Like A Glass of Orange Juice With A Gallon of Water Added to It

It's third period, my prep at school. After two classes of teaching That Was Then, This Is Now, I have a minute to wrap my mind around how my students are reacting to chapter 2. In this passage, Connie, an African-American teen, was harassed by a group of boys in a segregated part of town. One of them, Mike Chambers, decides his friends have gone too far with the girl and gets them to stop. Mike ultimately gives the teen a ride home and ends up getting beaten severely enough by her family and neighbors that he ends up in the hospital. That's where our protagonist meets him and hears his story.

My students had a variety of opinions and reactions to this part of the story. First period came to class with the chapter read, and they were not quite awake enough to have a lively discussion, so we briefly discussed what the 60s had in common with our reality: war. They believed that racism was still a problem in this country but they knew it was an even bigger issue in the 60s. Only a few students had ever heard of Malcom X, a few more knew Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and nobody had heard of Medgar Evers. Some students wanted to argue that, since racism is still an issue today,  Connie had no excuse. I agreed with them that racism is still an issue but I put forth the argument that to compare the degree racism of that time to what we witness and experience now, is like a glass of orange juice with a gallon of water added to it. The taste is still there but not nearly the same as the original. I told them we would have more to talk about after the video and instructed students to keep notes of their reactions to the video as I played it. I hoped they would understand what I meant at the end.

The video, A Time for Justice: America's Civil Rights Movement, produced by the Teaching Tolerance project, is 38 minutes long. It starts at the grave of Jimmy Lee Jackson and then flashes back to the brutal murder of Emmet Till, a teen boy who came from Chicago to visit his uncle in Money, Mississippi. He flirted verbally with a white shop owner's wife and was beaten and killed for it. The video ends with the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Monday's formative assessment is an entrance pass in the form of a writing prompt:

OK, now you’ve seen the whole video. Realize that the Civil Rights Movement era had ended less than five years before the setting of this novel. Why do you think Connie reacted the way she did? Do you believe that just because discrimination became illegal, that the new laws also changed the attitudes of those you witnessed in the movie and the novel? Why or why not?

I can't wait to see what the kids come up with. Some students were visibly shaken by what they witnessed. The video pulls no punches. It is graphic and the dialogue has not been sterilized for a  PG audience.

Half of my classes are only finishing chapter 2 today, so either  we won't get to the video or we will not finish it today. I teach in the middle in a number of ways. That's where the title of this blog came from. For the past ten years, I have taught an interdisciplinary college course called "Race, Class and Gender" to college freshman. In the college environment, my tongue is untied and my resources are unrestricted by curricular concerns-- my syllabus is my curriculum. There we break down a macroscopic view of oppression and subordination through analysis and interpretation of primary documents like the "South Carolina 1712 Act of the Better Ordering  and Governing of Negroes and Slaves." These students are five years older, and that matters. They have had more opportunities to learn about the Civil Rights Era. Some actually took electives in high school about the era, or wrote term papers that were evidence of an indepent study about events or figures from this time period. I have to be far more careful, as a middle school level educator,  about how I talk about these issues in class.

I am caught in the middle in many ways. I help students bridge the achievement gap between high school and college expectations during the summers. I have empathy for my students, for Connie, and for the other characters in the novel. I am in the middle because I was raised by parents born during the Great Depression, who grew up with Jim Crow in rural Ohio. My siblings are baby-boomers who remember the civil rights era with the perspective of children and what we now refer to as "tweens," yet I have no memory of any of it because I was born in 1967-- a member of the once reviled Generation X, a generation that has produced our current president and the republican vice-president nominee.

So, how do I help the students gain empathy for the situation, honor their perspective, and find peace in believing I simplified the era's issues to make them accessible to my students without trivializing these issues? Fortunately, the middle school's anti-bullying program gives us both an on-ramp to meeting each other half-way. I asked who are the four types of people involved in a bullying situation: victims, bullies, by-standers, and advocates. Was Connie bullied? Why did she want revenge? Was Mike really an advocate and was he completely innocent?

While viewing the video, I made a list of allusions made to events and prominent figures in the Civil Rights era. They are as follows: Emmett Till; Rosa Parks; Jim Crow; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Birmingham Bus Boycott, "Letter from A Birmingham Jail;" The Little Rock Nine; lynching; Brown v Board of Education; Lunch Counter Sit-ins; Ku Klux Klan, The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; Voting Rights Act; Jimmy Lee Jackson; the March to Birmingham, Bloody Sunday.

Some of my classes started the video in the middle of class so they were not able to finish. My formative assessment for them was a simple exit ticket from old xeroxes and cut into quarters. They identified at least 5 things they learned, were surprised by, or that they know is going to linger with them. Here are some of their reactions. I have made no attempt to fix their grammar because I wanted to share their voices, as is, 3 weeks into 8th grade.

• I didn't know that even their [blacks] graveyards were segregated.
• A black boy was killed for talking to a white man's wife.
• Men admitted to killing the boy and still were found not guilty
• Jury was all-white and biased
• Blacks had to be guarded to get them into that school
• The average income of an African American man was $700 a year
• Graves [of blacks] were in swamps and abandoned areas
• Blacks were in slavery for 300 years
• Each and every day when a colored kid wanted to go to school, adults stood outside and harassed them
• In 1954 slavery was already gone for almost a century
• A bus was set on fire because there were black people in it
• How the blacks got treated in the diner
• 9 black students inspired college students to fight segregation laws
• That Rosa Parks refused to giver her seat to a white man and was arrested
• There were signs saying whites only.
• Whites didn't get into troube.
• In 1956 they banned bus segregation.

I always find my students' responses and reflections interesting, surprising and sometimes, amusing. Getting them to tell me what they are thinking informs my approach to teaching them. They also help me keep the pulse of their generation.