Category Archives: Professional Development

Letter to Younger Self

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Dear younger Self, young Woman, “Babygirl,” these four things remember always:  

Pray. 

You are from women who prayed: Louvenia who blessed you before you were you. Bessie Mae who sang music into your bones. Eddie Carol who wove her work ethic into your heart. Prayer kept them. It will keep you, Babygirl. Solid. Whole. Unshakeable.   

Practice. 

You are from women of the pen:  Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Gloria Naylor, Lorraine Hansberry, and Virginia Hamilton who kept you reading – who breathed life into your warrior pen that kept you writing. Keep practicing, Babygirl. It will keep you. Focused. Honest. Strong. 

Persevere. 

You are from women of greens and cornbread: aunts, a mother-in-law, and Sunday school teachers who fed you from the wisdom of their scars, who carved steadfastness into your palate, who showed you how to rise. Keep keeping, Babygirl. It will keep you. Tall. Fierce. Wise. 

Play. 

You are from girls with pigtails: dancing barefoot in the rain on a sunny day. Hopscotch and Double Dutch and Simon Says and checkers-not-chess gave you charisma. Shootin’ marbles atop the Louisiana soil with girls who were emeralds. They made you. Witty. Spicy. Royal. 

Remember always, the women who raised you… to pray, to practice, to persevere, to play. 

With love and gratitude, 

Mary Lorraine, “Raine” 

On Black History Month

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Black History Month?  What’s the Point?

I usually introduce Black History Month to my students in August.  Then, we research as many other cultural and ethnic history and heritage months as we can throughout the year. 

I celebrate Black History Month with my kids and for my kids because I want them use this month to learn about others and about themselves.  Black History Month helps students think and learn about differentness so that sameness, and ultimately, oneness becomes more of a probability than possibility.

Brain researcher, Zaretta Hammond’s book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain explains the neuroscience behind the fact that the brain seeks to make connections to what is personally relevant and meaningful when it processes information for learning.  And she argues that what is relevant and meaningful to individuals is based on their cultural frame of reference.  From it, she says they gain perspective that engages attention, and assists in interpreting and inferring meaning. 

Her research posits that we learn from surface culture – holidays and music and food, the way we dress, etc., and from shallow culture – unspoken rules that govern the ways we see everyday norms – etiquette for sneezing in public, personal space, types of language we use in public v. private, etc.  We also learn from deep culture – what guides our values, ethics, spirituality, and how we view safety vs. threats.  She gives an example that in one culture, the color red could mean good luck – but in another, it could mean danger.  Hammond says we see and process information based on our own cultures, so if we are learning through our deep culture lens, we are only seeing the world with our value system.  So, I ask this question, “If what we know about another group’s culture is limited or just plain wrong, to what extent does this affect how we learn from and about each other and the world?” 

Differentness.

When I began teaching in the Central Valley over 20 years ago, I quickly realized that I didn’t know my kids and they didn’t know me.  We knew each other’s most generic cultural and ethnic stereotypes, but we didn’t have an academic understanding of culture and ethnicity that moved too much beyond stereotypes.    

In the Bay Area, I taught ELD/SDAIE and Comp. and Lit., (grades 10-12 in the same classroom).  My kids were primarily Hispanic, White, Vietnamese, Black, Chinese, Samoan, and Ethiopian – and all with similar socioeconomic backgrounds.  But unfortunately, I only saw the White kids as White.  I didn’t have a mindset to see their individual cultures and ethnicities, to see beyond the stereotypes. 

And whenever I’d ask the White students what their culture and ethnicity was, they’d usually say one of three things:  “American.”  “…a mixture of __ and __ .”  or “I don’t know.”  Black History Month helped me change this.  

The kids were curious about me – and I them.  They had made it through 11 or 12 years of school and had never had an African American teacher.  I learned quickly that if I were to garner the respect of my students and gain their trust and interest, I had to figure out who they were – and they needed to do the same. 

Black history month was how I introduced the spirit of my culture and ethnicity to them.  Their natural curiosity took over.  From there the real work began:  making studying culture and ethnicity normal rather than monthly. 

Sameness.

As educators, in addition to having knowledge about our content, I believe we would give our students this advice: 

  • Be good citizens of the world.
  • Know yourself.  Love and approve of yourselves.  Don’t apologize or have any trepidation for and about your culture and ethnicity. 
  • Don’t judge or criticize yourselves.  The world’s already got that covered. 
  • Don’t fear being trapped by cultural and ethnic stereotypes.  Know your history.  Understand the shoulders on which you stand and the responsibility you owe.  Know your strength.

Helping students heed these pieces of advice as they saw them take form when studying Black history, helped them take pride in discovering their authenticity through discovering their own cultures and ethnicities.    

In the twenty one years that my students and I studied the literary coursework, cultural history and social justice movements within the cultures and ethnicities always included meaningful texts.  Students began, for example, to see that the immigrant experience through the eyes of Portuguese American author Alfred Lewis in Los Banos looked much the same as it did through the eyes of Mexican American author Gary Soto in Fresno, or Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston in Stockton. 

They discovered that many other groups had history or heritage months and that many of the field-trip worthy places to visit were local.  In the course of twenty years, my BSU (Black Student Union) students, and students who were in my class took the field-trips below, which I highly recommend.    

  • Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD) – San Francisco
  • The African American Historical and Cultural Museum of San Joaquin Valley – Fresno
  • African American Museum and Library – Oakland
  • California African American Museum – Los Angeles
  • Museum of African American Art – Los Angeles
  • Marcus Books – San Francisco
  • Underground Books – Sacramento
  • African American Shakespeare Company – San Francisco
  • Dance Theater of Harlem – travels to UC Berkeley annually
  • Alvin Ailey Dance Theater – travels to UC Berkeley annually
  • Allensworth State Park – Earlimart
  • Various speakers at MJC, CSU Stanislaus, Merced College, and UC Merced

Among all the usual reasons to celebrate and teach Black History Month topics, consider that it is also a great way to get students’ brains into the habits of making deep connections that engender learning about the world, and most important, about themselves.

Link

On Music vs. Noise: 

Before we can fully embrace sameness, and ultimately oneness, we must choose a sensory experience with differentness.  With both hands, we must touch the walls of the unfamiliar space, walk in the tightness of the new shoes, and hear the heartbeat of another…and the music of the “other.”  If we look hard enough at differentness, if we let it seep into our collective consciousness, if we identify, analyze, and understand differentness, we eventually see sameness – even if we dislike the sameness we see.  Your blues don’t sound like mine — except when it does.  And…sameness (and ultimately oneness) can only happen if differentness stands tall – as its authentic self – with its authentic sound.  Diversity is R&B and classical and gospel and metal and hip hop and jazz and rock and country and pop and blues and punk and funk in motion, isn’t it?  A beautiful improvisation that, if we are mature enough, pushes us toward critical thinking so that we can hold divergent views in our minds and still navigate the same space in harmony, possibly agreeing to disagree, but living peacefully within the paradox, nonetheless.

Watch Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk:  The Danger of a Single Story

On Balance vs. Harmony

Isn’t this how beautiful music works?  You play a note; I play a different note; somebody plays loudly; someone else plays softly; and another is at rest, counting beats until it’s time to add more sound.  At rest.  Silent. Without silence, music cannot exist.

Beautiful music is harmonious.  Harmony is challenging.  It takes differentness and sameness operating in the same space, working together, creating beauty out of chaos.  Different notes.  Different timings and speeds – allegro and andante.  Different levels of sounds – loud and soft.  And those rests.  Those silent pauses that tell Differentness when to breathe, when to slow down, when to stop so that Sameness can play its notes.

Sameness is one sound.  Differentness is another.  The notes come together in balance.  In the key of C or another.  The same key on the staff.  Then otherness comes.  Harmony.  Different notes and different chords in the same key to birth a whole new sound.   Each note, being its authentic self – each note working together to find its way within the grand design to find its way to harmony, to oneness. We can make harmonious music or cacophonous noise; it’s all in the mindset; it’s all in how hard we’re willing to work for it.

On Working for Harmony in the Classroom

I teach diversity daily.  Every good teacher does.  We help the diverse students in our classrooms own and hone their authentic voices and help them carve out, figure out, the value in the content of their voices.  We help them speak their truths, treating everyone with kindness, dignity, and respect.  They learn to speak their beliefs, attitudes,  thoughts, feelings, emotions, and values without devaluing, marginalizing, and erasing other voices.

This is hard.  Striving for harmony is hard.  A zillion components go into the mix, enter the conversation about how to do it.  Of the many methods, here are mine:

My Lesson Plan Food for Thought

  1. Give students provocative texts to “read” (include video excerpts, visuals, and audios) regarding the diversity concept you want to engage.  Whatever topic is current in the news is a good choice – whatever they want to discuss is another good choice – or whatever topic needs a light shed on it because it’s invisible.  I chose to focus on Racism.  The Black Lives Matter Movement held up a light to the young voices in our classrooms and pointed out what was already in the news:  a barrage of unarmed black men getting killed by police officers in American cities large and small.  Our nation had some challenges.  Our school had some challenges.  Our classroom had some challenges.
  2. Add different voices to our Western Literary Canon.  Of course Shakespeare and Steinbeck are still in the orchestra, but I added black voices, especially those of black men.  We read Ta-Neshisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and Brent Staples’s Black Men in Public Space.  We went to TED Talks for Stu’s ” Black Men Ski,” Tony Porter’s, “The Man Box” , James Baldwin, Dick Gregory, James Weldon Johnson, my father, brother, sons, uncles, and many, many others.  It was important to hear black men play their authentic notes, speak with their authentic voices as they entered this conversation on racism.
  3. Teach them to discuss – not debate.  In the latter, there are winners and losers.  The former posits the idea that understanding the issue from multiple perspectives is the single most important purpose for the discussion.  Sometimes students agree to disagree.  Sometimes they see the other person’s truth as part of their own.  They first recognize and understand difference – then they get to sameness – and ultimately to oneness.
  4. Teach them five types of listening:  listening to paraphrase and summarize information; listening to learn and comprehend information, listening to analyze and evaluate information, listening to empathize and feel others’ thoughts and emotions, and listening to appreciate the truth and beauty of what someone is saying is what REAL listening is about.
  5. Give them discussion resources:  supply them with great discussion handouts that delineate the “rules” of student-run discussions; have them develop their own discussion norms; show them videos on how to have discussions; have them make their own videos; teach them to create their own discussion questions; let them listen to audios of student-run discussions; be sure they have their discussion journals and reading logs during the discussion (for resources, see maryasgill.org)
  6. Give them writing situations throughout the unit:  my students have “DAILY WRITE” notebooks on their computers or in composition notebooks.  When they enter the room, they see a quote or question or prompt to which they respond before the discussion begins.  They write before and after group discussions and whole-class discussions.  They research information generated from their questions.  They write reflections after the discussions.  It is through the writing that they internalize their thoughts enough to have a verbal conversation – enough to add their authentic notes to the song that is America, the song that is the world.

Resources:

TeachingTolerance.org – Educating for a Diverse Democracy

Yale Center for Teaching and Learning

Know ELLs – Ning for Teaching English as a Second Language

The song that is America and the world is being created daily with many instruments that play different notes.  Sameness, balance, means that if you play a B-flat and I play a B-flat, we are the same, we found balance.  Understanding that we are all human beings and that there is only ONE race – the human race – is a laudable notion.  Yes, we are all the same.  Yes, all lives matter.  Yes, we all bleed red blood.

The problem with only looking at sameness, though, is that we are too quick to get there.  We are too quick to erase, or marginalize differentness.  When we do this, we get to sameness, and we find balance, but we do not have harmony.  If everyone in the orchestra that is America and the world plays only B-flats, we are the same, but we do not have music.  We only have the warm-up for what the real music promises to be.

We must each play our authentic notes if we are to continue to create a new song.   Balance lets us all know that we all matter.  Harmony helps us understand why – that some notes matter more than others at certain times in the song, and that every song requires silence.  Without it, there is just noise.

The goal, then, is not to emphasize only Sameness – but Differentness  – and ultimately, Oneness.  One song, many different notes.  One world in harmony.

Drop me a line if you know of other great resources for teaching Diversity in the classroom.

…so that life is always good – no matter what.

Mary

 

 

On Moving and Thinking Slowly

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As a child, among the best times I’ve had in my life were my summer visits to rural Louisiana to sit on the front porch with my great grandmother to think through her paradoxical questions and watch the sunrise. She would rise from bed, put one foot on the ground, ask me a question no eight-year-old could possibly answer, put the other foot on the ground, breathe deeply, then start her day: pick lemon grass from the garden, brew tea for us, get her bible, and walk outside to the front porch to have communion with God, Stella (her canary), Jacko (her dog), and me, her tiny visitor from New Orleans, a place she said “moved like it was on fire.” She would spend an hour or so reading the bible to me and asking me questions about life, love, and all things that required me to slow down and think before I attempted an answer.

I didn’t know it at the time, but as I would reflect on those visits through a series of writings done in myriad teacher seminars via the Great Valley Writing Project in California, I began to develop a philosophy that has shaped my life as a mother, wife, teacher, and former child of a frenzied life: slow is good. I move slowly. I think slowly. I learned to wake up early so that I could wrap myself in the stillness of the morning, so that I could harness the peace to carry me through my day, so that I could slow my pace if I forgot to breathe. I learned to slow my thinking so that I could think well.

Because I intend to continue my focus on thinking well, I take (free) online courses – one my sister-in-law, Dr. Claudette Asgill, introduced me to called Coursera, where I discovered the class Social Psychology – designed to introduce students “to classic and contemporary social psychology, covering topics such as decision making, persuasion, group behavior, personal attraction, and factors that promote health and well-being,” as the course’s professor, Dr. Scott Plous, writes.

My purpose in taking the course and joining Social Psychology Network (SPN) is to continue to stay focused on thinking well. Good thinking requires slow, deliberate movement: learning and unlearning, making mistakes, relearning. It requires the know-how to find peace in the middle of storms. It requires that I understand current realities and create new realities to help me solve problems and work through tough situations. Thinking well requires that I continue to grow at my own pace – so that through and with my students, I change the world one idea at a time.

So, I am part of SPN because I cherish good thinking. I am a teacher from a small town who wants to give the gift of slow moving and good thinking to my students, as my great grandmother, in her small town, gave to me. Though she is no longer on this earth, she is with me, drinking lemon grass tea on the porch, asking mind-blowing questions that enhance my thinking, watching new sunrises every day. SPN is one of those new sunrises.

Have you discovered any (free) online courses that have enhanced your thinking in some way? If so, how has connecting with people from around the world honed your thinking skills?

Jot me a line…and remember that life is always good – no matter what.

Mary