A Class Activity With Two of My Youngest Students

It has been a while since I last posted.  I began writing a serious post this week which I hope to finish in the coming days.  

Today an activity in one of my classes evolved into something unplanned that I wanted to share here. 

Most of my students are college (university) age and professionals.  I have a three hour Saturday class of three girls.  The youngest is ten years old, and the other two are about thirteen.  Today there was an activity in their English book (Your Space 2 published by Cambridge University Press) that called for the writing of a short rap song using the words "have to."  One of the girls missed out on this, unfortunately, since she was absent. 

While the girls were writing their rap together it came into my mind that they should film it on their phones.  They both have phones. In fact, the ten year old is the owner of an iPhone. Before I could express my brainwave Edanaz, who is ten, asked if they could have time to rehearse their rap and then film it.  I eagerly and totally agreed. 

We tried to film the rap inside the classroom, but the video came out too dark, so the girls gave me their phones and I filmed the rap just outside on the balcony.  Here's the final result with my two cute students.  :) 

İngilizce kursunda yaptığımız çalışma :))
Posted by Zeynep Sude Kasap on Saturday, April 25, 2015

Eagerly Climbing Mountains to Get to School

We take so much for granted in America.  We don't have everything we need such as a healthy and affordable food supply for everyone and some other things, but we do have a degree of freedom unlike these Palestinian children in the video.  They literally have to climb mountains and walk through the wilderness to get to school.  Their parents understand the importance of education and that their enemy can take everything else from them except their education.  This video needs to be shown in many places across America. 

The Palestinians are prisoners in their own land.  They've been boxed in, banished, walled in, chased off, bombarded, humiliated, and still they encourage their kids to go to school to learn and not to play, socialize bully, and date. 

African-Americans parents really need to see this.  Yes, we don't live in a post-racial society, but imagine if your children had to get up at 4AM and ride a donkey to a school that is two hours away. 

Schools have been renovated and rebuilt in my town almost each year for the last several years.  They have added extra centers of learning for high school students, but here the graduation rate is still only 70.1%.  For the state where I reside it is only 69%.  The school district thinks it's an achievement to be a point higher this year than the state. This is not an achievement.  Still 30% of the students are falling through the cracks, and it can't be blamed on all the teachers either. In some areas of the country which are predominately African-American the rate is only 50%. 

In some ways we have it worse than the Palestinians.  For one I seriously doubt if these children come from homes where the women are single.  Illegitimacy is rare in the Muslim world.  Depending on the country, you could pay with your life if you had a child out of wedlock.  Marriage, family, community, and if existent tribe and clan are still important. The idea of the "strong" individual alone and without support is alien to the mindset of most people in the Middle East, Africa, and many Asian cultures.

So how do we blacks in America rebuild ourselves?  It takes a home at a time working on itself and the children.  We African-Americans need to start marrying again and teaching the children that education is a foundation and ticket out of ignorance and self-destruction.  Being a rapper, singer, actor, preacher, or a ballplayer are not the only options for us.  There are so many different careers, and you don't have to be rich and in the spotlight to be happy and fulfilled. 

The Palestinians are isolated with no one to look out for them.  The Israelis sometimes come in and bulldoze schools making it very difficult for Palestinian children to go to school. 
These Palestinians in the video are prisoners in their own land, but still they are attempting to build a future for their kids by encouraging them to get an education no matter what. 
They make no excuses. 

No one can save African-Americans now.  There's few that even care. Obama doesn't care.  The "messiahs" and "Moses" of the past failed to get most of us out of bondage because the biggest bondage of all that most of us have is in our own minds.  We have to free ourselves one individual at a time.

If I could have convinced more slaves that they were slaves, I could have freed thousands more. ~ Harriet Tubman

Rather a Brief Manifesto

It has been awhile, but I am here once again. 

I am better and more relaxed with taking standardized tests than when I was younger.  Saturday morning I took the certification exam for my state in early childhood, and if I passed it will be added to my middle grades and high school English certification. 

I am planning to re-enter the teaching job market here in the USA full-time.  I feel I am needed, so here I am.  I will not return idealistic like I was as a youth.  I return a realist and pragmatist, so therefore I might be able to survive this time.  I will be up against a lot, so God give me strength.  The familial decay, especially in the African American community, and the overall social degeneration that was evident when I was a young teacher, is three or four times worse now than it was when I hired for my first job as an educator.   

I am not sure if I passed the exam yesterday, but I don't think I failed either.  At my old high school, I finished all 120 multiple choice questions and four short essays in less than the allotted four hours.  Many many people were there taking exams.  I was relaxed and used the tactics for doing a standardized test I actually learned from teaching my students strategies for the TOEFL exam in Turkey five years ago. 

The first time I took a teaching certification exam near the end of my graduate studies, I passed it, but I knew few less back than about test taking I did this time.  In the past, I was a very nervous test taker.  I don't think I even studied for my first teacher's certification exam, yet I passed. 

In the last 12 months I really started to ponder how can I be of use to my people here.  I go to Walmart (don't particularly like it, but I go)  and see some of the elementary school kids I work with through substitute teaching, and some of them come up to me with hugs.  I get hugs from black, white, and Mexican kids, and I'm not even their regular teacher.   There is one little wide-eyed Mexican girl that even if she is with her mother or father at Walmart she leaves them and comes up to me with a hug.

Nowadays so many children are falling through the cracks.  It almost seems to me that a lot of people are in denial of this.  There is so much apathy and denial.  Kids aren't little birds or other baby animals who by instinct can strike out on their own early.  They need good parents and good teachers who guide them. I don't think a lot of kids get any love from their parents. The parents themselves don't really know what love is.  I don't agree that teachers should be surrogate parents, but the society we live in is forcing teachers to change diapers in early Headstart classrooms and teaching morals in first grades.  I see it in my town, and I wonder what the devil happened, but I don't have to really wonder.  I know.  

I see the society collapsing, and I know the problems are too big for me, but what is the little bit I can do right here in the place of my birth?  So I hope to come back and be a servant (teacher). 

I was also talking with my mother yesterday saying I am thinking of doing the research on how to run for mayor of my town. LOL Yeah, I'm really thinking about it.  Getting involved in politics is not my cup of tea, but what else can I do around here to help?  I am not bragging, but I'm not your typical black woman or woman in general. The people who know me are aware this is the case.  I was always different.  I will die a person who isn't afraid to be my true self. I've had a lot of experience with people of many races and various cultures.  I am a cultural hybrid, West and East, but I am more a person who leans towards the outlook of my African side and see things like an Eastern person.  What can I bring to the table here in this place? 

I'm something of a news and political junky but the stress?  The corruption?  Me mayor of this small city with a huge university and a rather exceptional public library?  But who knows?  At least I can do the research and then decide if I might take on such a challenge. 

Most of the population my small Southern city is black.  Outside in the suburbs where I live the population is more mixed.  However, the city  limits has seen some gentrification in the last few years for the renovation and building of housing and flats geared towards university students who don't want to live on campus or can't find space there.  My town has never had a black mayor to this date.  In recent years, all the mayors have been white women.

I keep asking myself what can I do, and with my sometimes not so great health, am I tough enough?  Mom in all her wisdom even said that running for mayor is very stressful.  She doesn't know what the first steps to take are, but she is right that it is a stressful proposition. 

For sure I want to bring back the idea of the public servant. The day of the leech, parasite, and mafia needs to come to an end.  But then again sometimes I just want to drown or bury myself in poetry because I really don't like the lime/lame light at all when it comes down to it.  hehehe  The lame light has led some folks to an early death...  #randoms

Gangnam Style in the Classroom: Randoms

This is going to be rambling, but here I go.  This was post was stimulated by what I saw in a classroom yesterday, but I will get to that later. 

Years ago after frustration and feeling the heartbreak that I was not appreciated as a teacher and had gotten the worse of it because of my race, I said I would never teach in America again.  I turned my back on my profession, my people, and the society.  I felt that my principal, many of my black students, and some of the white parents had taken my good intentions, enthusiasm, dedication, and concern slapped me in the face with them, threw them on the ground, and trampled them all underfoot. 

I had gone into my profession idealistic and ready to go, eager to make a deep and positive impact on young lives, but instead I had been faced with bad grades, indifference, breaking up fights in the classroom or having to run to one of my male colleagues to break up the fights, being cursed at once by a student, a parent who made it painfully clear she didn't want me to teach her little blonde daughter solely because I was black, another who subtly complained because she didn't like the fact that I taught her blonde son three different subjects. You see a black person even with a masters degree couldn't possibly be capable of giving her son a quality education because the few of us who got that far were just benefactors of the handout called affirmative action and were naturally less qualified than whites.  I faced a parent who complained I was giving too much homework, extracurricular activities were more important for her daughter than doing work at home to reinforce what she had been taught in the class. 

There was so much I faced as a young teacher so that after two years I said never again.  My soul had been slashed by knives.  My spirit deflated.  I rejected another contract for third year at that school, applied and was accepted into Peace Corps, went to the African nation of Botswana, enjoyed myself there,  felt more at home in Africa than I ever had in America, loved my students and my international set of  colleagues from various African, European, and Asian nations, loved one man in particular, it was a great romance, but it was not meant to be, came back home and went through a very dark period in my soul, recovered from the depression, and in the last few years taught English occasionally in Turkey. 

It is not easy being an educated black woman in America.  I have an Eastern bent to my mentality than most of the people I live among.  I am a hybrid of sorts, American in name but more Eastern than American.  African Americans used to be closer to our African counterparts on the continent and other Eastern people back in my grandparent's era.  My mother's parents were very much like some African and Middle Eastern people.  They were deeply religious and unselfish.  Even though they were poor they helped those they knew who were poorer and more desperate. They were devoted to the well-being of their families, hated divorced, were well liked by their communities and even by many of the whites they knew.  These were the heroes I looked at and were influenced by including my mother who is just like her beloved mother and father. They live on in her and in two of their other surviving children.  I didn't have to look to the TV and have some celebrity or sports figure as my role model.  I lived with and visited my role models. 

It is not easy to live in America.  It's even more difficult and lonely if you refuse to model yourself after everyone else.  The is a recipe to being an American, and most people follow that recipe.   Blacks expect you to be just like them, and whites expect you to be a version of their envisioned stereotype.   All my life I have longed to be free to be me, not have some vision of who I am supposed to be imposed on me by my own people or white people. 

I would say that life has gone nothing like I had hoped partly because I was very different from most in my environment from almost the very beginning.  At various points in my life I have been an outcast.  Other times I was applauded, usually by foreigners and a few others.  I've had few real friends. Either I got bored and frustrated with them or they got bored with me.  I refused to settle for less, so I have been often alone with mainly my family except in the last few years.  For a long time I have felt more at home with non-Americans than I have Americans.  I am not an optimist like many Americans.  I am more of a fatalist and realist, but I am attracted to mysticism.  The world of the mind and of a higher plain outside of what we can see with the physical eye is more real to me sometimes than the absurdity of this world.  

I have come back and for better or worse I am going to try and help my people again.  I have been substitute teaching randomly in the last several years when I was not teaching English in Turkey.  When I was certified to teach in my state, I could teach anywhere from grades 4 to 12, but after elementary school I was confined to only the subjects of social studies and English which are my two favorite areas.  If the children in these groupings are not taught love of learning and respect for teachers and other adults by this age there is very little that can be done, I feel.  This may sound harsh and discouraging to some, but by second or third grade many kids in this country are infested with arrogance and dislike learning.  Many including people in the government blame the schools, but few are courageous enough to blame the parents, but maybe they don't because of their own guilt over their lax parenting.  Some say the schools are grooming kids for our prison industrial complex, and yes the way some schools are formulated, this is probably true, but a lot of parents are also aiding in their kids' downfall.  Then at the same time there is the threatening cloud of the state taking away people's kids if there is the accusation of abuse which can come even if a parent is not being abusive, but is only trying to discipline an unruly child.  The system we live under craves more prison inmates and just sits there like some big predatory fish with his mouth wide open for small fish to just swim right in.

Next week I begin an experiment to help my people. I will be teaching a course at a local community center on African historical figures from J.A. Rogers' first volume of World's Great Men of Color.   I have Facebook friends who live in other countries, a few who help and try to enlightened others.  They have been a big influence on me and an inspiration even though I haven't met any of them face to face.  They write prose and poetry, have gatherings to talk about geopolitics and write articles about wars and their consequences. Some are guests on international news networks that I watch online.  Some have gone on peace missions, and organize and go to demonstrations.  In other words they are trying to make a difference, a phrase commonly said in this country.   I am invited to some of their gatherings, but sadly I live too far.  Even though my residence is in a small city with a huge state university, this place is an intellectual and cultural wasteland.  I was a part of a writer's group for almost four years, but no deep and honest critiquing of anyone's work was done, When the leader of the group become so self obsessed, stop coming with anything to read and only wanted to talk about gifts she got from her grandson and men, I quit silently without saying another word to her or sending an e-mail.  I was also a part of what I call a pseudo-intellectual group run by some so-called friends who are Turkish.  They are mostly doctoral students, but they don't seem to have the dedication or level of knowledge to be Ph.D candidates. To me is it very strange to sit in a room with a group of people working on higher degrees who are too afraid to voice their own opinions.  I got tired of being one of four openly expressing my views in that group when all the rest were too afraid to open their mouths.

Recently I was invited to a gathering of black ladies, but after sitting through a presentation given by the head of the local Red Cross, a middle aged, dyed blonde, fat, white female who acted like she was still God's gift to men I said I would not go to a second meeting which I was invited to.  I've so tired of going to some prosaic gathering dressed up as something interesting and refreshing when it really isn't just to get out of the house.  I like my own company better than being bored to the edge of insanity.

As to Gangnam Style, it has replaced one of Justin Bieber's songs in some of the elementary schools here.  The pre-K and kindergarten set require more than Mary Had a Little Lamb and The Itsy Bitsy Spider nowadays.  Such nursery rhymes and childhood songs just don't cut it with kids raised on TV and Gameboys.  Learning must be backed up by entertainment or the kids go cold to it and stay jittery.  Yesterday I worked in a pre-K class and the parapro couldn't get the kids to pay much attention to swaying houses with lyrics about numbers and days of the week, but when she pulled up a version of  Psy's Gangnam Style on the smart board, the kids were all eyes.  They wouldn't dance before but when Psy and a woman dancing in hot pants, garters, and police cap got on the screen they did.  At four they are already being conditioned to become disciples of fads and commercialized entertainment like the rest of the population.  Today's media is extremely adroit in indoctrinating all ages.  It was sad to see that early they are learning to conform to what doesn't promote art and culture, the here today gone tomorrow opiates that the media pushes down their throats.  Learning for learning sake died some time ago in this country.  It is advocated in educational circles that education and entertainment must be wed in the American classroom.  American kids need an assortment of extras to get excited about learning.  Still so many of them fall short.

I liked the parapro at the school today.  Despite hating her choice of putting up a video of Gangnam Style, I guess she felt the only way she could grab the attention of a large class of 4 year olds, a number of which were highly jittery was to start up a popular pop song. She and I sat together at recess and talked, finding common ground since both of us plan to take the state teacher's certification exam this spring.  She even asked me about myself.  Often as a substitute teacher and being a black woman people just expect that you probably have only a high school diploma or less.  Most don't ask me about myself. Living abroad where people were often curious about me resulted in my being spoiled a little. I was more visible abroad and sometimes got weary of the attention.  At the schools here they probably couldn't imagine that I have taught both here and internationally and that I have a higher degree.  Sometimes as a substitute I feel invisible, but I make myself feel better about that invisibility by conducting myself professionally and dressing better than the majority of the teachers.  I still believe in professionalism in attire on the job.  In Botswana and Turkey the standards for dress at work were higher than here.  It's difficult for me to go to schools and see teachers dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and some even showing cleavage.  What happened to high standards and dress codes?   

I don't worry so much about the majority or white culture around me.  My concern is for my people.  I am not sure there is much hope for us locked into an alien identity that has scarred us.  I am not saying that all white people are bad, but there is so much that is wrong in the culture which destroys lasting human connections on so many levels.  I remained connected to my ancestral values mainly due to how I was taught by my mother and witnessed from her parents.  My father is very American in his outlook.  He admits that even as a child he dreamed of having what white people had.  His family was not close and very dysfunctional.  He and some other family members say they don't like having people coming around visiting all the time.  In all the years that he visited his in-laws he never allowed himself to open my grandparents' refrigerator once even though almost everyone they allowed into their home were treated with hospitality.  You're at home, my grandmother would say.  I wonder how my grandparents felt about my father never trying to really make himself at home for all those years.  Dad's mother grew up in an abusive and violent home and then married my grandfather who drank, was abusive and unfaithful.  He said she would tell him to never accept food at the home of his friends even if he was offered it.  I feel the suspicion, competitiveness, narcissism, and paranoia that some of the members of my father's family have, including himself, are some of the worse symptoms of white American culture.  However, despite the differences I've had with my father and continue to have I must say that one spot I praise him in is that he has successfully run a small business for many years and states that black people must become more independent, productive, and have their own businesses.

So this is my rambling post.  I guess I just wanted to get a few things off my mind even though this was inspired by seeing little kids dance to Gangnam Style in a classroom.  I wonder often where are we going as people.  It never gets better despite all of the so-called improvements, all the "grand" propaganda that is touted.  It will never get better until we examine ourselves and realize where we are heading.