On November 3rd, I went to the Promising Practices meeting and I have to say I really learned a lot and enjoyed going. The first session I went to was called Wake Up and Smell the Environmental Racism. It was about how minorities are being put into areas where it is unsafe to live because of the air quality. I was surprised to learn that African Americans and Latinos actually have the highest percentage of people with asthma. It's sad because those people have to live in these areas because they can't really afford anywhere else. Also, I learned that the state will put dumpsters or sewage plants near these people because they can't afford to sue or do anything about it. This reminds me of the Tim Wise video. As much as people want to believe racism is dead, it's really not. Although this isn't done purposely, it is absolutly important to realize that it's happening. Just as the title says, people need to "wake up" and realize what's happening right in front of them.
What I thought was really cool was that the kids in this club to help the environment have a bus that they drive around in and go visit places to talk about their issues. When they found out that the bus only runs on diesel, they decided they would have it run on vegetable oil because diesel is bad for the environment. I never knew someone could even do this. While they were telling us the process they had to go through in order to make the vegetable oil work for the bus, I kept thinking to myself, "This seems like a lot of work just to get a bus going." After I thought about it, I realized, if they really care about something so much and they go through all that trouble, they obviously really love what they're doing.
One thing that really impressed me with this session was the fact that the kids presenting it were only in high school. I was going in expecting all the presenters to be adults who really knew what they were talking about. I was really surprised with how much information they knew. It showed that they really cared about the issue. They really kept the session interesting too. For example, the two instructors were dancing when I first walked in so it made me feel a little more comfortable in knowing they wouldn't be really boring or serious.
The next session I attended was called Preventing Transgender Bullying Before Children age 6 or 7 or 8. The instructor was so nice and really seemed to care about what she was talking about. I have always been a huge advocate for anti-bullying in general. I feel that going to this session just gave me more ideas of how to deal with kids who bully others. I was really glad to see how many books there were that included transgender children. Everyone wants to feel included and accepted especially at that age and reading books about others who are "different" is a great way of trying to get them accepted by others. This session reminded me a lot of the GLSEN article we read for class. The article talked about how children as young as five years old are exhibiting bias, bullying and homophobic feelings towards others. I feel that this has to do with the media telling us what is right and wrong, aka boys are masculine and girls are feminine. A great example the instructor used in the session of transgender people was a movie called Call Me Kade about a girl who really felt like a boy inside and all the struggles she went through to become who she really wanted to be. After watching this movie, you really get the feeling that children know if they are transgender when they are very young. Kade's mother in the movie even says she felt her daughter was different from when she was about two years old. It's amazing to hear that children that young already know how they feel about themselves. This was a great session to go to and I recommend it to anyone who has the calling to become a teacher.
Overall, I really enjoyed going to this meeting. At first, I wasn't sure how I felt. I thought it was going to be really boring and I was upset that I had to get up early on a Saturday, but I think it was really important for all of us as future teachers to go to this. It gives us a different perspective on what goes into being a teacher.
I think now that we've all gone, everyone in the class would agree with me in saying that we enjoyed going especially since we all tried our best to be able to sit at two tables near each other and really engaged with each other. It shows how close this whole class has gotten over the semester.
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