A prefatory introduction so you can catch a glimpse of WHY I do what I do:
Some people ask me when I plan to retire from teaching, which is an odd question. Yes, odd, because my students would immediately respond, “He’s only 34 years old.” A far more revealing question than the retirement one is to ask WHY I teach at all much less continue teaching.
My social identity and conscience were shaped by Judeo-Christian ethics espoused and modeled in my church.
My social purpose (i.e., mission) was hammered out on the anvil of the civil rights movement and Vietnam war peace protests.
So, the places, photos, vignettes, and witnesses encountered on our journey have flooded me with experiences that recall many personal traumas but also joys [especially the singing!], and deepened many details and emotions about events and places and, especially, persons in my living memory (not a book memory). My timeline of the civil rights movements is in my brain and body and bloodstream.
Here’s why I teach. Each year, I try to make it explicitly clear to my students that the primary reason I stand before them in the classroom is that I have been unwittingly called to a mission by the witness of people who greatly influenced me. Some of those key persons include Bob Moses (one of my high school math teachers), Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, Rev. David Bebb Jones, Rev. St. Paul Epps, Rev. Jimmy Joe Robinson (and many more clergy), childhood friends, teachers, mentors, and colleagues in ministry who nurtured and supported me physically, intellectually, and emotionally during the civil rights movement and, later, Vietnam War peace protests and demonstrations. My mission is to honor or memorialize in my teaching these people who suffered and/or were murdered so that students with whom I intersect may lead the way that we may never ever again have to repeat either of those two arduous, traumatic episodes My mission has not yet been completed so I am called to keep on teaching.
We all are students. We all are learners. We all are works in progress. We all are “becoming.” To that end, some of my observations and comments and learnings and questions include but are not limited to the following for my students to wonder and ponder . . .
“No one really knows why they are alive
until they know what they’d die for.”
–Martin Luther King, Jr.
“If you give your life to a cause in which you believe,
and if that cause is just and right,
and if your life comes to an end as a result of that cause,
then your life could not have been spent in a more redemptive way.
I think that is what my husband has done.”
– Coretta Scott King
Question:
What am I willing to die for? . . which will help me to know why and for what purpose(s) I am blessed with the gift of life.
What are you willing to die for?
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* Benevolent Temple & Temple Beth-El: “Every Jew has the responsibility of aiding God in the work of tikkun olam (“repairing the world”)
Question:
What specific broken lives and relationships can I commit to repairing with God?
To whom and what can you commit?
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* I greatly appreciate and shall appropriate (with attribution) Sam Walker’s gift of an attention-getting intro to a presentation:
“If I see you looking around, talking with other people, texting, not paying attention,
then I lose my focus and have to start all over again . . . from the beginning.
So pay attention, and I can keep on rolling.”
Amen!
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* Live Oak Cemetery, Selma, Alabama
* NOTE: Resource-backed history often emerges as the dominant historical perspective in re-tellings
example: the Nathan Bedford Forrest plaque in the Live Oak Cemetery in Selma which reads:
“Forrest’s memory has been tainted by the accusation, started by a Northern newspaper during the War, that he had ordered the execution of black troops captured at Fort Pillow in Tennessee. It also was rumored that he organized the Ku Klux Klan’s resistance to Reconstruction after the War. Separate congressional inquiries produced no credible evidence to support either accusation, and no charges were ever brought against Forrest. Having accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior in 1875, he was called home October 29, 1877”
Plaque Donated by the Order of the Southern Cross
(“a philanthropic organization whose purpose is the preservation of our Southern heritage and history”)
OPTION 1: After you have researched verifiable background information about Forrest, ask if he is a:
* patriot or insurrectionist?
* principled or unprincipled?
* penitent or unrepentant?
* God-fearer or God-mocker (probably too heavy a Q for students)
OPTION 2: for an “observation-inference-question” [introduction / warm up] to a lesson on persons (of ALL persuasions and positions) who were active during the civil rights movement
01. ObservationS: Describe what you observe/see in the historical marker
02. InferenceS: Based solely on your observations (above), what can you infer (figure out, conclude, interpret, think) about location, setting, context, significance, purpose, meaning? (For example, “Because this . . ., therefore that . . . .”)
03. QuestionS: Based on your observations (above), AND your inferences (above), state at least two (2) questions you have about the historical marker
04. Write a caption (“title”) (less than 10 words) for this historical marker
OPTION 3: Create a historical marker / plaque regarding the “modern” civil rights movement (you pick the person and/or the event)
1. write a narrative for an historical marker located at a notable site (connected to the person)
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* National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama
“Our national crime is the epidemic of lynching.”
–Ida B. Wells, 1909
The casks (which state the name and date of the person murdered) start off at eye-level, but as you slowly descend the walkway, you are gradually encompassed by darkness and hemmed in by grave-like walls on all sides, with symbolic hanged bodies suspended above you. You must look up as they look down upon you. “Strange Fruit” intones Billie Holiday. Signs describe the transgressions that led to their hanging. But most of the unpardonable, condemnatory words and actions seem trivial, commonplace, incidental that we, too, maybe have spoken or acted in like manner. What would prompt people to hang people for such words or actions?
Perhaps we, too, have uttered such words or behaved in like manner but were not hanged for it
* Hebrew “ruach,” Greek “pneuma,” and English “spirit”all connote “wind/breath.”
Where there is the “wind/breath” of ruach, pneuma, spirit, there is life (see the 1st creation story in Genesis 1 and the creation story of Pentecost in Acts 2 as well as other biblical texts)
By divine wind/breath, chaos is transformed into cosmos (order, harmony, equanimity, etc.)
“Invocation” by Elizabeth Alexander
“The wind brings your names . . .
The truth comes in the wind
The wind carries sorrows, sighs, and shouts . .
The wind brings everything
Nothing is lost.”
Ruach, pneuma, spirit, wind bring names that live in harmony, in peace, in shalom in the Beloved Community
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In 1968, striking Memphis sanitation workers marching for nearly 2 months had been unable to gain recognition of their union much less engage in any bona fide negotiations with the City. Discredited the legitimacy of even their personhood, workers were discarded as only so much refuse themselves. So the workers carried signs on their daily marches that read, “I Am a Man.” Names connote respect and dignity which is what the workers were denied.
What can we appropriate from this plight today?
Carolyn McKinstry counseled us: “Do what you can do with what is proximate to you.”
What is proximate to me? Students.
So, my first 3 tasks to accomplish on days 1 & 2 of each school year are names, names, and names, especially the names by which students call themselves. The sooner I know students’ names, the sooner I can start to establish a personal relationship and, thus, increase the chances of teaching content and skills.
What is proximate to you that you can do?
Start with what you can where you can with whom you can.
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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.”
–Margaret Mead
My mission has not yet been completed so I am called to keep on teaching as one small way to change the world..
Grace and Peace,