Barack Obama Being Adorable with Adorable Children
this actually makes me kinda tearful
this actually makes me kinda tearful
Howard University featured in Life Magazine circa 1946.
Yes she’s a Delta…. OO-OOP
My students and I were reading “Thank You Ma’am” by Langston Hughes. If you’re unfamiliar with the story, a young boy attempts to rob a bigger, older black woman on the streets of Harlem in the 1950’s. In an interesting turn of events, she gets the best of him, “kicks him square in his blue-jeaned sitter” and “shakes him until his teeth rattle.” If you don’t know the story, I encourage you to read the rest of it.
Anyway, I always tell my students to visualize what they read and to make personal connections. In the story, only a few people stopped to watch what happened. I asked the students what the people in their neighborhood would do.
One kid: Take out my cell phone and record it.
Me: And put it on worldstarhiphop.com?
THE CLASS: YEP!
The First Black Girl Scout Troop
via MadameNoire.com
This photo, taken in the late 1930s, is of the first African-American troop in the Dixie Region, which covered the Southern states. Source: Girlscouts.org
work with kids! I won’t discuss whether I laugh with or at them but I laugh!
I have one particular student who just can’t seem to turn down her hood when she writes essays. I told the class to include a simile in their narrative essays. She gave me “it was as dark as if the light bill wasn’t paid.”
Last week, they took a district test and had to write three essays. The first, a narrative, was about doing something you thought you couldn’t. She wrote about jumping a fence. In it, she included the simile “I ran as fast as a turtle on crack.”
Sometimes, the laughter turns to tears, however. The second essay was an expository essay in which they were to explain if it was better to believe in yourself or for others to believe in you. In this essay, she was completely unfocused and off topic but had the nerve to write “R. Kelly, Amber Cole, Chris Brown they are believers.” R. KELLY?? The man who recorded his sexual and piss-ual encounters with a child?? Amber Cole?? The teenager caught on video giving oral sex? Chris Brown?? The convicted batterer??
Chiiillle…
Now you caught my heart for the evening
Kissed my cheek, moved in, you confused things
Should I just sit out or come harder?
Help me find my way…
