Search

This will be the 10th year of participating in Mix It Up for Kirbyville Middle School. We have decided to hold a Mix It Up Day each quarter of the school year, rather than just once a year. We held our first one this school year on Friday, Sept. 17. Students picked a playing card from a deck of cards and sat at the corresponding table. I had placed several conversation starter questions at each table.

Critical literacy is just as important for visual texts, such as cartoons, as it is for the written word. This toolkit will help your students read Sikhtoons while thinking about the social justice implications.

As a class, develop a working definition of human rights.

Growing up, no one told me that people shouldn’t be gay. My parents didn’t tell me I shouldn’t talk to kids whose parents were lesbian. My neighbors didn’t rant against the horrors of gay rights. Instead, all the people in my life encouraged me to live openly, to take people’s personalities and see the beauty in them, to smile at the adorable young couple clutching each other’s hands, no matter their gender. Love was love. I lived in a world blissfully ignorant about the cruelties of the “real world.”

The undercurrent affects my classroom. I can feel its tug and see its effects but can rarely locate the source or the exact flow. Cruel taunts and gossip are the culprits behind my students’ tears, stony faces—their anger and their fear. The ferociousness of the few vicious communications I have been privy to as a high school teacher caught me off guard. High school can be a shark tank and the blood flows with every passing class period, thanks in part to the popularity of online social media. I feel helpless to save the victims because I don’t even know who they are half the time.

Recently, after reading a story about a bike messenger in a big city to my kindergarteners, I asked the students if being a bike messenger was a job they might like. I also asked them to clarify why it would or would not be.

Recently I suspended a seventh-grade boy for publicly calling his former girlfriend a “slut” and a “whore.” Our rules on slurs are clear. But as I learned again, talking about something in class doesn’t always affect student behavior, especially if the unwanted behavior isn’t corrected or condemned outside of the classroom.