Tag Archives: standards

Guest Post — The Things We Carry: Questioning Systems of Injustice

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The Things We Carry: Questioning Systems of Injustice

A Guest Post by Megan Adams

There are two stories that I carry with me each day. I tell them to countless teachers and students; I have used them for training purposes as well as instructional tools. Yet what drives me to be a better educator and a better person is the memory of the two young men who are the main characters of those stories.

One, Ced, should have graduated in 2008. Ced was motivated, driven, and athletic. He had several scholarship opportunities. However, he took the Georgia High School Graduation tests for the first time in 2007 and failed all five of them. He tried a second time, and passed the writing and science portions of the test. He tried a third time, and did not pass any additional tests.

The fourth time was the spring of his senior year. By now he was panicked. We worked after school each day before football practice. That spring, he passed mathematics. However, failing the social studies and language arts portions for the fourth time meant that he could not graduate with his class.

By May most of his teachers were deeply concerned. Ced had lost interest, and felt that he was not capable of passing the tests. He said, “if I can’t pass the tests, ain’t no way college will work for me.” Yet he tried again that summer.

He managed to pass English Language Arts, but failed Social Studies for the fifth time. His score dropped so dramatically that all of his teachers were at a loss. Yet once the fall of 2008 came, he was back again. He gave a shy smile, and said, “I’m not going to quit, yet.” He came back for two weeks to review for the test.

The weekend before he would have tried to pass the Social Studies portion of the Georgia High School Graduation test for the sixth time, he got into an argument with his father about chopping wood.

His father shot and killed him.

Ced, a child who made good grades and did everything right in his early years of high school had all of his hopes stripped from him by testing, the failure of a school system to prepare him, and the environment in which he was raised and never escaped.

Soon after Ced’s death, however, another young man, Rico, came into my classroom. He was another football player, and was a junior in high school. The death of his former teammate shook him into reality. He asked me to calculate his academic grade point average (GPA) in order to calculate his National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) eligibility.

He was a complacent student during his freshman and sophomore years of high school, and was far more interested in popularity than grades. His GPA was a 1.7 out of 4.0. He asked what he could do. “How will I get out of here?” I told him that as a junior, his only option would be to make all As.

He scoffed, but there was a look I couldn’t place in his eyes. Over the course of the school year, he indeed made all As. I was shocked. His GPA continued to climb, and his scores on the ACT were high enough to get into college. Rico passed all portions of his graduation test by the end of his junior year.

What is the point here? As teachers, what can we take from these stories?

It is easy to blame the system; it is no secret that the state of Georgia has changed our education standards and assessment measurements too many times over the past fifteen years – something teachers across the nation can relate to, despite where they live. The teachers can barely keep up. Clearly the system is not working for students.

It is also easy to blame the difference in students’ home lives. But, is that it?

I think there is a deeper, darker issue at play in these stories about social justice. The high school these boys attended was predominantly Black and one hundred percent free and reduced lunch.

There was neither a regional outcry brought on by the first story nor regional shouts of victory brought on by the second. They are just two more students, struggling to overcome a system that is not designed to support them. That system might work, but it might also end in tragedy as in the case of the first child.

Is there nothing more we can do to change that?

Megan Adams is currently an Assistant Professor of Reading Education at Kennesaw State University. Her interests are in researching youth identity and perceptions of empowerment, particularly in the rural, southern United States. She is also interested in taking that work and assisting pre-service and in-service teachers as they improve their reflexive practice to foster social justice teaching. You can reach her at madam104@kennesaw.edu.

Lesson Planning: Getting to Know your Students, Narrative Writing & Personal Legends

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Before developing unit plans, I like to get to know my students. Because class sizes are so incredibly large (I have classes ranging from a modest 22 to a hulking 36 students), it is impossible to hold individual conferences without chaos ensuing between the other 35 students, so I get to know my students through their work.

There are a few ways to do this — journals, essays, projects, classroom discussions — I like to do a little bit of everything in order to see which mode fits my students best. Now that I am a collaborative teacher, I have to make sure these activities work for both myself and my team teacher.

One of the assignments we came up with was an introductory narrative essay. There have been three prompts over the last two years: “What three songs are your most favorite and why?” “What three songs define your personality best and why?” and “What are the three most important things to you and why?”

These questions purposely set up a five-paragraph essay in order to test students’ initial writing ability, as well as whether they, without prompted, follow a structured five-paragraph style or create their own unique structure. From a teacher’s point-of-view, this assignment works because it gives initial writing data as well as a peek into the lives of students.

From this one essay assignment, I can create a standards-based writing unit that begins where my students are in their writing. I can also create topics that pique my students’ interests, as those topics are pulled from their own essays. And, finally, I can begin to chip away at the wall students initially put up when they walk into my class, and get to know who they are, however complicated they may be.

Why should I get to know my students before I teach them? Well, while I have standards I’m forced to follow, I do not believe my students can be standardized — no one can. However, by getting to know my students, I can better create lessons that teach to their individual needs. To me, that’s teaching social justice and doing justice by my kids.

Another way to learn about my students is through compiling a “Personal Legend Project.” Originally developed by a colleague, Dana Richardson, to accompany The Alchemist, this project allows students to look at themselves and their futures, as well as learn about different ways to use technology to present information. Here is a link to the project assignment and rubric: Personal Legend Project.

About 18 months ago, when my position at Athens Community Career Academy dissolved due to funding (which prompted my change from English teacher to Special Education collaborative teacher), I assigned this project to all my classes. I presented mine first, to give them an idea of what they could do, but I told them to run with it:

Jennifer Whitley’s Personal Legend Example

Many things have changed since then, but my personal legend has not. As you can see from my example, these are meant to be personal, but students could share as much (or as little) information they wanted. Here are some student samples:

Ivey’s Personal Legend

Chris’s Personal Legend

Hilda’s Personal Legend

**For some of my classes, I also had them do a brief culture study and relate it to them as well, as you can see in Chris’s project. Here is Ivey’s culture study (which derives from her own heritage):

Cherokee Culture by Ivey

These are only a few examples of the hundreds I’ve received over the years, but you get the idea — not only does this project allow students to research their own goals and interests, but it also give me, the teacher, an idea of what is going on in their heads and what makes them unique in their own right.

So, when lesson planning, I encourage you to look at your students as individuals — which I’m sure you already do — and teach them that way. In a world haunted by standardization, test scores and scholastic funding, it is easy to forget we are teaching humans, not statistics, but when we attach a face, life details and personal legends to those names, we begin to teach social justice and with a critical lens.

Happy planning!