Aim for the Head, Fred!

I'm just trying to figure out who to throw my shoes at--I know I'll definitely need more than two of them! Clearly we are all deeply affected by the reality of the inequities in our system, and I think it's cathartic and good for our hearts to share the impact this exposure has had. I can tell from previous comments we're all on the same page here, ready and willing to do something to turn things around. For me, it has peeled off a veil of ignorance, exposing me to issues which are normally carefully hidden. How do we turn our anger, frustration, shock and outrage into actions which will make a difference? It's gotta start in the classroom, one student at a time--being open to others' voices, their cultures, their realities--and build out from there. Since Monday I've thought often about Zalika's story from her teaching experience in California, how the values and culture her African American kids were raised with were so foreign. Showing them another way, the way it needs to be at school, and asking them to leave some things they don't need at the door--they can retrieve them later on the way home, if needed. As much as we want to, we can't change everything in the lives of our students, but what we can offer is a different experience inside the walls of our schools, and our classrooms. Sure, kids need to adapt, and they will. But the onus shouldn't be solely on the children to do all of the changing--teachers need to adapt to their kids, too, as Delpit deftly delineates. How to make the needed adaptations within the framework of our conformist system? There's a lot of work to do there, and even more outside the educational institutions in the larger societal system. This is where it really starts to feel daunting and overwhelming and out of our grasp. So I say, let's vow to start our personal revolutions by bringing it down to a level we can control, and give the best we've got to each and every kiddo in our schools whose lives we touch.