Sketchbook

The Rosa Parks article that was assigned this week was a version that I did not know and it was not taught in school. The article describes it as the “Rosa Parks and the Bus Boycott” version due to every textbook having the same version [Kohl, H. The politics of Children’s Literature; What’s wrong with the Rosa Parks Myth. Zinn Education Project 1-6.] The article was insightful and it gave a description of Rosa Parks interview about her arrest. Articles like this ones, where the information is reliable and the author is just stating the facts, helps analyze the events of history from a critical viewpoint. Such texts also makes teachers ask why history has been taught a certain way and why certain facts are omitted from the students. With such thought, I decided to include a video about the school system which it came out a few years ago. The video is a simulation of a court case which the people are suing the school system because it does not benefit the students and the teachers follo...

The introduction of History as a Weapon reminded me of a history class I took here at the University of Houston, the professor started the lesson with a question in which he would answer throughout the lesson. When I first took history courses at the University level, I felt that I had been lied to my whole life because the history that was explained at the University was completely different to what high school teachers told me. The first thing that I did after a few history lectures, I decided to not think about what I “had been taught” in high school. Every week there was a new idea or a thought that conflicted with me, I either was surprised or interested at what had happened. Whenever I learned something interesting such as the reason for Thanksgiving or the way that religion was forced to Indians among other history topics, I was amused of how much it had been kept from me and the nature of people and their actions towards others that were different than them. A Brief Histo...

Last year I was placed at a local elementary school from the University of Houston, I was there for 7 months. I was in a program called AmeriCorps and my position was a literacy tutor in that elementary school. After reading the first chapter of Black Ants and Buddhist, I couldn’t stop thinking about the student that I had that year. The text described the teacher been removed “from the ghetto (Black ants and Buddhist. p. 1)”. In my experience I was placed in a low socioeconomic community, the school had a 400 student population and the majority of students were African American followed by White and Hispanic. I knew the situations that my students were going through, some mornings they came to school the way they woke up. For breakfast they ate everything, since they were hungry. On Fridays, an organization left bags with food for the students due to the limited access that they had to it. The teacher I was helping out would tell me about the life that the students had at home. The...