Election Day PD

Election Day PD

Today is election day, and while most schools are sitting in boring meetings, wondering why they are here and the students are not, at the School of Awesome, our PD is worthwhile and inspiring.

Today we are doing some work around identity, and where we are from. We are leveraging this reflection to make better connections to each other, and our students.

I will be updating this post (and Tweeting @cambrianed) throughout the day with thoughts, photos and reflections,

Where I'm From 

If I told you I was a teacher at “The School of Awesome”, 

would you know where I’m from?

Where I’m from, I hear the sounds of students being ushered to class 

by a bowl that sings and the encouraging words of faculty and staff. 

I see the faces of students, happy and sad, 

tired and awake, engaged and disenfranchised. 

I feel supported, nurtured, protected, safe, and inspired 

and work so as hard as I do so that they can say the same.

Where They (Our Students) Are From

 

• How can visiting student’s neighborhoods help us better understand our students? 
• What do I hope to gain from this experience?
• How can my students benefit from this?

Science Team Walkabout in Central Harlem

Search #HudsonHomes on Twitter

Some Reflections

• My discomfort with being a tourist in my own city was obvious, not just because I would be walking the streets of neighborhoods that I otherwise would avoid, but because the lens that I was given was to observe measures of quality of life that I knowingly take for granted…
• We walked through areas of Harlem that were as sanitary, cosmopolitan, and  cooperate as anyplace in the world, blocks away from places that were comparably  as raw, urban and gritty as others.
• I observed men as old as their 50s openly and casually consuming marijuana in the street.  This rattled my prudish sensibilities on the subject, but thought that this behavior was more symbolic than my superficial glance in their direction could tell me.  The men almost seemed empowered by this act and I wonder in what way this influences the community.