Takaki Chapter 3

(Editor's note: It's been a long weekend. Went to Connecticut for a wedding and between the travel, overdone steak, and the terrible drivers on 295, I am in no mood to be entertaining. You can complain to management, but I doubt that will get you far.)

Chapter 3 in Takaki had a couple nuggets that I could definitely share with my students. First, his examination of how it wasn't just Blacks who were slaves, but the Whites who were indentured servants could also be considered slaves sheds new light on common held beliefs. This is an interesting point as it challenges what most students, and teachers for that matter, believe concerning slavery in Colonial America. To integrate this into a lesson, I would do a "KWL" Chart, first asking the students what they know about slavery and then asking them what they would want to know about slavery. After completing the "KW" part of the chart, I would do a guided reading lesson on Takaki's discussion concerning the indentured servitude of whites. After the reading, I would do the "L" part of the chart and ask the students what they learned from the lesson. Hopefully, the students would learn that it wasn't just Blacks from Africa who served as slaves in the colonies.

Another nugget from Takaki was his investigation of why blacks were selected to become slaves and how the colonies moved away from having whites serve as indentured servants. Takaki mentions that as the landowning elite in the Colonies became more aware of class differences, they decided to create a "scapegoat" that would direct the attention of oppressed whites towards blacks and slavery and away from class differences. With the focus of attention shifted towards blacks and slavery, elite landowners could rest assure that their social and political status would remain undisturbed.

This would be an excellent lesson for my students because this examination begins to reveal racism as a social construct, one that still separates individuals today. To start the lesson, I would provide some employment statistics from my home state...the great state of Ohio. Currently, Ohio is suffering tremendous unemployment and the effects that tend to follow, i.e poor schools, run down towns, limited social services, and limited opportunities. I would provide the statistics without informing my students of the race or ethnicity of the group I am referring to. I would ask the students to guess what group I may be talking about. Hopefully, they will not answer "white" and steal my thunder. By explaining to them that groups of other races and ethnicities suffer the same ills as those in inner cities, students should recognize that certain issues are not just a "white" or "African-American" problems; rather, they are problems suffered by many people and that we tend to classify it as a race issue because if everyone realized that they suffer from the same problems, some people at the government level would have a serious problem on their hand. Race, in short, is a social construct that prevents people from organizing efforts and working towards a common goal.

As noted in a previous post, I tend to underline important information as I read as a method of monitoring how I think. I took the time the other day with my AP Psychology students to do a similar metacognition exercise. First, I described metacognition and why it is important. Second, I modeled what I do as I read to give them a better understanding. I took an opinion piece from the Washington post a few weeks back called "Rose Colored View of All Blacks Schools" written by Mr. Gilmore, legal scholar at Howard University. Mr Gilmore examines school integration and how Washington D.C.'s Dunbar High School flourished during segregation and whether or not contemporary African-American students would flourish under as similar model. I choose this article specifically because it was a topic they could identify with, it wasn't particularly difficult to read, and it could generate some very opinionated responses. I thought using this criteria for the first attempt would help ease my students into the exercise.

I set the parameters by having the students use various symbols to annotate whether the agreed, disagreed, were surprised, or confused by certain information. In addition, I had the students write what surprised them about the article, what new information they learned, and what one question they had for the author.

Overall, the students responded well to the exercise. I'm not sure if it was because it was a break from Psychology related material or because I told them it was an exercise I routinely due in graduate school, but they seemed to be acceptable of the exercise and would like to do another one again. I felt pretty positive about it as well because it helps broke the routine and introduced my students to college level material, which is motivating for some.