Why I love Teaching

In thinking about communities I am in, or looking to join,  for another class I got involved in ITAG. If you are not familiar   ee, itag unites teachers, nurses, and any adults who believe in quality education. The educators form action groups who then work on a particular issue or challenge bringing forth an action to improve that area. group that I have joined is working around African-American history that is being taught in Philadelphia. Black history is now a graduation requirement for all students in the city, yet there is no set curricula and only one book for the entire course. The district has one page dedicated to the course with a download. As a city with a large black population this community group will work on the formalization of a standard curricula and supporting texts that include space for a social activism. The goal will be to complete this curricula and present it to the SRC for approval....

As a former teacher of this course I find this wonderful and exciting. I remember having to create EVERYTHING for this course myself, with only a month before school started. Oh yeah, and I had just graduated college. I taught this course in 2005,the first year it was being mandated. Luckily my degree is in African/African-American studies, and I had taught Saturday school, or I would have been completely screwed. I learned after at the end of the school year from my social studies support coach that the district was offering teacher support for this course, but by then it was too late.

I can say that I am excited, and a little scared to be joining this group. I noticed that everyone joined the group because they were each doing something in their own way around black history, and just like myself wanted to make a larger impact. Many of the people are social studies teachers, so what we plan to do could directly impact their work. For myself, curricula development is what I would like to continue doing so to be involved in a project like this is awesomely inspiring. You could even say this is a dream project (for my education half of life). As I said I taught black history when I first graduated. I felt so nervous and unsure, not in my knowledge of the information. It was the connecting the why this is important, to their lives through lessons that were interactive. Until this point I had never taught high school, so the flow I had developed as described by Csikszentmihalyi in this awesome weekly reading we had was disrupted, and spent the remainder of that year wobbling through with very limited help and resources. I hope that through the joined efforts of this group that we could offer the guidance and support for a subject that has been under-supported by the district for quite some time. What we are attempting could be huge for the city. Its implementation varies from school to school, so no one really knows what the students are learning. Which means that the students are missing out on being able to discuss, and strategize solutions to current problems as they relate to them. 

Before the first meeting there were two articles offered to begin discussion. I am already learning more about the struggle for rights here in our own city. This article, explains the history of the course, including the protest and the polices response. This is something I had no idea about before, but as a teacher and am already making connections between the similar response of the police then versus now... I have also clicked on all of the attached articles and looked up so much reading this, that I now feel like I could answer any question asked. I am really looking forward to getting more involved!

If you are interested more follow @TAGPHILLY or http://tagphilly.org/

Shayla