Blog Post 2 1/19

I have noticed that in my fourth grade classroom, the students are writing papers about Black historical figures related to Michigan. They were given articles to read, and then were asked to incorporate the information into the papers. The students were also being taught the importance of introductory sentences in their papers, and how to structure paragraphs. The way this lesson is being taught, seems to be a lesson that combines social studies and language arts. This lesson seems to give the students a brief overview of what happened and what the people went through. It seems like what the Leland article was encouraging teachers to do, was to have students read articles that would illicit an emotional response from the students reading it, so that the students could better relate to what the person in the story went through. While I think that it is important and good for articles to question people’s assumptions and prejudices, the Leland article went too far in the other direction. On page 10 it says, “In an all-white community, it can become ‘normal’ to assume people of color are somehow ‘different’ and maybe even ‘dangerous.’ An example of the dominant discourse” (10). However, the CDC disagrees with the above claim that it is just a dominant discourse with the below link showing the per capita homicide rate among different races of people in this country over the last 20 years. In 2010, the White homicide rate appears to be about 3, and the Black homicide rate appears to be about 30. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6227a1.htm#fig3