: knowledge in
math does not come about because the teacher says it's so. Math is a realm where
people can demonstrate the rightness of answers to themselves. So if part of
what creates the fear of math is wanting to avoid being wrong, then learning to
like math is about learning to be willing to mess up.”

Part Two

We just learned that our son will have to give up six weeks of his summer to take Algebra 1

and Geometry so he is ready for Algebra 2 on a track to Calculus when he enters 9th grade. He had a terrific summer planned, and we expected howls. He screamed once, negotiated for a

payoff treat, and then was fine with it. Why? On some level it felt like an honor, a step up -- if you want to play in the High School fast track, this is what you need to do. 

There is no getting around the fact that Math is a language that you need to learn. Ellenbergis saying -- once you begin to speak, you have real creativity and freedom. Sasha's school is saying, but you do need to learn the language -- and there may be no way there but the grind of summer school.

Maybe we need a two part approach to Math -- here is how cool it can be; here is what every oone must do to get to that cool place. 

What do you think.