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Making Amends for Human Environmental Damage

17/4/2018

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What do whooping cranes, wolves, bald eagles, giant Galápagos tortoises, California condors, American alligators, and American bisons have in common?  They have all been brought to the brink of extinction by human beings who hunted them, ate them, poisoned them with pesticides, lead, and micro trash, and destroyed their environments.  That’s the bad news.  They have also been rescued from extinction by legislation, caring naturalists, cooperative zoos and biologists.

Back From the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction, by Nancy F. Castaldo, tells the moving stories behind all of these rescues.  Whooping cranes were hunted almost to extinction for their giant white feathers to decorate the hats of fashionable women.  And they weren’t the only birds killed for their plumes.  Bet you didn’t know that two women, Minna Hall and Harriet Hemenway, goaded the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918) that lead to the beginning of their salvation. 

In story after story of these creatures brought back from the ultimate death of their species, I was impressed not only by the amazing details of Castaldo’s research but I was also envious of her adventures in collecting them.  She didn’t just read books and interview experts.  She traveled to the locations in California, the Florida Everglades, the Galápagos Islands, and her home State of New York to experience first-hand the animals and their preservationists.  This book was an adventure to write and that comes through to the reader.

I found myself angry at human greed, injustice and carelessness that afflicted each species.  I marveled at the Herculean efforts of individuals that went into each campaign to save them. Castaldo is tells moving success stories. At times I was in tears.  But she also hints at the many stories of tremendous losses she hasn't told.  How dare we destroy our fellow inhabitants of our planet!

We cannot lose touch with our planet and the need to preserve as much as possible of its diversity of life before it’s too late.  Nancy Castaldo’s  Back from the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction  contributes to opening the eyes of the next generation.  
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The Empowerment of Children

15/4/2018

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What happens when you take a group of minority kids after school and give them the resources to tell a story through video and their own music (hip-hop) about a problem that they and children and teenagers live with everyday, everywhere? This is the question Ray Thomas Jr. and his Xposure Foundation have been working on for the past nine years.  Unfettered by test prep, standards, and curriculum goals, Xposure's  programs give kids a voice and the tools to address issues that impact  them the most.   One of their latest products is a 51 minute film "Dear Bully: The Tables Have Been Turned," which was premiered at a local Multiplex yesterday here in the town of Greenburgh, NY, where I live. Note, Xposure has received 5 NY Emmy nominations for earlier films. 

It is not without irony that I viewed this insightful film by and about children and teens addressing this problem while the oval office is currently occupied by a bully, whose bully pulpit is Twitter and television; reality media that expose his total lack of empathy.   

"Dear Bully" works on many levels.  First there is humor.  A music video of "Big Bad Butch the Bully Johnson" is a cartoon depicting a hulking monster with an evil eye who is so bad "that when he looks in the mirror he scares himself."  
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"JUST HOW BAD IS BUTCH THE BULLY JOHNSON?" is the question asked and answered in this over-the-top poke-in-the-eye catchy rap.
Live action shows the many deeds bullies do: tripping, shoving, knocking books out of their  victims' hands, helping themselves to lunch money.  The camera focuses on the victims while the audience sees the backs of the bullies, their faces obscured for the most part, slightly dehumanizing them.  The hero of the story, "Ace" is so authentically played by Malcolm Small, now in high school, that they have footage of him when he actually was in grade school in a flashback showing his apprehension as he entered his new school (at the urging of his mother) anticipating an unwelcoming response from his classmates as the "NEW KID, " a common target of bullies.  

Ace is a leader and he organizes other victims to figure out how to fight bullies. He encourages   the others to give vent to their anger and their natural desire to hit them back harder.  But Ace tells them that "violence begets violence" so they must find another way. Since Ace is a good student, he is bullied into revealing his test paper for the bullies to copy.  His vengeance is sweet and satisfying (no spoiler from me!)

In his dreams, Ace becomes president of the US and is about to sign an anti-bullying bill, having grasped the concept that when it comes to bullies vs. victims "we have the numbers."  I couldn't help but think of the post I wrote last week, Putting Citizenship Back into the Curriculum where Dr. David Liu spoke of the enormous surge of civic engagement as a reaction to our Bully-in-Chief. Xposure kids are manifestly in the spirit of the times.  

The live action is interspersed with fully-rendered music videos that are at times poignant, at times joyously uninhibited, and always full of youthful energy.  Ray Thomas's fingerprints are all over every part of this production so it has the personal integrity that connects with humanity at large.  The film's anti-bullying law requires that victims write their bullies a letter, which bullies are required to read before they enter mandatory "empathy training for bullies."  Here's a sample of the verse:
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My take-away of "Dear Bully" is pure empowerment: "If they don't like you for being yourself, be yourself even more," so say the students of BeYou High. This is must-see for kids everywhere; it is a non-polemic, non-didactic, non-preachy communication that is guaranteed to transmit its potent message to a rapt audience.
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A Hard Look at a Typical Question on a Standardized Test

10/4/2018

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First, you have to read a paragraph: (Note, this is for a grade 6 test)

The modern wood pencil was created by Joseph Dixon, born in Massachusetts in 1799. When he was thirteen years old he made his first pencil in his mother's kitchen. His sea-going father would return from voyages with graphite in the hull of his ship, which was used used simply as ballast, or weight, when there was no cargo to transport. This graphite was later dumped overboard to make room for shipments for export. Joseph Dixon got some of this excess graphite, pounded it into powder, mixed it with clay and rolled it into long strips that he baked in his mother's oven to make the "lead" for his pencil. This dried the "lead" and made it firm. He then put a strip of "lead" between two grooved sticks of cedar and glued them together to make a sandwich. He chose cedar because it is soft, can be easily sharpened, and is relatively free of knots. All you had to do was sharpen the pencil with a knife and it was ready to write.

Then you have to answer the following multiple choice questions:

1. You can tell from the passage that it was important for ships to be
a.) heavy enough b.) fast enough c.)wet enough d.) big enough

2. Dixon got some graphite that had been used to replace
a.)cargo b.)powder c.)clay d.) wood

3. What happened to the graphite that Dixon didn't use?
a.)It was thrown away b.)It was used for ballast c.)It was shipped as an export 4.) It was used to build houses

4. Why did Dixon heat the mixture of graphite and clay?
a) To harden it b.) To melt it c.)To turn it into a powder d) To make it dark.

5. Dixon chose cedar because it was
a.) easy to shape b.) firm c.) long d.) cheap

6. How did Dixon get the "lead" inside the pencil?
a.) He glued it between two pieces of wood. b.) He poured it in when it was melted c.) He slide it into a hole he had drilled.) He rolled it in a mixture of sawdust and glue

7. In this passage the word knots refers to
a.) hard spots in wood b.) difficult problems c.) a measure of the speed of ships d.) tying ropes


Now, here are some questions that might interest you about the test questions.
1. Where did I get this information? From a contract asking permission to use the passage from a book I wrote (The Secret Life of School Supplies.)
2. What are the chances that the students read the actual book in their test prep? Nil Ever? Close to nil.
3. Did the students find the passage riveting reading? Probably not. It was taken out of context.
4. Why is it important for students to regurgitate information from the passage in their responses? I have no idea. If they have no real interest in the invention of the pencil, if the story isn't interesting enough to repeat to someone else, it is a manufactured trap to give anxiety to students, parents and teachers. It's the previous paragraph in the book that describes the problem that the invention of Dixon's pencil solved that makes the test paragraph more interesting and memorable.

I would hope that the passages selected by the test creators would be stand-alone attention grabbers. But apparently two paragraphs would be too long. FYI, The pencil happened to be an extremely useful invention for land surveyors. They had to be able to write outside with a permanent dry writing instrument, since at that time, most writing was done with quill and ink, which wasn't suited to noting down critical information in the wind and the rain.

Do you think preparing to answer this kind of question is a good use of your time or your students? I can tell you it's not one of my better paragraphs. Maybe, if they had read more of the book, they wouldn't need test prep to get the answers right.
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Putting Citizenship Back in the Curriculum

8/4/2018

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Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University and Executive Director of the Aspen Institute’s Citizenship and American identity program. Photo by Vicki Cobb
On April 7, 2018, I returned to Teachers College, Columbia University for their Academic Festival, a celebration of the mission of this premiere graduate school founded on the principles of John Dewey as stated on the wall over the  TC reception desk: 
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photo by Vicki Cobb
The title of the keynote address by Eric Liu was "Teaching Civic Power." It was a rousing reminder that, as Dr. Liu quoted Sandra Day O'Conner: " 'Compulsory public education was instituted in the country in the first place to create citizens,' not wage workers, not customers, not capitalists, but citizens capable of governing themselves and their country." He believes that all teachers, no matter what subject, are also teaching civics through their own behavior.  He also recollected that in 1814, 25 years after the founding of the United States, John Adams said, "There never has been a democracy yet that has not committed suicide." 

On the up side, Liu said,
 "The United States today is not quite suicidal but it is definitely in a state  of self-inflicted fragility."  This is not a recent phenomenon but has been growing over the last forty years  "of erosion of common purpose of the leaders of both parties and .....of devaluation of public education in general and civic education in particular." 

We the people have ceded our collective power (the capacity to make people do what you would have them do)  over the years to special interests, to those who have wealth and to corruptive influences.  According to Liu, "Power doesn't so much corrupt as it reveals character."  The good news is that Eric Liu is optimistic about the future:  

 "Despite the sickness of the body politic right now, let me tell you why I am so hopeful.   In part, to be honest, it is because of the man who currently occupies the White House. After all, he alone, as he likes to say, he alone has sparked the greatest surge of civic  engagement this country has ever seen. Millions of Americans are stepping off the  sidelines and participating. .... People are swarming like antibodies to a virus … the immune system of the body politic is now kicking in.  The goal now has to be civic renewal—we need a new network of mutual aid, civic, social and moral character."  


How this can be done is by returning to the principles of John Dewey who believed that learning comes, not just from books, but by doing.  Eric Liu embodies these principles and he is speaking to wake us up. Thus the teacher, the writer, and the citizen of a democracy are all  practicing acts of faith, where learning and the thriving of a democracy become true through our best practices.
It will come, according to Dr. Liu, with the "savvy realization that we're all better off when we're all better off."

 
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I'm expressing my gratitude to the inimitable John Dewey.
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Collecting a History

6/4/2018

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The point of view of most history taught to American children is the story of our collective past through the deeds and writings of mostly white men. It is the job of historians to examine written works of eyewitnesses and primary source documents to first figure out what happened and then surmise why it happened. As Africans were torn from their homelands to serve as slaves across an ocean, their history was at the least ignored and might have been lost forever, if not for a man I never heard of: Arturo Schomburg.

Now he is celebrated in a glorious picture book: Schomburg: The Man Who Built A Library by Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Eric Velasquez. Born in Puerto Rico in 1874, a descendant of African slaves, young Arturo hung out with the cigar makers, who always had a reader of literature in the front of the room to engage the minds of the workers while their hands did their repetitive craft.

Weatherford’s craft as a writer is lyrical:

“So when his fifth grade teacher told him that Africa’s sons and daughters had no history, no heroes worth noting, did the twinkle leave Arturo’s eyes? Did he slouch his shoulders, hang his head low, and look to the ground rather than the horizon?

“No. His people must have contributed something over the centuries, history that teachers did not teach.”


Schomburg became an auto-didact and a U. S. immigrant. He then began his search for the lost history of the African diaspora.

“So he haunted rare book stores, poring over fragile pamphlets with torn covers and leather books with paper mites between pages.”

On every page, Eric Velasquez’s illustrations brings the man, and his discoveries of great people with African heritage to life. Weatherford includes just a hint of the depth of Schomburg’s discoveries, because, after all this is a book for children. Black heros, poet Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass and Haitian revolutionary, Touissant Louverture are properly memorialized with art and discussion. But I never knew African blood ran through the veins of Audubon, Dumas, Pushkin, and Beethoven.
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As you might have guessed from the title, Schomburg’s collection is now a library in Harlem, NYC. The richness and succinctness of Weatherford’s prose and Valesquez’s vibrant art indicate to readers how much more there is to black history if they only started digging for themselves.
Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library belongs in libraries everywhere, including mine.



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     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.

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