Annapolis Fieldtrip

Sometimes when I'm dealing with bus companies that are late and students who have been allowed to register for field trips at the last minute every other time someone has taken them, I get frustrated and say I don't want to plan any more of these "extras." Then, students ask to sit by me on the bus on the way home and are excited to tell me about what they found out about how slaves secretly learned to read in the William Paca House Kitchen, how they connected the Alex Haley Memorial to what we read in class, and how they want to go on more trips like this. We went to Annapolis for an African American history tour today.

This was Miss Julie at her finest.

Here, they connected Thurgood Marshall (whose statue we are with) to the Brown vs. Board of Education case we learned about last time we were in the Media Center.

And as we were walking, they saw Governor Martin O'Malley who thanked me for my work and told them he's proud of Northeast.

A Poem for My Students, Part II

Laugh in Bubbles

by Mrs. Carlson

Sometimes

I couldn't help but laugh.

Sometimes

I cried for you.

Sometimes

I was proud as a peacock.

Sometimes

I acted like you,

threw pens,

sucked my teeth.

Sometimes

I bough giant bags of Starbursts.

Sometimes

I read about vampires so we could talk.

Sometimes

I put my whole class on a cart so you could cool off.

Sometimes

I ate my yogurt lunch with you.

Sometimes
I listened to 92Q.

Always

I loved you, and
always

I will pray the best for you, and

always

I hope that you

laugh in bubbles and

dream in symphonies.

Shenandoah 2009 - Just the Girls

Over Memorial Day weekend, seven students and three teachers from Northeast Middle School set out on a weekend of adventure together, an opportunity to see a part of the world none of the students had ever experienced. Each student had set a goal a month before school finished. Some aimed for specific grades, others for specific scores on final tests. All worked toward progress on year-long goals. Each one reached her goal, and as a reward, we went camping.

While camping, hiking and swimming, the students were able to celebrate their incredible accomplishments, and we teachers were able to observe them inadvertently using what they had learned during the year. The three girls in my car decided to read aloud during the three-hour drive, displaying increased confidence in their fluency as well as their desire to read for their own enjoyment. Others debated why parts of our campfire burned blue or yellow, and proved their increased knowledge of the scientific world. Splashing through frigid springs and tramping almost nine miles, all seven of the girls demonstrated their abilities to adapt to new environments and set and accomplish goals. It was a pleasure to watch the students and teachers laugh and learn together in the Virginia mountains.

Everyone is smiling, because this is before I made them hike 8.8 miles.

We played a lot along the way.

I love this lady, and so do the kids.

Here's what one student had to say about the trip:

The Day I Hated Mrs. Carlson

It all happened when I went on a camping trip with Mrs. Carlson, Ms. Shannon, and Mrs. Beaumont. They made us walk 9 miles up a big mountain, which they had lied about and said it was 8 miles. Then they said it was 8.8 miles. When my father came and asked Mrs. Carlson how long we walked, all the kids finally found out that they were lying whole time.

While we were walking up the hill, I kept telling Mrs. Carlson that I was going to torture her when we come back to school on Tuesday. I told all the teachers, “Don’t say anything to me for the rest of the trip.” I also was about to curse a whole lot of people out, but I didn’t. I kept my promise to myself.

Email Edits

Today a student sent me this note with her attached "Bio" for our class zine:

"hello,mrs.carlson...i love your class,it is very fun...your the best teacher ever!! "

She may like me, but as far as being the "best teacher ever" I have some work to do: spaces after commas, capitalize the first person personal pronoun as well as proper nouns, contractions need apostrophes and to show their original forms. At least she learned how to send an e-mail!

TIME Magazine

The following is an article I came across from TIME Magazine. I would like you to read it and guess when it was published.

Resegregation (from TIME Magazine)

The name of the process is "resegregation." It happens typically when a once-white school is opened to all races and in a few years becomes all-Negro. Or, in another backfire of the Supreme Court's desegregation decision, a few Negroes may try classes in a white school, and then for various reasons resegregate by returning to Negro schools. The result, in many places, is more segregation than ever.

The trend is clearest in the border cities, where Southern Negroes are migrating in vast numbers while whites move to the suburbs. In St. Louis, Southern School News said last week, Negro students have reportedly increased by 75% since desegregation in 1955; the city has more virtually all-Negro schools than before. The same goes for Baltimore, which in the past decade has gained 40,754 non-whites and lost 175,522 whites. In Washington, D.C., where schools desegregated in 1954, so many white students have left the school system that Negroes now make up 80% of total enrollment.

Negroes sometimes add to the resegregation trend by shunning integrated schools even when perfectly free to attend them. More than three-quarters of Oklahoma's biracial school districts have desegregated, for example, but the number of Negroes in mixed schools is actually declining. Some officials say that many Negro youngsters fear competition with better prepared white children, preferring to get high marks in inferior Negro schools rather than low marks in superior mixed schools. Worse, the decline in Oklahoma's all-Negro high schools seems to be cutting the number of Negro youngsters going on to college.

In large Northern cities, a kind of resegregation results from ghetto housing. New York, Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia all have Negro populations that are at least twice as big as the South's largest Negro communities, those in New Orleans and Houston. Hundreds of Northern city schools are predominantly Negro, and becoming more so. This ironic turn of events puts the Northern schools in a category somewhat like the "separate but equal" Southern schools that the Supreme Court outlawed. Believing that such de facto segregated schools are inferior, Northern Negroes are starting legal attacks, calling for such solutions as taking students by bus to distant mixed schools.

But if the majority of a city's schoolchildren are Negro, "integration" may be a fairly elusive goal. The phenomenon of resegregation also suggests that the law can go only so far in correcting racial inequalities—and that stressing the fine points of integration is less important than insisting on excellent schooling for all U.S. children.

That's right: April, 2009. All right, that's not true. It appeared in the issue that came out on Friday, December 1, 1961. However, had the word "Negro" been replaced throughout with the term "Black" or "African American," it could have been published yesterday. The public schools in Baltimore today are grossly unequal and indisputably separate. Unfortunately, the dialogue about how to "insist on excellent schooling for all U.S. children" no longer seems to look at desegregation as part of the solution.