I can read what I write and what other people can write for me to read.
BIG Child-Centered Workbook 1965
This terrific big work text for kids begins with a Read-Aloud Animals Everywhere Rhymes. Easy to recite, echo, memorize, dance to, sing or copy as a handwriting practice.
Hickory Dickory Dock
The mouse ran up the clock
The clock struck one
The mouse ran down
Hickory Dickory Dock
An Animal Story page allows plenty of room for a student to draw a picture of a favorite animal and then write a story. From there we go to Farm Animals, Zoo Animals, Animal Riddles, Animals In The Clouds, Animal Tracks and Crazy Creature Animals.
On The Top Of The Crumpetty Tree
The Quangle Wangle Sat
But his face you could not see
On account of his Beaver Hat
(Edward Lear Nonsense Poetry)
The literary concept of Riddles as Puzzles is introduced.
Who lives in a straw house in a tree and hides her babies from you and me? Who lives in a hollow tree in the wood that he fills with nuts for his winter food? Ethel M. Wegert
A series of Critical Thinking Skill Exercises Featuring The Use Of COMPARISON: I Can Run As Fast As… I Can Eat As Much As… I Can Play Like…
There is a page dedicated to good old-fashioned pasting Cut-Out Animal Pictures.
Animals In Clouds Activity offers a lovely Read/Recite Aloud poem entitled CLOUDS.
White sheep, white sheep on a blue hill
When the wind stops you stand still
When the wind blows you walk away slow
White sheep, white sheep where do you go?
The Quangle Wangle’s Hat
These work texts are meant for work. They spread out nicely on a flat surface. They are made of sturdy paper strong enough to withstand the pressure of primary pencils, glue pots, thick crayons or watercolor painting. Each page is perforated and can be torn out for display at school or at home.
Level II Unit 3
Book II blends Literacy + Science + Child as Weather Observer. A 9 year old boy named William contributes a poem he authored.
THE WIND
The Wind! Wishing, Swishing, Howling, Pushing.
That’s the wind. The wind is cold. The wind is chilly. Wind! Screeching, wheezing, Breathing, freezing. That’s the wind! Dash!
Tumbleweeds roll, trash cans crash, SMASH!
The dirt flies high, dust gets in your eye. That’s the wind!
How about a page for recording Figures Of Speech Similes?
It is cold as ice. As hot as an oven. As scorching as the desert. As sweltering as a sauna. As fresh as a daisy. As silent as a snowflake.
Rosenwald Schools Between 1917 and 1932, nearly 5,000 rural community schoolhouses, modest one-two-and three-teacher buildings known as Rosenwald Schools, came to exclusively serve more than 700,000 black children over four decades. It was through the shared ideals and a partnership between Booker T. Washington, an educator, intellectual and prominent African American thought leader, and Julius Rosenwald, a German-Jewish immigrant who accumulated his wealth as head of the behemoth retailer, Sears, Roebuck & Company, that Rosenwald Schools would come to comprise more than one in five Black schools operating throughout the South by 1928. Smithsonian Magazine
Arthurdale Community School
The New Deal Era Arthurdale Community School stressed education for real-life situations. Arithmetic was taught by showing children how lumber was measured to build a house. The revival of traditional Appalachian music encouraged students to strengthen their reading and writing skills by making up calls for community square dances. Fiddles and guitars were built in shop classes.
Chicago Handwork Classrooms
Industrial Arts/Correlated Handwork Classrooms In Chicago Public Schools 1910-1930’s.
The School In Rose Valley
The School In Rose Valley was established in 1929 by families from the local Pennsylvania Arts and Crafts community who sought a creative, student-centered alternative to traditional education.
Cambridge Nursery School
Cambridge Nursery School was founded in 1923 by noted educator Abigail Eliot who believed in “children’s imagination, and in giving children a chance to do the things which they naturally do and to grow at their own pace.” Abigail Eliot was guided by the belief that young children learn much of what they need to know through play.
Water Work
Pouring, scooping, splashing, floating, buoyancy, flowing, filling, measuring, estimating, manipulating, lifting, observing, talking, problem-solving, communicating, enjoying and sharing the wet watery space. Detergent squeeze bottles, old plastic medicine jars, perforated berry baskets, funnels, flexible, plastic tubing of varying length and diameter, plastic medicine droppers, poultry basters, bulb ear syringe/aspirators, corks, plastic measuring cups, plastic water jugs pint, quart, gallon, mini bike pump, battery-operated fan, clear plastic eye dropper, salt shaker, wide variety of sponges.
More Please!
More Please! What a fun image. Their leader is learning how to dish out what looks like a great big serving of safely warmed mashed potatoes. Now imagine that The Adult Kitchen Cook has told our hostess that there are 6 to be fed and each scoop is 8 ounces or one cup per girl. Nothing more needs to be said. The Math is left to sink in and percolate.
Bathe The Baby
Bathe The Baby Math-Health-Science Center Includes: Sponges, infant soap, shampoo, oil, washcloths, hooded towels, diapers, powder, wipes, baby scale, bulb ear and nose aspirator, thermometer and an oral medicine syringe.
Each item has a name with a vast universe of language and experience attached to it. Over time and with practiced usage, children will acquire a very sophisticated vocabulary & understanding.
Big Motor Work
Core strength, motor planning, and coordination. Tons of Fun. Shifting their weight and stabilizing their movements. Focus, spatial awareness + muscle control. Center of Body Mass. Center of Body Gravity. One Big Rocking Good Time For All!
Mable Hillery was a singer of Georgia Sea Islands children games, dances, plays, fantasy songs, blues & spirituals. She was known by school teachers for developing teaching manuals and audio tapes that preserved traditional folk songs from The Georgia Sea Islands.
Mable worked with Interdependent Learning Model’s Follow Through Program housed at 144 West 144th Street. It was a part of the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. This program developed materials for classroom teachers seeking to preserve & highlight Black culture.
Ms Hillery worked on cultural projects in Harlem. Specifically at Public School 76 located at 220 West 121st Street. She also worked with six schools in Atlanta. And eventually instructed at Bank Street School Seminars. She was especially devoted to recitals of “play songs” for Black children.
Her workshops often combined children, youth and adults. They were definitely not sit down affairs or staged events. Participants could choose just to observe, but everybody was involved one way or another.
From Mabel we learned never to judge a book by its cover. Someone might be sitting on the sidelines out of shyness. But if you studied their face, you saw the interest, the concentration and the absorption.
A favorite play song routine was titled Little Johnny Brown. It was lots of fun and very humiliating for all of us who joined in. It went like this.
“Little Johnny Brown. You spread your comfort down. Little Johnny Brown spread your comfort down. Fold one corner Johnny Brown. Now fold another corner Johnny Brown. Fold another corner Johnny Brown. Yes fold another corner Johnny Brown. Now take it to your lover Johnny Brown. Take it to your lover Johnny Brown. Show her your emotions Johnny Brown. Show her your emotions Johnny Brown. Now lope like a buzzard Johnny Brown. Lope like a buzzard Johnny Brown. Give it to your lover Johnny Brown. Give it to your lover Johnny Brown.”
The humiliating parts were the required actions. The dance began with a big circle. One person was chosen to play the leader role of Johnny Brown. That person was given a piece of fabric to symbolize a comforter or a quilt. And when the big group sang “Little Johnny Brown spread your comfort down.” The leader placed the quilt on the floor in the middle of the circle and began artfully or humorously dancing to each corner folding them one by one. Taking it to Your Lover involved some completely silly, improvised movement. And Lope Like A Buzzard had you flapping your wings and imitating any type of chicken dance you could manage.
Absolutely hilarious and a terrific group builder as well. Everyone laughed. Everyone enjoyed the antics of the Leader. Inhibitions began to melt away. And often as not, friendships were formed. This was the genius of Mable Hillery. She was a Community Organizer Georgia Sea Islands Style.
Mable Hillery never-ever forced participation on anyone. Water was allowed to seek its own level, so to speak. Reticence was respected and protected. She told us quite explicitly not to try and remember the words to the songs “perfectly.” We were humans. We were artists. We were teachers and students all rolled into one. And we kept the traditions ALIVE by adding our own pizzazz to the mix. We also used our own voices. No recorded music. No instruments. No technology of any kind. These were street games, stomps, songs, hand-claps and chants. We performed them and enacted them as if we were on a neighborhood corner, a playground, an open field or a coastal Sea Barrier Island Sandy Beach.
Mable Hillery
Another favorite was “Chicken And A Chicken And A Crowd Of Crows.” This one was a hand-clap which could get as complicated as your eye-hand coordination permitted. Or could remain as basic as a simple patty cake clap.
But the words told the story of a witchy woman who liked to steal chickens. It goes like this. “Chicken and a chicken and a crowd of crows. I went to the well to wash my toes. But when I got back, my chicken was gone. What time was it Old Witch? It was a 1 o’clock. Say 1 o’clock.” Everything gets repeated taking us from 1 o’clock straight up to 5 o’clock. And each time a number is shouted we paused, threw one hand up into the air and waved it, along with our hips, turning about as if we were the stars of a full-on Hokey-Pokey production.
This song held the flavor of a mysterious island childhood. Where a community well became the focal point for all manner of public rituals. Washing dusty feet or cleaning a freshly butchered chicken only to lose it to a thieving, creepy crone. Exciting stuff!
Just so we are CLEAR! This is The Georgia Sea Islands Brunswick Georgia History that Mable Hillery married into.
“On February 21, 1891, almost exactly 129 years before white vigilantes fatally shot Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia. A mob of white men lynched two Black Men named Wesley Lewis and Henry Jackson. Just outside of Brunswick. Without trial or investigation they were hanged from a tree, riddled with more than 1,000 bullets & then left on display for thousands of white spectators to view. As one newspaper described the scene:
…the population of Brunswick turned out en masse to visit the scene of the lynching. Vehicles were at a premium and it is estimated that more than 3,000 people made the trip to Dent Swamp during the morning. A few hundred yards away from the improvised gallows a country church was in full blast, and the singing of hymns almost within sight of the dead negroes.”
Mable’s work was always a powerful tribute to these very people and the trauma they had endured for generations. Buried in the belly of the Plantation System brutality emerged a deep, intelligent, delightful, creative & subversive repertoire of music, myth and mischief. This was the treasure teachers were given.
The universality of these songs and games is both stunning and reassuring. 30+ years of sharing them with people of all ages and incomes confirms their enduring appeal. They sound REAL. They feel like stories that happened to someone & somewhere familiar. They are so authentic that they stick in your throat and in your muscle memory. Therefore, they are easy to remember and reproduce vocally and motorically.
Folklorist & Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax thought so highly of Mable’s work that he wrote this to The Ford Foundation.
April 7, 1969. “Mable Hillery, and the Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick have had great success in improving the atmosphere and the educational exchange in Harlem School PS 76, at 220 W. 121st Street. They did it by bringing to the kids the complex and culturally rich folk songs and dances of the Southern United States. A pilot experiment is ready to be set up involving Mable Hillery and Reverend Kirkpatrick and the Sea Island Singers in the New York City school system.
Last year these two Black friends of mine, Mable Hillery & Reverend F.D. Kirkpatrick, who are ‘natural educators’ and also great singers of folk songs, worked in one of the most disturbed schools in the NYC metropolitan area.
They brought peace and a renewal of educational activity into situations which had formerly been totally chaotic. Where school administrators and teachers were out of contact with their pupils. This art is itself a communication about the Black cultural tradition which has been mistakenly omitted from our educational curricula. The most talented Black folk should be brought into the schools to give the children a formal education in the Afro-American musical tradition. Teaching the children the songs and dances of their ancestors. Is how the lessons of history, social science and literature can be given a richer meaning. By bringing in people from the community, the schools will be establishing natural ties to the entire Black community.”
And Here Is What Can Be Found Today At The Library Of Congress.
The guide to the use of street/folk/musical games in the classroom : Volume 1, Song-games / Mable A. Hillery, Patricia M. Simmons.
Published/Created
New York : Interdependent Learning Model, Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York c1974 : Interdependent Learning Model, Fordham University, c1979.
This teaching guide is the first of three volumes designed to teach Afro-American children street/folk/musical games in the elementary classroom. It is one of the Interdependent Learning Models (ILM) whose overall objective is for teachers to use the cultures of their students as vehicles for teaching academic skills and content. This volume focuses on ten traditional folk and clapping and chanting games. An introduction offers an historical overview of games, the definition of folk and street games, and a rationale for using games in the classroom which explains the effects on learning, attention, self-concept, and physical development, as well as benefits for teachers and schools. The second chapter defines the games as Transactional Instructional Games (TIGs), lists distinguishing features of TIGs, suggests teaching methods, and offers an implementation checklist. The ten games follow: Frog in the Bucket, Stick Out, Bobbing Needle, See Aunt Dinah, Emma You My Darling, Chicken and a Chicken, Skip to the Barbershop, Johnny Cuckoo, Little Jonny Brown, and Riley. For each game background information, lyrics, directions for action/movements, and learning objectives relating to academic, physical, and social skills are presented. Line drawings illustrate the actions when necessary. All games are for groups, stress singing and clapping in rhythm, and are non-competitive. A tape cassette, available from ILM, records a group of children with a teacher singing and clapping the songs.
The 2nd teaching guide is Volume 2 designed to teach Afro-American children street/folk/musical games in the elementary classroom. It is one of the Interdependent Learning Models (ILM) whose overall objective is for teachers to use the cultures of their students as vehicles for teaching academic skills and content. This volume focuses on clapping and chanting games. The first section of the guide offers suggestions for teaching the chants, including the need to examine the chants before teaching them, how to use chants to motivate and reinforce learning, and describes six ways to collect chants. Section II presents a teacher’s checklist for using a chant as a teaching tool, including eight points to consider after teaching the chant. Eleven chants follow: Juba, Hambone, Walk Along, Blow Tony, Head and Shoulders, Someone’s on the Phone, Categories, Old Lady from Booster, Who is the Greatest, Who Stole the Cookie, and The World is Big. For each chant background information, lyrics, directions for action/movements, and learning objectives relating to academic, physical, and social skills are presented. Line drawings illustrate the actions when necessary. All chants are for groups, stress singing and clapping in rhythm, and are non-competitive. A tape cassette, available from ILM, records a group of children with a teacher singing and clapping the chants.
This story is about a Father-Daughter Team who traveled the world and wrote Geography books. You remember Geography? The subject we no longer teach our Global Citizen children.
The father’s name was Frank Carpenter and he was born 1855 in Mansfield, Ohio. Frank was a photographer, a journalist and a globetrotter.
His daughter Frances was born 1890 and she accompanied her father as his secretary + backup photographer.
They wrote elementary school geography books with titles like: How The World Is Clothed 1907
Around The World With The Children 1917
The Foods We Eat/Journey Club Travels 1925
The Houses We Live In/Journey Club Travels 1926
The Clothes We Wear/Journey Club Travels 1926
The Ways We Travel/Journey Club Travels 1929
So what was the Journey Club Travels? It was children forming what amounted to a virtual travel club. They wished they could visit people in far-away lands but since they couldn’t, they would venture forth using imagination, research, artifacts, data, photos and much more. They even chose a Motto which was “Let Us Find Out.”
The Journey Club begins to sound like a real club. In the Houses Book someone named Jack is selected as President and he convenes the group by announcing, “The Journey Club will please come to order!” And so they do.
Mary reads from a record book and reports on the trips they have made. Dick tells the kids about a Journey Club Museum that is being organized. They find a space and set up shelves for all the artifacts and info they’ve gathered. Finally, they make what amounts to an exhibit from the Food Trips they had just completed.
A Planning Committee appears with a presentation on trips in the offing. How about great forests, mines, mills, foundries and factories? The Houses Journey gives them the idea to build an actual playhouse calling on guidance from someone’s father who operates a house-building business.
As you can see, it just goes on and on and on!
The Carpenter approach to Geography was not War-Based, Trauma-Based, Famine-Based, Climate Crisis-Based, Immigrant Search & Seizure-Based. It was none of that. Even though all of that was going on everywhere as the Carpenters traveled and published.
Frank & Frances Carpenter Vintage GeographyFrank Carpenter Standing On A Monster Anchor!
“By the 1890s, Frank Carpenter’s convivial Newspaper Column introductions to international understanding quite naturally became directed toward school kids—whose traditional geography textbooks were more effective than sleeping pills. In Carpenter these youth found a companionable voice who spoke in terms of comparisons they understood like breakfast and clothes and pets. His fascination with the variety of humanity was a contagious and welcome force in shaping education and values.
A couple generations of American kids came to adulthood with Carpenter’s friendly regard for the rest of the curious wide world. Friendly is as Friendly does.
By the time Carp died in 1924 at the age of 69, he had written 20 books of travels for children and adults, published a newspaper column every Sunday for 31 years and dozens of travel pieces in Cosmopolitan magazine. And shipped, trained, automobiled and donkeycarted over very nearly the whole of the planet.
He also documented his voyages with a camera. His daughter Frances had the collection of 15,000 photographs placed in the Library of Congress. In recent months the digitized collection has been made available online. So today you can follow Frank Carpenter around the world from the comfort of home on your online screen.
It’s exactly what Frank had in mind. Looking at the photos you can’t help but love the guy. As did millions of Americans a hundred years ago.”
Most of what we’re learning about the world right now comes in the form of bad news.
We discover the beautiful beaches of Gaza overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. But our introduction includes watching Gaza being bombed into oblivion.
That is not the most instructive way to be learning geography.
I love this shower curtain. It is colorful, clearly illustrated and full of opportunities to become interested in the abundant terrain & inhabitants of our world. Obviously it could hang in a bathroom. But also in the bedroom, a studio, a classroom, a living room or on an outdoor patio.
There is so much detail here that pulls one in for reflection and research.
Whether it is used in a home or in a school, it is a starting point for adventure, inquiry and imagining.
Rather than thinking of geography as a subject that one must study using globes, pull-down maps or textbooks crammed with factoids and photos. How about a shower curtain? Begin by listening and not lecturing.
Are you curious about the animals? What do the colors signal for you? Blue, Green, White, Yellow? How many land masses are shown and how many BIG bodies of water are left off of this playful, eye-catching chart?
“They sensed very quickly the attempt to subjugate and beat them down to low wages and a precarious living.
Their resentment is peculiarly without bitterness. Their desire to get a just return for their work is strong.
A system of migrant self-government began to take form. They called it Functional Democracy. Committees took on Sanitation, Child Welfare, Adult Recreation or Fire Safety. This problem-solving energy was an important factor in keeping and restoring human dignity. It was so successful that when camp people moved to new locations, they set up DFS’s wherever they went.”
Sonora Babb Dustbowl Migrant Camp Activist
On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps. U of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint 2007.
Yes! Kraft Heinz is pulling Lunchables. From the low-income school meal program. Consumer Reports says “Lunchables & other lunch kits = high levels of sodium + cadmium + other harmful chemicals & have no place on the school lunch menu!”
But please Do NOT applaud these corporate menu monsters. Because the kits they sold to the craven cafeteria crowd were created SPECIFICALLY for school lunch programs. And worse, contained even HIGHER levels of toxins than those available in the grocery store!
Do you want to think about absurd elites? Then let us begin by imagining John Kerry telling his wife Teresa Heinz to get her privileged posterior into a Kraft Heinz Board Meeting and immediately removing the publicly-funded poison from the bellies of the impoverished. But No. John was too busy flying around the globe as U.S. Special Biden Envoy For Climate. Hypocritically Lecturing anyone who would listen to him. Droning on about global warming dangers. While his wife’s company was killing off children in the ghetto, the holler, the REZ & the barrio. Well at least they won’t have to suffer the ravages of climate crisis.
For sure The Kerry-Heinz-Biden offspring are not excelling at their private schools on a steady diet of Lunchables. Instead they stay way ahead of the curve thanks to a wide assortment of resources and opportunities available to very few. But this is necessary so that they can grow up and one day continue to rule & reign supreme over YOU. That is how the pecking order works at present.
If you do not care for the duplicitous manner in which this last election was executed from BOTH sides of the aisle. Then please join the outrage in some meaningful fashion. Because these fiscal fiends aren’t giving up. Kraft Heinz Final Word? “Lunchables products are not available in schools this year but we hope to revisit that at a future date.”
Lastly a reminder from The Science Corner. Cadmium is linked to kidney and bone disease and cancer. There is no safe level of lead for children.
Our children. All of them! Are being put through quite a lot. Adult immigrant bigotry, systemic racism, homophobic school board book ban mandates, corrupt charter schools stealing their public school buildings & budgets, anti-nutrition school lunch programs, A.I. Driven computer curriculum ad nauseam.
They know a steaming pile of excrement when they smell it. It agitates them and alienates them. Which places them in an untenable position. How does one love & respect a community of grownups who behave this way? How does one swear allegiance to a Democracy that permits and promotes such cowardly conduct? Our kids are wrestling deep inside themselves with some very serious emotional/developmental questions.
There are living-breathing children & youth inside those public school buildings. We are burying them beneath the casual rhetoric of adult politics. We are rendering them invisible by not describing what is being done to them. In the 1930’s sisters Sanora & Dorothy Babb waded into the depths of The Dustbowl Migrant Refugee Camps. As they helped people, they also documented the daily unfolding of events. It is a STUNNING & very humane portrait. “On The Dirty Trail: Remembering The Dust Bowl Refugee Camps” U of Texas Press 2007.
Once there was a perfectly GOOD puppy who was not treated so good. He was homeless. A bum on the street. An undesirable in the community. A stray. A vagrant. He was on the OUTS with just about everyone he encountered.
Now we all know what happened when the little puppy went looking for help. He was screamed at. He was run off with a broom. He was called mean names. He got chased down a winding road with a rake. He got chased down another winding road with a pitchfork for heaven’s sake. He was even bitten by a mother bunny who wanted him to stay away from her baby. And if that was not enough, he got a hard spanking with a folded-up newspaper by an old man who just did not like puppies of any shape or size. This was no way to carry on around a perfectly GOOD puppy.
The puppy was harassed, harangued and humiliated. It was a tiring ordeal certainly. But it was definitely not a deal breaker. Because the GOOD puppy kept imagining a terrifically GOOD home for himself. He was sure it was going to happen and guess what? It did.
He got up on his tiny hind legs and peeked through a window at a boy’s birthday party. A party that was perfect in every respect except for one thing. No one had thought to gift the birthday boy with a puppy. But as it turns out, the GOOD puppy took care of that little oversight all by himself. The birthday boy, his Mom and his Dad knew a GOOD puppy when they saw one and they took him in. They waited a reasonable amount of time and when no one came to claim him. The family kept the GOOD puppy for their very own.
This title was part of a wonderful 1950’s series of Rand McNally Junior Elf books. Hard bound. Deep vivid colors and easy to read LARGE PRINT. All for the bargain basement price of $0.49!
These little books were sometimes FACT and sometimes FANCIFUL. And this one was packed full of suspense and danger at an emotional level accessible to young children. The illustrations are terrific and they make it very easy to imagine one’s self being chased all over the place by garden tools and hollering humans.
It is also made quite clear that none of this behavior is acceptable when meeting up with a GOOD puppy. The right response is not a fight or flight response. The right response is the act of warmth, regard, appreciation, acceptance, welcoming, sheltering and including. A richness of difference that the family did not know it was missing until the GOOD puppy appeared.
We can spend our days learning lessons from these wise Junior Elf stories. Or we can waste our time and our lives gathering with RABBLE who enjoy applauding when the spears and the tiki torches come out. To chase the equivalent of the GOOD puppy off to a place we choose to dismiss & characterize as “GARBAGE.”
What if Active Learning and Activist Learning came to mean the same thing at an imagined Michael Brown’s Ferguson Missouri high school? Maybe Ferguson would not have been inhabited by an occupying army. Students with authentic teachers, meaning not adults simply drawing down a paycheck and going along with the educational atrocities, would have called a community meeting. Maybe Michael would have lumbered in to listen, curious, skeptical but reflective.
In this meeting, students would have announced that they were alive and in search of an education, one they were not receiving in their current situation. They would have made it quite clear that rich Missouri men with “budget experience” had no business being assigned a phony administrator title and phony authority anywhere within the district’s school hierarchy.
They would have declared that deliberately impoverished school budgets and segregated learning centers were nothing new. Just the old, stale, sick repetition of the same old racism.
Video, protest art, interviews, dance, drama and public exhibitions would have begun to document what passed for high school in Ferguson. Out of control students, teachers, police and politicians would have been denounced and then put on public display for all to see and censor.
This is what Active and Activist Learning is capable of and it is exactly why we only catch glimpses of it on the cover of an aging high school newsletter from the 1970’s.
Rest In A Disturbed Peace All Ye Who Love Democracy!
As you might guess, there was no resting in the imagined Ferguson Missouri Normandy HS. Active and Activist Learning requires action, action that disturbs the peace and prosperity of right wing, reactionary eejets like the Silver Dollar City Theme Park tycoon from Branson, MO and his state school board cronies.
The community of learners at Michael Brown’s high school recognized an oppressive colonial model when they saw one. Some secret somebody announced the arrangement one morning by gaining access to the Public Address system and airing an up tempo version of Gil Scott-Heron’s hit song, Johannesburg, with revised lyrics that inserted Fergusonburg. And for that historic week, What’s The Word? Fergusonburg! was the chorus chanted over and over in every hallway, assembly, food line and sports team warm-up.
Michael Brown had never heard of Johannesburg, Steve Biko or poet Dennis Brutus but pretend for a moment that his teenage school mates made certain that he began to listen up and learn. If Normandy High was to be their Robben Island, then there was a rich history of resistance that cried out for absorption.
The first rule of survival in such a degraded, Power Over Paradigm is self discipline and unified action. When Michael behaved like a bully or was spotted hanging out with the wrong crowd, he got called on it in a community meeting. He didn’t like it much. He even stomped out a time or two but in the end, he embraced the upbraiding delivered in his best interest. He was no bull in a china shop and he could not muscle his way through life in Ferguson. Though oblivion was a logical choice, his friends cautioned him not to get lost in a haze of drugs and illegal misadventures. They needed his intelligence, his humor, his loyalty, his affection and his strength. A dead hero is no good to no living body. These kids were fighting for a good life and Michael’s spiritual muscle was a Must Have.
It was in this fashion that Michael Brown began to master the art of channeling his outrage at the conditions that surrounded him. He was not alone, an aberration, a menacing giant or a renegade. He became a young man with a purpose, the very big purpose of revealing Ferguson to the world for what it was, an oppressive arrangement, repeated across our USA in countless communities of class and color.
Did you really think the Ferguson Teens needed to read that the White House authorized U.S. torture centers around the globe? Of course not, because militarization of the entire culture was obvious on their neighborhood streets day after day. It was obvious in the corridors of Normandy High where students roamed freely outside of assigned classes while unable to read and comprehend the front page of USA Today. Time to take the bull by the horns.
Michael Brown first argued that he did not have time to tutor anyone but he was soon persuaded otherwise by his affirming affinity group. They would set up shop after school at the library, in a church basement or barber shop, using whatever was at hand to launch their improvised adventures into literacy. It was crazy, sometimes raucous and rowdy but they were effective and they knew it.
Numbers swelled and soon bands of teen tutors and tutees began mounting voter registration drives across the most under-served sections of Ferguson. They fashioned themselves after the freedom-seeking literacy/voter movements on John’s Island SC in the 1960. They knew full well how literacy and grassroots empowerment were linked and they also knew that the cops would interfere the moment their work began to pose a challenge to the White Power Structure. What’s The Word? Fergusonburg! And in Fergusonburg it became a badge of honor to be stopped by the police and interrogated or threatened for distributing handbills that laid out the particulars on how and why to register and vote out the ruling junta.
Well, you know how youth are. They talk to each other. They post and twitter, message and selfie and before too long surrounding high school student bodies began to hear about the active/activist Ferguson learning movement. No one needed sanctioned internships or co-op experiences. It was not a phony resume citation they were seeking nor did they request official credit. They knew the real deal when they saw it and they wanted in. Soon, the P.D. was hassling the sons and daughters of county clerks, plumbers, beauticians and practical nurses. These parents were having none of it and so their dignity and influence brought an entirely new audience to the inhumane horror that was Fergusonburg.
When the private schools arrived, it really went viral. After a day of voter reg sidewalk pounding, they all headed home with iPods and iPads full of video, audio, photos and instagrams documenting the paramilitary protocols practiced in Fergusonburg. These parents were fast and furious with a response that rained official censure all over the pathological parade that passed for a community police presence in Ferguson. Talk about class warfare. The 1% were finally throwing their weight around someplace where it would do some good. A whole new world of energy, citizenship and inclusion began to take shape.
