Into the Outside

In Search of Holiday Cheer

While there are many exciting things to do during the holiday season in NYC (think ice skating at Bryant Park, watching the Christmas tree standing bright at Rockefeller Center, heading down to the holiday market at Union Square, and sitting on Santa's lap at Macy’s), I recently came across a few activities I had not, until now, thought about doing. In my research about early American History to tie into a curriculum I am working on with a 7/8th grade teacher, I came across an event listing on the website to the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan that read: “Kwanzaa 2007.”

A quick search on the web led me to the Official Kwanzaa Website, where I read that Kwanzaa is a pan-African and African American Holiday, celebrated for seven days from December 26th to January 1st every year and created in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga. The celebration of Kwanzaa involves a commemorative display on a piece of African cloth consisting of seven colored candles (black, red, and green), representing the seven principles of Kwanzaa (unity, self determination, cooperative economics, creativity, collective work and responsibility, purpose, and faith), two ears of corn for the children of the community, a unity cup for pouring libation to the ancestors, and African art objects and books. Karenga is careful to emphasize on his website the importance of the values behind the holiday and the care and artistry in which one should practice the rituals. 

So if you are feeling enticed, you may want to consider paying a visit to some of the locations and events below. And who knows, you may even end up finding (or making!) a different kind of gift this year.

African Burial Grounds on December 22nd or 27th - Free workshops on Adinkra Appliques, Beading and Stories, African Puppets, an African drum ceremony and spoken word presentations on the history of the lives of the people buried in the Grounds.

American Museum of Natural History - an afternoon celebration on December 29th (12 – 5pm)

The Charles A. Dana Discover Center inside Central Park - an evening lecture by George Edward Tait, Poet Laureate of Harlem, also on the 29th (6:30pm), produced by the Central Park Conservancy and the Museum for African Art.

Enshrined Memories at the Brooklyn Public Library

If you haven't had a chance yet to check out the Enshrined Memories: Brooklyn and the Civil War exhibit at the Brooklyn Public Library's Central branch, try to get there before it closes on January 5. The exhibit, curated by Green-Wood Cemetery historian Jeffrey Richman in partnership with the library, is an impressive and reverential tribute to Brooklyn's enormous contribution to the culture of the Civil War. At the outbreak of the war, Brooklyn was the third largest city in America, a natural provider for the supplies and manpower that fuel a war economy. And as we are discovering more and more through downtown excavations and new scholarship, Brooklyn was also a hotbed of urban abolitionism. Brooklyn Heights was full of clandestine Underground Railroad stopovers. The renowned abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher attracted throngs from all over to his anti-slavery sermons at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims on Orange Street. And poet Walt Whitman, an outspoken abolitionist in his own right, was editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle until he was removed in 1848 for being too radical. Enshrined Memories paints pictures of each in effective, broad strokes. But it also personalizes the soldiering experience through letters and uniforms, watercolors and tribute books, creating individual profiles in courage of colorful Brooklynites who fought, many of whom are buried in the borough's Green-Wood Cemetery.

NYTimes article: "On the Trail of Brooklyn Underground Railroad"
NYTimes article: Underground Railroad on Duffield Street
NYTimes article: Dispute over Duffield houses

I have a background in American Literature, so I'm always looking for a literary hook in the exhibits that I encourage teachers and students to explore. And here, on a first-floor, back panel in Enshrined Memories, I found one: The Prentiss brothers were two Brooklyn boys whose wartime rift - one fought for the North, the other the South - became an emblematic, nationally-known tale of the "brother against brother" cliche. Both were wounded in the same battle, and the poet Walt Whitman, one of Brooklyn's favorite sons, was their nurse. The classroom possibilities for this story seem endless! Whitman's war poetry, the wonderful Drum-Taps, would be a great place to start reading; his later poem "The Wound-Dresser" is also accessible for many students. In their digital collection, the BPL maintains an online catalog of Brooklyn Daily Eagle papers from 1840-1902. Remember that before he was a volunteer nurse, Whitman was the Daily Eagle's editor until his fiery and vocal antislavery views forced him to write elsewhere. And the Library also maintains a Brooklyn in the Civil War site, with lesson plans and timelines that cover Whitman, the war, and much much more. Whitman's wartime trajectory - from abolitionist editor to field nurse to poet-chronicler of the war experience - is about as inextricably bound with the ebbs and flows of the Civil War as any Brooklynite's. A whole series of lessons might be constructed around views of slavery and the Civil War through the eyes of Brooklyn's own Walt Whitman.

Though the Enshrined Memories exhibit is closing so soon, its content will live on at Green-Wood Cemetery, and online in BPL's many digital collections. The Whitman hook is just one way to combine the exhibit's stories with classroom learning in ELA and social studies. But I urge you to go see the exhibition for yourself, maybe over the holiday break, to start thinking about all of its possible tie-ins. It think it's not just a limited show about Brooklyn in the Civil War, but it chronicles the larger story of New York City's significant and ever-shifting place in American history.

Holiday Celebrations at an International School in Tokyo

I'm not sure if you've gathered this from my postings, but Japan is a really funny place. Here's an example--I've read that somewhere between 2% and 6% of the population is Christian in Japan. The main religions here are Buddhism or Shintoism (or a combination of the two). But, let me tell you, Christmas is HUGE in Japan. The Christmas music, decorations, lights, shopping rival New York in its robustness. I was shocked this year when I started hearing Christmas carols in stores immediately after Halloween (another big holiday in Japan). As I type this, the shops are packed with people purchasing Christmas gifts and trees to put up in their homes. But, where as in the US Christmas is fundamentally a religious holiday (despite the commericialism), here the holiday is purely consumer: you won't see a nativity scene decoration, but lots of Santas and snowmen and trees and lights. I've found the phenomenon of Christmas in Japan to be both entertaining and perplexing.

Because of the popularity of Christmas, I was very surprised about what happened at my daughter's school. We posted a sign-up sheet in the classroom for parents to volunteer to come in and tell the class about their special holiday. As I've written before, this international preschool is truly the United Nations of 2 and 3 year olds. Madeline, my daughter, is the only caucasion American in her class; we're Jewish, so I visited the class and read some Hanukkah stories, played dreidel, and showed a menorah. We had people volunteer to talk about Thanksgiving and the Indian holiday Diwali, but no one was signing up to talk about Christmas! As the weeks went by and the slot for Parent Christmas Visit remained blank, I became more and more amused. In the States, of course, this would never happen. I knew that some of the kids in the class had to be Christian, plus Madeline has several Japanese classmates who clearly enjoy the Christmas consumer holiday I mentioned above. Finally, Sofia's dad who is from Ireland but has lived in Japan for 12 years and is married to a Japanese woman, signed up, he even came in dressed as Santa and gave the children little gifts to bring home.

I enjoyed how the holidays were handled at our school--everyone got an opportunity to talk about their own celebrations and religions. It seemed that no two children shared the same background-everyone was something different--which I think is such a valuable environment for young children. I liked that Madeline could learn about everyone's different celebrations and feel that her own was as unique and special as the other children's.

Uncle Jed's Barbershop

The second graders I work with are opening up their own stationery store.  They spent much of the fall conducting market research: interviewed local residents and each other, polled the school community, and asked questions about what the community needs, and wants.  They determined that their neighhorhood lacked, and needed, a stationery store.  By mid-November they were ready to start drafting business plans.  So I scoured the Internet for a read-aloud that would, in a perfect world, dovetail with their NYS second grade "My Community" curriculum.  I wanted a book that fully and positively detailed a community, but also outlined some of its challenges.  I wanted to find a book that would express a community's needs and wants, one of the essential learnings for the unit.  And I wanted a book that would help the students understand that many people satisfy the needs of a community in many different ways.  In retrospect, maybe I wanted too much out of a single book, for a single lesson.  But I found a perfect fit.

Uncle Jed's Barbershop, by Margaree King Mitchell, is a simple, beautifully illustrated story (by James Ransome) about a selfless man whose lifelong dream is to own a barbershop.  Told through the eyes of his young niece, it also tells a tougher, simultaneous story about prejudice and segregation, about the Great Depression and the economic, spiritual and emotional hardships of the time.  The book is often taught in Civil Rights units, or it could be a helpful Social Studies text for lessons on sharecropping and the conditions leading up to the Great Migration.  But as I read it over, I realized that on the surface, it was the story of a man who saw a need in his community and worked hard to fulfill that need.  It was, in essence, the story of someone who drew up his own business plan, pitched it, executed it, and opened his shop.  I hoped the students would make a connection between Uncle Jed the entrepreneur and themselves.  So after the read-aloud they answered three questions: 1. "What was the store he wanted to open?", "Why did he want to open the store?", and "How will the store benefit the community?"  These comprehension questions became a separate, blank worksheet.  Now the students would have to answer the same three prompts, but as they related to their stationery store.

There are so many books, many of them time-tested in the classroom and quite excellent, that we pigeonhole as "Civil Rights books," or "stories about the Revolutionary War," for example.  But the most fruitful core texts are multiuse, about many different things - historical periods, people, genres, styles - all at once.  I started thinking, "If a 'Civil Rights book' can be an effective read-aloud for 2nd graders studying community needs and wants, then there must be more books that can just as effectively re-framed and re-purposed.  Maybe we should change the old adage to something like "You can't judge a book by...the way it's been taught before."

 

The Family Vacation

I remember being a kid and taking family vacations during school -- nothing extraordinarily interesting just visiting the grandparents in Florida. I also remember my teachers piling on the homework for the lessons I would miss while I was gone.

Now as an adult, my little family and I just took a vacation to someplace much more extraordinary for us Americans. We visited Singapore and Thailand. While I was gone, I was thinking about what a fantastic opportunity family travel is for school teachers to help educate their classroom about the world. Not every American student gets the opportunity to travel to Southeast Asia, but every trip is an experience.

For me, growing up in Pennsylvania, visiting Florida was not too exciting. But, I'm certain many of my classmates had never been to Florida, had never left the state or been on an airplane. What would have been interesting was if my teachers had asked me to report on cultural or environmental differences I noticed during my family vacation. I'm sure this would have make me look deeper at my surroundings rather than just thinking of it as another trip to see the grandparents. Upon my return, I could have shared my experiences with my classmates.

With the holiday season coming up, it could be a good opportunity for students to report on and share their experiences outside the classroom with their classmates. The one student who visits Upstate New York might have some interesting tidbit to share along with the other who went to see family in Central America or the Midwest US. Travel should be an opportunity for students to take note of their surroundings and what is different culturally, environmentally, ethnically. By assigning them to report on their experiences, they will certainly notice things they wouldn't have otherwise.   

History That Breathes

When I think back to my elementary public school education, I suddenly remember with a jolt how social studies was always my worst subject. I have never been good at remembering facts and dates, and I wasn’t all that interested in kings, presidents, and wars. I struggled to come up with this fill-in-the-blank or that multiple choice answer from the information that punctuated my texts books, and most of the time, and with great dismay, I could only conjure up an indecipherable wash of times and places that never yielded me a correct answer.  Only when I got to college, and I think this is true for most American students, was I introduced to the idea that history is a work-in-progress, that it is written by people, for people, and that it is constantly changing.

The incident that spurred on my elementary school reminiscing was a comment made by a an eighth grader during a visit I took with the class to the Museum of the City of New York:

“How do they know that’s what it looked like back then? How do we know they’re right?”

The students were looking at a large 3-D model of the Dutch settlement in Lower Manhattan in the 1600’s, marked with dirt roads, simple wood houses, and vast plots of farmland. The educator silenced the room in order to point out how remarkable that particular question was, and she answered it by citing the documentation of maps, drawings, writings, and portraiture that all went into the formation of this picture of Lower Manhattan based on the material recorded by the Dutch. What she did not go into (most likely due to do the time restraints we had for our visit) was that these attempts to record history, to distill it in time, are accounts, informed by plenty of research and cross examination, but they are subject to interpretation, starting from the primary sources of those who were present at the time.

What struck me most about taking this group to the Museum of the City of New York was that it made tangible something that is very hard to grasp as a young student. These students could recognize images and artifacts from their own city, some that span back 400 years, and begin to make connections to the objects, people, and geography of the city they know and experience today, allowing them to viscerally understand the transformation of a city over time. They could begin, however rudimentarily, to understand the study of history as a living, breathing organism that also has a life of its own.