The Things That Bring Me Joy - Knowing that @LBility's Students Will Have an Experience with Text That Lures Them Into Reading and Global Awareness

A woman said to me yesterday - a non-educator and Fox News consumer - that the reasons teachers are leaving in droves across the United States is because of the Woke curriculum being force upon them. When probing it further, she reported it's all over the news. I had to scratch my head, simply because I don't know of a school in the United States who are forcing books upon kids. Rather, I know that some books are more relevant to the heterogeneous populations in schools and when these books are brought into them, the young people devour them, want more of them, and engage in higher order thinking skills that are championed by state and national standards. 

In the six or seven schools I attended this past week, the vast majority of teachers had little opportunity to teach, because districts were mandating test preparation in order "to improve reading scores," bypassing opportunities to read any substantial text. Instead of good books and engaging conversations, students were given test prompts and assignments to set goals for themselves to do better on these tests during the next round of testing that will come next week. In others words, teaching has been replaced with teaching and reading has been kicked out of the classroom, except for test-instruction.

27 years teaching has helped me to value teacher expertise, youth voices, practices that work, and intellectual curiosities that schools find helpful to teaching, but this has quickly become restricted by top-down administrations. Brilliant, hard-working, and passionate educators (heck, I was one of them) leave K-12 teaching because their hands are tied, they can't do what is best for kids, and the nation has politicized instruction with this anti-school sentiment. Stellar teachers cannot shine if they are eclipsed by imbecilic paranoia on a few news channels and the frenzy over state test scores that do little to offer insight on reading proficiencies. 

This is why I cherished Lossine Bility's call yesterday after he sent me a photo of him reading one of the classroom books I gave him and Abu for their schools (class sets). In his words, "The kids are all reading. Administrators have even taken note." Why? Books like When Stars are Scattered, a graphic novel, teaches young people about immigration, refugees, global inequities, perseverance, hope, narration, and truth. This is the enemy? Well, to some people. 

Reading has become scorned and, alas, poor instruction prevails as it fails the young people in our schools. Book challenges harm what schools are designed to do...to teach young people to be readers, thinkers, writers, and doers. 

I'm going into the weekend frustrated: we need awesome educators, kids deserve the best schools, but our systems are failing both. I'm not sure that the lobbyists and capital-manipulators who wish to decimate public schools should have the upper hand, yet the do (and poor Florida. I'm so sorry for all the young people there). We should be fighting this nonsense wherever we can. 

Find good books. Listen to teachers. Volunteer at a school and observe for yourself what works and doesn't work with the minds of youth. Don't tweet, repost, or listen to idiots who are simply fabricating falsehoods out of their ignorance and fear.

Read. Get an education. THINK.