Rodriguez, “Aria“ blog #7

 I came to America when I was four, my middle sister was 12 and my oldest sister was 14. They have a stronger foundation in Spanish but for the most part my mother pushed for all of us to learn and speak English. It was a new world everything was different and all she wanted was for her daughter to be able to successfully integrate into America. It’s the passage of the story we read was interesting, I have felt these feelings of disconnect to my culture and home because of the push to only speak English. My mother is never going to be able to fully understand me because my expressive language is English. My first language is Spanish, but it was never developed and now as I get older, I feel less connected and struggle to use it. Even though I get to use it often to connect with families I work with. I find myself stuttering or struggling to think of the word. Which make me distant even more from first language. I wonder what could have been like if I was able to nurture both English and Spanish as a child. Why as society we were to appreciate two languages later on in education but make it an issue if you’re in k-8 grade. Maybe I would if felt more connected to my roots and also still embrace America for all that it gives.  

Fin, from Literacy with an Attitude blog#6

        2016 NPS Finals - House Slam - Ashley Davis & Oompa "Simon Says"

Education was never given fairly. At the end of segregation and the start of integration, we watched as schools in Arkansas closed just to stop students of color from coming into white schools. Then when it came to communities, many of the ghettos were built due to redlining, and that also affected education because the school you go to is usually the closest one to your home. That is a great thing for wealthy communities to be placed in schools near the home but for low-income communities the disparities were huge. So now a student came from the ghettos, attended schools with very few white people, and has a stigma for disobedience and lack of respect. This leads to over-policing BIPOC communities and focusing on the wrong things. We often want to focus on and blame the behavior for the case of it all but we very rarely ever ask or figure out what caused it and how can we fix it. 

    This poetry slam is a good connection to the reading because we focus on policing behavior and forget to educate our students or we want an easy way out when we can't "control" them. which just helps the school-to-prison pipeline. We spent so much time educating them on "the right way to be" that we didn't allow them to grow as readers, we trained them for prison.

Rose, How Structural Racism Works Post #5

 

We 

Structural racism is connected and affects education, housing, media, job, the criminal justice system. It also takes on new forms and because of the color blindness ideology it thrives in our system. I want to link a article for each structural impact listed. Just so more people can see how

It’s existing today.

RI discrimination lending allegations    

Lack of black voices in the media

RI Incarceration disparities

RI education 

Video analysis

I 

Teach us all

Kohn arugment post #3.5

 The government should do a better job providing funding for teachers in order to achieve the classroom culture that Kohn is speaking on. The example given that are not just on how the teacher should engage with students but on how the classroom should be set up, should be seen as a failure on the school funding part and not on the teachers. I can provide a great lessons and teach with all the passion but the lack of items in the school is the district responsibility. Teachers are already underpaid, using their funds to provide something more to students. There are so many articles on the benefits of a well set up classroom, paired with a good teacher. The students experience greater joy in learning and school when it’s appealing. Yet we don’t blame the district for the lack of school culture we blame the individual teacher. 

Kozol post #3 quotes

"South Bronx by a narrow river, make up one of the largest racially segregated concentrations of poor people in our nation."

This is just another that shows, we legally desegregated but didn’t not physically and in actions upheld it with communities and schools.

"Our children start to mourn themselves before their time."

As a child that come from poverty, the community and lack of opportunities makes it seems like there are only a few ways out. You either align with the community “norms” or fight thousands for a slim chance of getting out of the cycle of poverty. In these communities it’s easy to watch your dreams die when the person you thought would make it out fails. 

"Somebody has power. Pretending that they don't so they don't need to use it to help people - that 1s my idea of evil."

It’s the knowledge of a greater power putting this system in play but not knowing who, what or why this is allowed to happen. How as people we watch others suffer, how we are willing to allow it to happen. Especially when there are groups or individuals who gain from this exploration. 

"There's a whole world out there if you know it's there, if you can see it. But they're in a cage. They can not see."

This cage is oppression and it’s invisible hold it has on the people experiencing it. We would do better if we know the unspoken rules. If we were wanted to successed but it’s not like that. What we know is what we see and grow up in and read about and often times our reflections of our community is never the inside out but the outside looking in and down at those who fall short of what America says are the rules to the American dream. 

Intersectionality ( connections to debates and conversation on TikTok ) post#4

 intersectionality is a easy concept to understand on a micro level but debated about in a macro level.         “The better we understand how identities and power work together from one context to another,  the less likely our movements for change are to fracture”  A great explain I can give is the conversations and controversy of being a trans woman and the intersectionality of being a black trans woman. Women supporting women is the goal, yet with in our movement divides happen. When transphobia blocks those rights and protection for trans woman, we have now derailed from the mission and dismiss how transphobia is harmful to woman, especially black woman. A long history of defeminization of black woman, has led to a traumatic projection version of that to the trans community. Trying to ignore someone intersectionality is harmful and brings new issues to communities struggling to be protected. It’s one step forward and five back, we can not keep this small progression going. It won’t be true inclusivity until we do a better job at accepting intersectionality, even if it’s not at first understood.