@edutooters #edtooter
Have been disappointed by the silence of the grand jury system in the US media. A good day to teach students about how grand juries function.
"For potential felony charges, a prosecutor will present the evidence to an impartial group of citizens called a grand jury."
“Calling experts to safeguard cultural heritage in Ukraine – apply now. The European Commission has published a call for experts to safeguard cultural heritage in Ukraine. The deadline to apply is 25 April 2023”. #CulturalHeritage #Ukraine @academicchatter @histodons http://culture.ec.europa.eu/node/2965
@mguhlin how timely is that?
"What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody’s history, you must lie about it all." https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/baldwin-talk-to-teachers via @ZingerLearns
I appreciate his point to and calling out white liberals, it hits home :)
Thanks for sharing this powerful piece by Baldwin. I had never read it before. This opening portion is where I'm at:
"The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not...."
continues...
"To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish."
Some of the best learning about marginalized communities can be had from listening to members of that community speak to each other about their problems. One of the situations where lurking is encouraged!
I learned a ton about what would help reduce Asian hate crimes, by listening to Asian women talk to other Asian women, without me or other non-Asian folk speaking.
I don't need to speak to contribute to the conversation or support a community. Being present and listening, *is* participating.
@edutooters #edutooters
It's the first day of the term and we are going to be discussing Baldwin's A Talk to Teachers.
I reread it every couple of years, and this year, it continues to strike me how a paper written 60 years ago remains so relevant right from the start..."we are living through a very dangerous time." We could change a few words and it could pass for a paper recently written. It's a real indictment of how much farther we have to go educationally.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/baldwin-talk-to-teachers
The powerful uncropped version of the photograph 'Tank Man'. A nameless hero who stopped a column of tanks on June 5, 1989, a day after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was ultimately ushered to safety by fellow protesters, and his identity remains unknown to this day.
#Iconic
It's time for me to tell the tale of the most recent bad review we received at our coffeeshop.
We don't get bad reviews often! We're a good shop with good pricing and fast service and friendly staff and literally the best coffee you can get for at least an hour in any direction.
But sometimes we get bad reviews from tourists who are upset that we are a coffee shop and not a breakfast joint, and sometimes we get bad reviews from bigots who are upset that our staff is mostly queer and about half trans or that our floor manager is an indigenous woman. Sometimes they'll complain about our music (https://mountaintown.fm slaps, fuck you.) and sometimes they'll complain about the fact that we're "too woke", presumably because we have some queer and trans pride stuff hanging inside, and we don't police the queer and trans price stuff that our staff wears, and we sell radical literature (and we write, publish, and distribute radical literature, but most of the time the people who are complaining don't know that.)
None of that is what we're talking about today, though.
Now that they're coming under attack from the right, it's useful to be able to point to the benefits of social-emotional learning (SEL) programs. A new review of 12 metaanalyses comprising >500 research reports finds significant positive effects: https://is.gd/NXmxPq
I appreciate your first point, definitely not an issue of sticking neck out, just limited purview.
To your latter point, I just have deep experience in one narrow aspect that I do not think is worthy or sufficient for a single letter, which I see as a disservice to the student, and combining would make a much more well rounded letter.
It's an interesting situation and the first time I have run into this :)
This is my hope :)
@ZingerLearns @edutooters I think the more important part is to indicate which aspects that you are commending were witnessed by both of you, and which ones from each one of you. That way, it does not look like you were not wishing to stick your neck individually out, but really is a matter of both wanting to contribute collegially from your own experience.
Another approach would be to have a recommendation from each of you, indicating each one the period/project that you’re covering…
@ZingerLearns @edutooters Interesting. A "we, the undersigned" letter of recommendation sounds different and powerful, actually.
@edutooters
Has anyone ever written or seen a co-written or group letter of recommendation?
I am in the process of writing a letter of rec in collaboration with someone else and am curious about insights anyone might have.
I did not feel I could speak about the student enough to write an entire letter (they did some work with me) so we decided to co-write.
My kids are looking for colleges, so I made a site with college info that others might like: https://collegetables.info/. Includes info like faculty and student demographics over time, finances over time, abortion access in the state, state rep support for same-sex marriage, what fields students graduate in, etc.
It's open source (https://github.com/bomeara/collegetables) and uses #rstats and #rmarkdown
Please let me know what other sources of data would be helpful!
STEM teacher educator. Humanizing teaching and learning. Believer of student brilliance. Luddite. Disbeliever of silver bullets. Nobody is coming to save us. #Edutoot #Ungrading #STEMed
@ungrading @STEMed