“I ask the ESL specialist what resources are available for a student who spent 4th and 5th grade in a refugee camp. She tells me her boss will reach out to the family. He never does.”
I have literally no motivation to write anything. I have all of these ideas in my head, but I don’t know how to let them flow out of my pen and onto a piece of paper. It’s frustrating, it’s annoying, and honestly I just want to scrap everything and just pick an entirely new topic. I feel like part of me thought it would have been a glorious idea because it is so passionate and so personal, but none of them relate to what I’m needing.
I need inspiration.
So here I am, typing on YouTube “educational slam poetry” and click search. There isn’t a lot in the first videos, only a few, but at least it’s something that I can grasp on. So I click on Olivia Fantini’s “On Standardize Testing”, and I have never been moved by something like this since Niel’s poem “OCD”. It moved me so deeply and I think that’s what I needed, because I am so moved by the social justice of the education system. There is such a heavy unfairness in the classroom that many students struggle to succeed, but she brings in something more.
The looming forces of standardize testing. How we test our students on their knowledge and only their knowledge, and if they fall behind then that’s where they stay; they don’t have a chance to succeed. It’s this large fallout almost in our system, and they are almost overloading our classrooms and it’s terrifying. Students are only memorizing ‘what will be on the test’ and stress when it was something they couldn’t prepare for.
Her poem was powerful though and truthful. So many say they understand the minority groups and what they go through, but they really don’t. You don’t understand each specific student unless you are in the classroom teaching. It’s heartbreaking.
At least I found some direction today and I can start gearing myself down the path I wish to go down. Bless.
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