Tag Archives: Latism

Education By Example

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As a teacher, I have often wondered how best to involve parents in the education of their children.  In my school experience, I’ve often heard that children learn from what we do, as well as what we say.  And a couple of recent experiences in my own home, with my own children, have shown me exactly how important it is to be actively teaching my children, as my parents did for me, by being the type of involved parent in their curricular and extracurricular education: I need to educate them by my example.

A few days ago, in conjunction with the national observance of Columbus Day, my children were exposed to what I felt was a one-sided, celebratory portrayal of Colón. For reasons too numerous to mention here, it was important to me to address the presentation with the person who spoke, and to speak with and teach my own children that evening.  I talked to them both about what was missing from the presentation they witnessed, and about my speaking up and meeting with the presenter.

The lessons I hoped to impart were at least two-fold: first, that Columbus was an explorer who brought knowledge of the new continents back to Europe at a time when they could exploit that information, and then took slavery, disease and oppression back with him on his second journey to colonize in the name of Christianity; second, and more important, is that I taught them how to speak up, even to people who have authority over them, when they believe that something is wrong, or someone is wrong.

I’ve written before about the importance of teaching children that they can change the world only if they speak up, and that they have a moral responsibility to make the world a better place by speaking truth to power when necessary.  As a parent, it’s imperative that I make this lesson clear by acting in the same way I expect them to act.

The second event was a sixth-grade science project which landed (to my surprise) on our dining room table late the night before it was due. Tired as I and my wife both were, we both realized that this was an assignment that our son would need our assistance to complete, a truth that was confirmed by the title of the assignment, “The Family MythBusting Project”.

Knowing nothing about the project (my wife had a little more information that I did), I had to read the directions and help him navigate his academic work. By working with him – running to get supplies, asking him questions to see what he had learned, having him teach me what he knew, letting him stay up a little past his bedtime to finish and staying up with him working – we showed him that his education, that his work was important. While the veracity of Power Balance Bracelets isn’t life-changing (he determined that they don’t really work), the memory and impression of his parents spending the time with him, challenging and learning with him, supporting him as he educated himself will.

I started this blogpost by saying that I am a teacher.  Todos los padres son maestros.  All parents are teachers.  We teach children by our example what is important, what they should focus on, how they should interact with each other and others, and how they impact and affect the world.

If we complain about teachers, but don’t speak to the teachers themselves, then we are teaching them cowardice. If we have issues with their schools, and we take those issues to the schools, we are teaching them to be assertive and have an impact. If we speak Spanish at home but make sure they learn English, we are teaching them to have more tools in their toolbox. By speaking up for bilingual education in schools, for smaller class sizes, for qualified teachers, for equitable distribution of education resources and attention from local and national governments, for Mexican American Studies Departments and Curriculum, for Indigenous People Day and whole host of other issues, we are teaching our children that they have value, that their education has value, and they should raise their voices to secure their birthrights.

When we do that, that is the moment they learn. Es el momento en el cual entienden. We are educating them by example.

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It’s the media…the social media, that is.

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UPDATE: It seems fitting that this is the post I wrote yesterday, the day before the passing of Steve Jobs. While I avoided the terms iPhone, iPod and iPad, Job’s visionary genius and Apple’s leadership in terms of technology are the foundation and infrastructure upon which these social media tools depend, and are the hardware students are using and will be using for years to come to access the universe we all inhabit. While the company will continue, and his spirit of creativity is no doubt imbued into the philosophy and plans for the future, his creative vision will be missed. Thank you, Steve.

“Social Media” conjures up a variety of thoughts and images: kids hunched over their smartphones in groups, not speaking to each other but laughing about the text they are sharing; teenagers or college students snapping pictures of each other, posed and unposed, and uploading them to Facebook for consumption by that website’s “more than 800 million active users”; people wasting time in front of screens, mobile and desktop, instead of talking to each other or appreciating nature and athletics. All of these pictures portray a negative, narcissistic environment doomed to collapse under the weight of it’s own self-indulgence. But what if they’re wrong?

Mobile computing, social media, smartphones and iPads are toys that adults are turning into tools (or tools masquerading as toys) that have the power to transform education as we know it. Latinos are already the largest ethnic group of users on Twitter and Facebook. Rather than fear this fact, muttering to ourselves in Spanglish about how children are spending too much time playing on their phones, we need to encourage them to put those tools to work, creating a revolution inside the classroom, inside the schools in this country, inside our minds to empower our children.

The power of social media played out earlier this week when thousands of people, Latinos and others, logged in to Ustream to participate in a town hall on the state of education in the Hispanic community with US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. What was notable was the immediate access and interaction granted the citizens of the United States via Twitter, allowing real time interaction with the man responsible for shepherding education policy in the United States. We got to ask questions, from the philosophical to the financial, and get some answers. It will play out again when people from across the country gather in Chicago next month for the LATISM National Conference. Imagine if we shared that power to learn and interact with our students.

Teachers are already finding that student success is increasing using technology and social media across the country. It simply takes a shift in thinking to understand that what our kids are using for fun can be used to teach them both the content and skills, that the same apps and sites they’re using to KIT (keep in touch) can be used to create songs, films, podcasts that speak to who they are and share their gifts and talents with a larger world.

In doing this, using new technology and social media to interact with their own education, they will learn that the power to transform the world rests in their hands; the tools they need to impact their school, their neighborhood, their city, their state, their country can be used inside the classroom as well as with their homies.

And there is definitely an app for that.

Originally posted 10/03/11 at Latinos In Social Media for Edu-Wednesday.

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Books Before Pencils

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Princesas para mi Princesa.

There were books in my parents’ bedroom. There were books in my parents’ office.  There were books on my nightstand with pictures in them before I could read, and books with words and pictures after I learned.  I learned to speak when Winnie the Pooh asked Christopher Robin for some honey, sounding out the words to make sense of the pictures, or the other way around (I’m not sure). And my parents read to me at night, sending me to sleep with language and pictures that I made up to see what they were reading. The input was more important than the output before I went to school.

Necesitamos poner libros en las manos de todo los ninos Latinos y Americanos y Latino Americanos, también, y temprano mas aun.  Early childhood education begins before children set foot in school, before they pick up a pencil. It is the basis for, and a strong indicator of, academic success as they get older. With “less than half [of Latino children] enrolled in any early learning program” we are sending them into schools un- and underprepared to learn, without the language to articulate their difficulties.  And, on top of this, there are other forces standing directly in their way once they arrive.

In her book, The Latino Education Crisis, Patricia Gándara examines the structural and societal obstacles to educating Latinos in the United States.  From political pogroms like Arizona’s attack on the Tucson Unified School District’s highly successful Mexican American Studies program, to the current vilification of illegal and legal immigrants (read: Latinos) in state legislatures across the country, Latino children’s educations are being thwarted with devastating impact.  “Only about half earn their high school diploma on time; [and] those who do complete high school are only half as likely as their peers to be prepared for college,” and “only 12 percent of Latino students are completing a Bachelor of Arts degree.”

The Obama Administration has begun to address the external obstacles.  The Department of Education and the White House recently coauthored a report “Winning the Future: Improving Education for the Latino Community” which identified not only the status of education amongst Latinos, but also begins to at least articulate changes in the structure of public education to benefit them as well.  And in Tucson, current Latino students are using the oldest method of expression, direct protest, to stop people interested in the demise of Latino education.

Politically, those of us in advanced years, having matriculated from educational institutions or simply left them, need to begin cultivating candidates and politicians, like President Obama, of whatever political affiliation who understand the importance of giving Latino children a Head Start, and making sure that those early childhood education programs are financially accessible.

Most importantly, though, and most immediate, is we need to get them books.  Books with pictures before they can read.  Books with pictures and words after.  Books in English and books in Spanish.  Books before pencils. The input is more important that the output before they go to school. Books.

Cross-posted at Latinos In Social Media for Edu-Wednesdays, May 4th, 2011.

New Latino Majority Creates New Challenges for CA Schools

Improving Latino Education to Win the Future (blog post)

Winning the Future: Improving Education In the Latino Community (report)

The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies

TUSD ethnic studies meeting changed to Tuesday

“Why Don’t More Latinos Graduate?”, LATINA Magazine interview with Patricia Gándara, May 2011, p. 110

My Parents Are Teachers

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Nine years old and college-bound

Lately, this blog and my voice have been getting some airtime and attention.  After years of working and learning, of writing and speaking, I accept those because they feel like acknowledgement of hours spent hunched over a notebook, hands stained in ink, mind churning as I analyze the history of this country, and the relationships and roles my peoples play in building that history each day.
But, in that attention, I need to admit that I haven’t done this on my own.  I need to admit that I have stood on the shoulders of giants, and taken the next step.  When I was nine years old, my grandmother, then going back to school to complete the college degree that had been interrupted by marriage, World War II, and raising four black women during the Civil Rights Movement, asked me if I was going to college.  Being the precocious (or obnoxious) child that I was, I simply answered,

“You’ve met my parents.  Like I have a choice!”

My mother and father made clear, not by telling me but by showing me with the stories of their lives and the actions I witnessed, that my education was important.
Since I began kindergarten there has not been a parent-teacher meeting, a Christmas play, a championship soccer game (maybe not championship,but…) that they didn’t change their schedules to support.

1985 never looked so good!

They also showed me, by their vocations, how important education is.  My father moved our entire family across the country as he earned his PhD at Georgetown, investigating and teaching the best methods of learning for students whose primary language isn’t English.  From the Montessori classroom to the US Department of Education, my mother has kept her hands on the pulse of learning her entire adult life.  I say these things, not as braggadocio, but echoing the awe that others speak with when meeting them.
They’ve always been my mom and dad, and I’ve always known that education was important because they showed me that it was. They watched the morning news and talked about it with me, even when I wanted to watch The Justice League, even when I didn’t understand what they were talking about. Now a husband and father, I’m doing these same things for my children because that’s how I learned, and that’s how I’ve become successful.
As I watch Arizona attempting to kidnap the future in this country; as I watch the Teachers in Wisconsin being vilified rather than lauded; as I watch public education being turned into assembly lines for manual labor, I have to stand up and say My Parents Are Teachers.  I have to stand up and say that it isn’t the American way to cheat children of their futures, and to keep families ignorant and afraid.  I have to stand up and say THANK YOU to my parents, for teaching so many years in the classroom, and teaching me out of the classroom when to stand up. From my work with Latinos in Social Media to my support for the public workers in Wisconsin, the lessons that I’ve learned, that my parents live, resonate each day.  This seems like a good moment for me to give thanks.

Thank You, Mom.  Thank you, Papi.

From UCLA to the President’s Advisory Board for the National Institute of Literacy, Thank You.
From the University of Redlands to the United States Department of Education, Thank You.
From Olin Street to Almansor Street, Thank You.
Your examples continue to inspire me, and to show me how important learning and education are.  And so I’ll continue doing my best to Spread the Word.
As I continue fighting Arizona, fighting Wisconsin, fighting ignorance and oppression across the country and the globe, I have to say thank you for arming me with the tools, the desire, and the knowledge to do so.

My parents are teachers.  And they’ve taught me quite a bit.

La Familia Macias in 2011.

 

Epilogue: This post was catalyzed by Univision’s Es El Mometo initiative, which began because too many Latino students in the United States don’t have the blessing of parents who know how the education system works, or have walked through it themselves.  The matriculation rates for Latinos are far below other ethnic groups in this country.  One way we can improve this fact is greater parent involvement, and greater awareness on the part of families of the requirements for students to graduate and go to college. As my parents have been involved in my education, we need to educate, inform and get parents and caretakers actively involved.

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Kidnapping the Future

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“I believe that children are our future…”

-Whitney Houston

Two native-born citizens of the United States.

The Future

Arizona is trying to kidnap the next generation of Latinos in the United States.  Rather than simply legislating that brown people are bad, or that Latinos are only allowed to work as gardeners and nannies in the Grand Canyon State (because neither of those would be politically correct), these segregationists are giving President Obama and Latino-America the finger by attacking children, taking away their citizenship, native language, education, and ability to “Win the Future”.

Jan Brewer, the Republican governor of Arizona, coupled with State Senator Russell Pearce and a Republican-controlled state legislature, has already declared it legally acceptable for law enforcement to stop citizens who “look Latino illegal.” When pressed for a description, though, they were unable to provide one.  What did happen after the passage of SB1070, though, is citizens of the United States with Latino heritage, Spanish surnames, or brown skin were stopped and harassed until that law was struck down by a federal court.  Now, the racists and segregationists have shifted tactics and targets. The laws proposed violate the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States because they:

  1. deny citizenship to children born in the United States to undocumented parents;
  2. create “non-citizen”- and “citizen”-stamped birth certificates;
  3. deny medical services/public education to “non-citizens” born in the United States;
  4. require school teachers, administrators, and hospital personnel to determine citizenship status/deny services; and
  5. forbid “non-citizens” from driving, and impose jail-time for those who do (and confiscate their legal property for Arizona’s benefit)

The new proposed legislation, then, is creating a segregated society by stealing the citizenship of native-born United States citizens. The coded language, calling their targets “illegal” and focusing on “immigration”, allows them to navigate the mainstream media with their racism only being called out by those they’re targeting.  This battlecry of “illegals” and “taxpayer services” hides in plain sight the determination by Arizona Republicans to sweep the state clean of brown people.

Arizona is proceeding like Germany in the 1930s, scapegoating a single group through discriminatory legislation, incrementally stripping them of citizenship, due process and access to services, and forcing them to vacate by creating a climate of persecution, harassment and suspicion.  Though these laws, like the previous attempt, will be found unconstitutional if they are passed, it is a wake-up call for Latinos and the United States that they are garnering enough support to be moved out of committee and voted on by a state legislature.  In fact, these proposed laws and the copycat legislation in 15 other states should give all Americans pause.

Kidnapping is a crime to be punished, not a method of governing a state or the nation.

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