Tag: curricula

Florida gives its reasons for rejecting proposed AP African American Studies course | CNN Politics

[ad_1]

CNN
—

Florida rejected a proposed Advanced Placement course focused on African American Studies because it included study of topics like the Movement for Black Lives, Black feminism and reparations, according to a list of concerns provided to CNN on Friday by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office.

The one-page document prepared by the Florida Department of Education also questions the inclusion of certain Black authors and historians whose writings touch on critical race theory and Black communism. For example, the state objects to the inclusion of writing by Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of American history at UCLA, who “warns that simply establishing safe spaces and renaming campus buildings does nothing to overthrow capitalism,” according to the document.

The state also said the course framework for the study of reparations – the argument to compensate Black Americans for slavery and other historical atrocities and oppressive acts – includes “no critical perspective or balancing opinion in this lesson.”

“All points and resources in this study advocate for reparations,” the document said.

The state based its assertions of the course on an 81-page syllabus from February 2022. According to the list of concerns, their objections cover six topics of study, all in the fourth and final unit, when students study “Movements and Debates.”

A previous draft version of the concerns sent to CNN by DeSantis’ office included an objection to the study of “The Black Power Movement and The Black Panther Party.” The draft version asserted that “The Black Panther Party (BPP) was based on the ideology of Marxism- Leninism. Goal of the BPP was to fundamentally change or overthrow the American government.” However, in an updated version of the state’s concerns, the references to the Black Panther Party were removed and replaced with an objection to the study of “Black Queer Studies.”

The state Department of Education on January 12 informed the College Board, the organization that oversees the Advanced Placement program, that the course violated state law and rejected its inclusion in Florida schools.

The course, which is the first of its kind, was first introduced in the fall as a pilot in about 60 schools and will be offered nationwide starting in the 2024-25 school year. It was developed over the last decade and is intended to be a multidisciplinary study of the African American diaspora that includes literature, the arts, science, politics and geography.

The College Board declined in a previous statement to CNN to directly address the decision in Florida but said, “We look forward to bringing this rich and inspiring exploration of African-American history and culture to students across the country.”

DeSantis’ office said the state would reconsider the decision if the course is changed to comply with Florida law.

Under DeSantis – whose standing among conservatives has soared nationwide following his public stances on hot-button cultural issues and who is said to be weighing a potential 2024 presidential bid – the state has banned the teaching of critical race theory. Last year, it moved to prohibit instruction that suggests anyone is privileged or oppressed based on their race or skin color.

[ad_2]

Source link

January 21, 2023
DeSantis administration rejects inclusion of AP African American Studies class in Florida high schools | CNN Politics

[ad_1]

CNN
—

The administration of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is blocking a new Advanced Placement course for high school students on African American studies.

In a January 12 letter to the College Board, the nonprofit organization that oversees AP coursework, the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Articulation said the course is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”

The letter did not elaborate on what the agency found objectionable in the course content. A spokeswoman for the department did not immediately respond to a CNN inquiry.

“In the future, should College Board be willing to come back to the table with lawful, historically accurate content, FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion,” the letter stated.

In a statement to CNN, the College Board declined to directly address the decision in Florida but said, “We look forward to bringing this rich and inspiring exploration of African-American history and culture to students across the country.”

The rejection of an Advanced Placement African American Studies course follows efforts by DeSantis to overhaul Florida’s educational curriculum to limit teaching about critical race theory. In 2021, the state enacted a law that banned teaching the concept, which explores the history of systemic racism in the United States and its continued impacts. The law also banned material from The 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning project by The New York Times to reframe American history around the arrival of slave ships on American shores. Last year, DeSantis also signed a bill restricting how schools can talk about race with students.

The College Board unveiled plans to offer an African American studies class for the first time last year. The course is being offered as a pilot in 60 schools across the country during the 2022-23 school year, with the goal of making the course available to all schools in the 2024-25 school year. The first AP African American Studies exam would be administered in the Spring of 2025, according to the College Board website.

It was not immediately clear if Florida had any schools currently participating in the pilot program. The College Board said the Advanced Placement Program has been working with higher education institutions to develop an African American Studies program for a decade.

“Like all new AP courses, AP African American Studies is undergoing a rigorous, multi-year pilot phase, collecting feedback from teachers, students, scholars and policymakers,” the statement said. “The process of piloting and revising course frameworks is a standard part of any new AP course, and frameworks often change significantly as a result. We will publicly release the updated course framework when it is completed and well before this class is widely available in American high schools.”

In a Twitter post Wednesday, Democratic state Sen. Shevrin Jones, who is Black, noted that Florida offers other cultural AP courses.

“This political extremism and its attack of Black History and Black people, is going to create an entire generation of Black children who won’t be able to see themselves reflected at all within their own education or in their own state,” Jones said.

DeSantis’ move comes as his standing among conservatives has soared nationwide following his public stances on hot-button cultural issues and against public health officials and bureaucrats during the Covid-19 pandemic. He is said to be weighing a potential 2024 presidential bid.

A group of Republican state legislators in Michigan seeking to draft him for the 2024 contest signed on to a letter that was hand-delivered to the Florida governor last month, asking that he “seek the presidential nomination of our Republican Party.”

The letter was signed by 18 GOP members of the Michigan Senate and House, who wrote that DeSantis is “uniquely and exceptionally qualified to provide the leadership and competence that is, unfortunately, missing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” In closing, they said they “stand ready and willing to help you win Michigan in 2024.”

Details of the letter were first reported by Politico.

[ad_2]

Source link

January 19, 2023
South Korea brought K-pop and K-dramas to the world. The Korean language could be next | CNN

[ad_1]

CNN
—

There’s never been a better time to learn Korean.

It’s one of the fastest-growing languages in the world, outpacing traditionally popular rivals like Chinese in multiple markets – reflecting the global phenomenon many call the “Korean wave.”

In 2022, Korean was the seventh most-studied language on the learning app Duolingo, according to the company’s annual language report. And it’s seeing particular success in parts of South and Southeast Asia, as the most-studied foreign language in the Philippines, and not far off the top spot in Thailand, Indonesia and Pakistan.

Although Chinese – which for years has been considered as the business language of the future – remains the second most spoken language in the world, thanks in part to the sheer size of China’s population, it has sat in eighth place on Duolingo for the last several years, lagging behind Korean.

Korean is the second most-studied Asian language on Duolingo, only narrowly behind Japanese, according to the language report. Duolingo, which has more than 500 million users internationally, ranks Korean ahead of Chinese, Russian and Hindi, and behind Italian. English and Spanish still sit comfortably in the top two spots.

This rise in interest, experts and teachers say, is thanks to the Korean wave, or “hallyu” – the proliferation of Korean culture internationally.

The last two decades have seen South Korean exports sweep the world, from K-pop and Korean TV dramas to beauty products, fashion and food. The country has become an international cultural juggernaut – so much so that the Oxford English Dictionary added more than 20 words of Korean origin in 2021, saying in a statement, “We are all riding the crest of the Korean wave.”

This phenomenon has been aided by South Korea’s own government, which has worked to spread the country’s cultural influence through music and media since the 1990s. Now, the Korean language could be the next export to go global.

“Compared to the time I started my career, the perceptions of Korea as a nation, Korean culture and society, and the Korean language have gone through a significant, positive change,” said Joowon Suh, director of the Korean Language Program at Columbia University. “Now it is perceived more modern, advanced, marketable, cooler, and hipper.”

For decades, East Asian language studies overseas have mostly been limited to Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.

But that began to change in the past decade after major hits by Korean artists and directors, such as Psy’s 2012 song “Gangnam Style,” the 2019 thriller “Parasite,” the 2021 Netflix show “Squid Game,” and the emergence of BTS, undoubtedly the biggest global stars of K-pop.

Figures show a surge in interest toward the language in the same period.

The number of students enrolled in Korean classes at higher education institutions in the United States leapt from 5,211 in 2002 to nearly 14,000 in 2016, according to data analyzed by the Modern Language Association.

This jump is striking given Korean isn’t easy for non-native speakers to learn. The US State Department lists Korean as a “super-hard language,” meaning it’s “exceptionally difficult” for English speakers and takes on average 88 weeks to achieve professional working proficiency.

Modern Korean follows a phonetic alphabet called Hangul, meaning the syllables are generally pronounced as they’re written – unlike non-phonetic languages such as Chinese, which uses symbols to represent specific meanings.

Suh, the Columbia instructor, said she first began noticing a rise in interest around 2015 – but it has accelerated in the last three to four years. The number of Columbia students enrolling in Korean courses increased by 50% from the 2017 to 2021 academic years, she said.

Other popular languages have seen numbers either plateau or drop over the last decade. US students enrolled in Chinese classes, for instance, jumped significantly from 2002 to 2013, a period marked by China’s massive economic growth and global influence.

But enrollments in Chinese had dipped by 2016, according to the Modern Language Association – coinciding with the deterioration of US-China relations, and the worsening perception of China in the West due to its alleged human rights abuses.

“Students’ interest in foreign language learning in US higher education tends to depend more on the perception or reputation of a country in terms of economy and geopolitics, such as China, Russia or Portugal,” said Suh.

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the number of higher education students taking Korean courses tripled from 2012 to 2018, according to the University Council of Modern Languages – compared to just a 5% increase for Chinese, and a decline in several European languages like French and German.

Korean’s newfound popularity was no accident, with South Korean authorities jumping at the chance to promote their language on the back of its more successful exports.

“It is the Hallyu that has persuaded Asian countries at the societal level that Korea is really part of the developed, western world,” said John Walsh in his 2014 book on the phenomenon. This shift in perception has in turn boosted the government’s ability to pursue “national interests in the areas of diplomacy, investment, education and trade,” he wrote.

Over the last decade, the Ministry of Education has sent Korean teachers overseas, including several dozen to Thailand in 2017 to teach the language at middle and high schools.

In more recent years, numerous countries including Laos, Myanmar and Thailand have officially adopted Korean as a foreign language in their school curricula, under agreements signed with the Korean education ministry, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap.

Meanwhile, the King Sejong Institute, a government-founded Korean-language brand, has established 244 learning centers worldwide, according to its website.

These efforts aim to “keep the interest of Korean language abroad, which has become widely popular with the Korean Wave,” said the education ministry in a 2017 press release.

“In the long term, Korean language courses in the local school curriculum will serve as a step to foster Korean experts, and thereby strengthening friendly relationships between Korea and other countries,” it added.

Suh cautioned that the Korean wave runs the risk of oversimplifying nuances of Korean culture and society, such as regional differences or class conflicts, while glorifying “anything (Korean) without fully understanding its history.”

But, she added, this simplification could actually benefit the South Korean government as it expands its influence, as something “any rising soft power might have to go through.”

Experts say students come to the table with various reasons for pursuing the Korean language – though certain trends have emerged among regional and ethnic lines.

“The Korean wave is an important factor for non-heritage students,” said Suh, referring to those without Korean ethnicity or heritage who are simply interested in Korean cultural products like movies and K-pop.

Meanwhile, students of Korean descent tend to take Korean classes for more “integrative” reasons, she said – for instance, wanting to live in South Korea, to better connect with their communities and families, or to explore their own Korean identities.

Jiyoung Lee, an adjunct instructor at New York University’s Department of East Asian Studies, pointed to the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. These have facilitated international cultural exchanges and “largely influenced” the number of Korean learners, she said.

But Lee, who previously taught Korean in Indonesia and South Korea, also noticed differences among students in different parts of the world.

US students tend to learn Korean “because they are more interested in enjoying culture … and want to talk to their favorite singers or actors,” she said.

By contrast, students in Southeast Asia mostly study Korean to get a job in South Korea, or at a Korean company in their home country, she said, noting the number of Korean brands “establishing themselves not only in Southeast Asia but also in various countries.”

For instance, the Korean entertainment giant SM Entertainment is expanding into Southeast Asia with new Singapore headquarters. Meanwhile, the Korean convenience store chain GS25 has more than 180 outlets in Vietnam, and is set to break ground in Malaysia this year, according to Yonhap.

The expansion of Korean business and pop culture may also be pushing young Southeast Asians to travel to South Korea. Southeast Asians make up more than 40% of foreign students in South Korea, and 30% of foreign residents in the country overall, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Jeffrey Holliday, who teaches Korean linguistics at Korea University in Seoul (with classes taught in English), said roughly 40% of his students are exchange students, mostly coming from the US. These students tend to be undergraduates, only in Seoul for a few semesters, and nearly all are avid fans of Korean pop culture such as K-pop, he says.

Meanwhile, his foreign graduate students – who tend to be studying there full-time and are seeking jobs in Korea – largely hail from China and Vietnam.

“To me it’s so surprising because when I was in college (in the US) from 1999 to 2003 … there was no-one learning Korean who wasn’t a heritage speaker. I was the only one who wasn’t Korean American,” he said.

“Whereas now, these students come here, they’re very focused, very determined – they really want to learn Korean and they’re here for that.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the placing of Japanese on the Duolingo report. It is the most studied Asian language on the platform.

[ad_2]

Source link

January 17, 2023
Georgia Bulldogs crush the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs 65-7 to win second consecutive College Football Playoff National Championship | CNN

[ad_1]

CNN
—

The No. 1 Georgia Bulldogs scored on their first six drives and dominated No. 3 Texas Christian University 65-7 to win their second consecutive College Football Playoff championship game on Monday night in Inglewood, California.

In the convincing win, Heisman Trophy-finalist quarterback Stetson Bennett passed for four touchdowns and ran for two more to lead the Bulldogs (15-0), who became the first team to win back-to-back national titles since Alabama in 2011 and 2012.

Bennett finished 18-of-25 with 304 yards passing in his final collegiate contest. He left the game with 13:25 remaining in the fourth quarter.

Georgia built a 38-7 halftime lead, scoring the final 28 points before intermission after TCU’s Max Duggan, the Heisman Trophy runner-up, rushed for a touchdown that made it 10-7 with 5:45 left in the first quarter.

The Bulldogs controlled play and the clock in the half, having the ball for almost 19 of the first 30 minutes and outgaining the Horned Frogs (13-2) 354 yards to just 121.

The onslaught continued in the second half until Georgia head coach Kirby Smart effectively called off the dogs and began using more second-team players in the fourth quarter. By then it was 52-7.

Georgia’s Ladd McConkey, a sophomore wide receiver, had two touchdown grabs, including a wide-open, 37-yard reception that brought the first six of the Bulldogs’ 55 consecutive points.

Sophomore tight end Brock Bowers, the national player of the year at his position, had one touchdown catch in his seven receptions and 152 yards receiving.

[ad_2]

Source link

January 9, 2023
Who is Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat seeking to succeed Nancy Pelosi | CNN Politics

[ad_1]

CNN
—

New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries launched his bid for House Democratic leadership on Friday, a historic move in which he would succeed speaker Nancy Pelosi after two decades of leading congressional Democrats. If chosen, Jeffries, a progressive, would become the first Black lawmaker to lead a party in Congress.

He has widespread support among Democrats, including from Pelosi as well as House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, both of whom said they will also step down from their leadership roles.

A rising star in the Democratic Party, Jeffries was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied political science at the State University of New York at Binghamton and received a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University. He also attended law school at New York University School of Law where he was on the law review.

After law school, Jeffries clerked for late federal district judge Harold Baer Jr. of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, was a lawyer for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP and was litigation counsel for CBS and Viacom Inc.

He started his career in politics after being elected to the New York State Assembly in 2006. In 2012, he was elected to New York’s 8th congressional district, which includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens. During his time in Congress, Jeffries has pushed for policing reform, including a national ban on chokeholds following the death of Eric Garner, a Black man who died in 2014 after being held in the restraining move. He was also instrumental in the passage of the First Step Act and co-sponsored the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that passed the House but failed in the Senate.

Jeffries also co-sponsored the Music Modernization Act, a bill that overhauled laws related to how songwriters are paid when their songs are licensed or played. It was signed into law in 2018.

In 2019, he became chairman of the Democratic caucus, making him the youngest member serving in leadership. Jeffries was part of a select group of lawmakers who were impeachment managers during the Senate trial of then-President Donald Trump, in which he referenced lyrics by late rapper The Notorious B.I.G. when outlining the House’s case against Trump. He has also been a member of the House Judiciary Committee, Budget Committee and Congressional Black Caucus.

In a letter announcing his leadership bid, Jeffries said he hopes to “lead an effort that centers our communication strategy around the messaging principle that values unite, issues divide.” He also praised the past leadership but said “more must be done to combat inflation, defend our democracy, secure reproductive freedom, welcome new Americans, promote equal protection under the law and improve public safety throughout this country.”

[ad_2]

Source link

November 19, 2022
Iran says it will sue US, alleging ‘direct involvement’ in protests | CNN

[ad_1]

CNN
—

Iran said Saturday it would take legal action against the United States, accusing it of “direct involvement” in the protests sweeping the country.

Tehran also warned the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia would “not be ignored by the Islamic Republic’s judiciary system” for their role in hosting and supporting TV networks such as BBC Persian and Iran International – which it claimed had urged protesters “to destroy public and private properties.”

Anti-government protests have gripped Iran since the September 16 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died after being pulled off the streets of Tehran by morality police and taken to a “re-education center” for lessons in modesty.

Strikes and protests have become a common sight in cities and towns across the country and in the capital chants of “death to the dictator” – in reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei – often ring out at night from the rooftops.

US President Joe Biden has thrown his support behind the demonstrators, promising costs “on perpetrators of violence against peaceful protesters” and saying the US stands with the “brave women of Iran who right now are demonstrating to secure their basic rights.”

The US has also announced sanctions on Iran’s morality police “for abuse and violence against Iranian women and the violation of the rights of peaceful Iranian protesters” and is working to making it easier for Iranians to access the internet.

This is not the first time Iran has accused the US of meddling in anti-government protests – it made similar claims in 2018.

The state news agency IRNA reported on Saturday that the Justice Department “has been tasked to file a lawsuit in order to investigate the damages and meddling inflicted by the US’s direct involvement in the unrest.” It also reported the claims against the BBC and Iran International, made by the deputy head of the Iranian Judiciary and secretary of the country’s High Council for Human Rights Kazem Gharibabadi.

The report did not make clear what court would hear such a case.

Meanwhile protests are continuing both within Iran and in solidarity movements across the world, with large demonstrations in both Berlin and Tokyo on Saturday.

Within Iran, business owners and factory workers from the Kurdistan region went on strike and students from universities across the country joined in on the demonstrations.

Video shared with CNN by pro-reform activist outlet IranWire, show Sanandaj, the capital of the Kurdish region, eerily quiet at the beginning of the work week as stores remain shuttered.

The Norway-based Iranian rights group Hengaw said shopkeepers were also on strike in Bukan, Sanandaj and Marivan, though CNN can’t independently verify these reports.

On Saturday, videos of protests against the Iranian regime from IranWire showed a crowd at Tehran’s Shahid Behasti University chanting “Freedom, freedom, death to the dictator, death to Khamenei.”

Students at Tabriz University in East Azerbaijan province also took to the streets chanting in unison that regime change was on the horizon, according to IranWire, and at Yazd University in Yazd province, students sang a century-old pre-revolutionary anthem.

An eyewitness told CNN that young girls from local schools who joined in the protests calling for “freedom” and “death to the dictator” were rounded up by police moments later and loaded into black vans.

Outside Iran, video published by Radio Free Liberty showed protesters on a boardwalk in Sydney, Australia, chanting “freedom” on Saturday.

Germany’s state broadcaster RBB reported solidarity protests with close to 80,000 people in Berlin.

[ad_2]

Source link

October 22, 2022
A single mom’s 4 kids had to fend for themselves when tragedy struck. How a chance encounter years ago saved their future | CNN

[ad_1]

CNN
—

On a dark autumn evening almost four years ago, Janie Yoshida was driving her daughter home from high school play rehearsal when she noticed a teenager walking by himself next to a busy road.

Tre Burrows, it turned out, was also in the play at Somerset Academy Canyons High School in Boynton Beach, Florida.

“I pulled over to the side of the sidewalk and rolled the window down and said, ‘Hey, where do you live? I’ll take you home,’” Janie recalled.

The 17-year-old kept insisting he was fine, until Janie put on “my mom’s voice” and demanded: ‘“Get in the car.”

The polite young man with the gregarious smile complied. But, Janie soon learned, he led a life more challenging than she imagined – one in which she’d soon play a far bigger role.

“He wanted me to drop him off at a main intersection. And I said, ‘Of course not. Just show me where you live.’ And he goes, ‘No, I can walk the rest of the way,’” Janie recalled.

Reluctantly, Tre directed Janie to where he and his family were living.

A motel.

“I tried to play it off, like no big deal,” Janie recalled. But in reality, “I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh my God … just terrible.’”

From that point on, Janie gave Tre a ride every day after play rehearsal. Sometimes, she would make up an excuse to get fast food along the way, just to make sure Tre had a hot meal.

“‘I don’t want to cook tonight,’” she’d tell him. “’Let’s just go through the drive thru.’”

Then one day, Tre let slip another detail about his family life.

“‘I’m gonna save this (meal),’” he told Janie, “’and split it with my sisters’” – one older and two younger, all together at the motel.

Tre’s mother, it turned out, had been working two jobs and hanging by a thread to support her four children against immeasurable odds.

Despite the financial challenges, Cindy Dawkins worked tirelessly to give her kids everything they needed. She had every meal ready, even without a kitchen. She helped with homework. Instead of asking her older ones to work part-time to support the family, she encouraged extracurricular activities such as track or school theater.

Eventually, Tre told Janie why he’d been so nervous about telling anyone where he lived.

“He didn’t want anybody to know because he was worried that the Department of Children and Families would come and take them away from his mom,” Janie said. “That’s just heartbreaking.”

Janie asked to meet this matriarch – and was floored by her work ethic and strength.

And as much as he loved his mom, Tre had no idea how much she sacrificed for her children.

Soon, immense tragedy would force him to learn.

A native of the Bahamas, Cindy moved to the US for what seemed like a promising career in the hospitality industry. But an avalanche of “bad luck on top of bad luck” fell on her, Janie said, including a layoff and a divorce.

She ended up waitressing at two restaurants – one during the day, the other at night.

“For the longest (time), she was working two jobs just to keep us afloat, paycheck to paycheck,” said Tre, now 21.

“And she did all of that with a smile on her face because she didn’t want us to know exactly how hard it was to do all that.”

But despite working two jobs, Cindy couldn’t get an apartment on her own because of a prior eviction. So she and her children moved into the motel, which cost far more per month than an apartment.

For three years, Cindy raised her four children in a motel room while working multiple jobs.

Behind the omnipresent smile she put on for her kids, though, Cindy was struggling.

She lamented that “‘in three years, I haven’t been able to make a home-cooked meal,’” Janie recalled.

“She was like, ‘I don’t have a moment to myself or any privacy except when I’m in the shower. So if I’m going to break down, I’m going to cry, it’s going to be in the shower,’” Janie recalled.

“‘And I’ve got to put my face back on, walk out of the bathroom in front of the kids and make sure that they don’t see it from me because I have to make them think everything’s OK.’”

The family’s bad luck culminated the day Tre missed play rehearsal.

The next day, Janie asked if he had been sick.

“‘They kicked us out of the hotel because my mom couldn’t pay,’” Janie recalled him telling her.

Janie went home and told her husband: “We need to get this family an apartment. I’m going tomorrow.”

And as readily as she’d opened her car door to Tre that first time, “we just rented an apartment for them,” she said.

With Janie’s name on the lease, the family of five moved into a two-bedroom apartment – mom in one bedroom, her four children sharing the other.

Cindy meticulously paid the rent and utilities “earlier or on time – always,” Janie said.

She got a raise at one of her restaurant jobs, Tre said, allowing her to quit her second job and spend more time with her kids.

But that cherished time with her children would be short-lived.

With a new home and better pay, Cindy and her kids eagerly anticipated celebrating her 50th birthday last summer.

“We were planning on going up to Orlando a few days before and then spend her birthday up there,” Tre said.

“We noticed that she started getting sick literally the day that we got there. As soon as we arrived, she went to bed and went to sleep and was just sleeping the entire time.”

Cindy spent her birthday, August 1, in bed with severe Covid-19. The disease ravaged her body so quickly, “I didn’t even get to see her after she went into the hospital,” Tre said.

On August 7, 2021 – six days after her birthday – Cindy died.

Disbelief exacerbated her children’s agony.

“She didn’t have any prior illnesses. … We just didn’t think anything like that would happen because we were healthy,” Tre said.

“We were seeing the news (about) all the people passing away from Covid, but you never really understand exactly how bad it is until you experience it firsthand. We weren’t thinking this would completely uproot our lives.”

Tre said his mother did not get vaccinated, in part due to rumors about side effects.

“We didn’t want to do this and then (have it) potentially cause us to get sick,” Tre said. “We know better than that now. But I guess that was the reasoning behind her not getting” vaccinated.

Tre and his siblings joined a growing group of children no one wants to be part of: the orphans of Covid. More than 212,000 US children have lost one or both parents to Covid-19, according to estimates from Imperial College London. And the number of children robbed of their parents keeps rising.

“It never crossed my mind,” Tre said, “that me and my older sister would be the ones taking care of our little sisters.”

Tre was the first to hear from the doctor his mother had passed. He rushed to the hospital and told his older sister, Jenny Burrows, now 25, to get there immediately.

When Jenny arrived, “We cried for hours,” Tre recalled. “Our little sisters were at home (sleeping). Then we gathered ourselves and we tried to figure out, ‘OK, how are we going to tell our sisters?’”

They woke up heir siblings Zoe Clarke, then 15, and Sierra Clarke, then 12. The most horrific nightmare had just turned into reality.

But Tre and Jenny didn’t have time to mourn. Their minds were racing:

“‘OK, are we about to get kicked out of the apartment we’re staying in because we can’t afford the bills?

“‘How are we going to move on from this home?

“‘How are we going to get the girls … everything they need for school?’”

And the biggest question of all: Will the younger children get taken away?

Despondent, overwhelmed and tasked with planning a funeral, Tre told Janie his mother passed.

“I just lost it. I couldn’t believe it,” Janie said. “It was devastating.”

She realized the siblings quickly needed help – and not just financially.

They needed to learn how to parent on the fly.

So once again, like she did all those years back from the driver’s seat, Janie went into mom mode.

Without a living legal guardian, the children’s greatest fear was getting separated. Maybe the younger siblings would get taken away into state custody and foster care. Or maybe they would be sent to the Bahamas to live with relatives.

Janie helped Jenny get to work on Priority No. 1: Becoming the younger girls’ legal guardian. It was one of the myriad legal complications that followed their mother’s death.

“Another thing that’s helping us tremendously is we were able to get the girls set up with Social Security benefits from my mom,” Tre said, which will help support Sierra and Zoe until they turn 18.

Janie and her husband also paid the remaining six months on the apartment’s lease. And she started a GoFundMe account, with an initial goal of paying for Cindy’s funeral expenses.

Then just as Janie had stepped in as a stranger to help Tre’s hard-working but struggling family, hundreds more strangers did the same.

The crowdsourcing fund grew so popular, it yielded enough for a down payment on a house so the children wouldn’t have to worry about getting evicted. Any extra funds likely will go toward Sierra’s and Zoe’s college education in the coming years.

Janie also taught the older siblings about car insurance, credit and other life skills they would need to know immediately, now that they had dependents.

The hardest part of being both a brother and a parent to younger siblings is “definitely the mental aspect of all of that,” Tre said.

“The attitude stuff is a big thing for teenagers. They’re teenagers. Like getting chores done, getting your homework done, the attitude that comes with all that … basically, everything that goes with raising a 16- and 12-year-old,” he said.

He and Jenny try to balance it all “while also making sure they don’t look at it like, ‘Oh, since Mom isn’t here, now you think you’re the boss and you can do all this stuff?’”

And Tre tries to balance tough love with “not being too harsh with them, obviously, because we all just went through a horrible situation.”

Tre and Jenny also now juggle a daily marathon of jobs, their own schooling and taking care of their sisters’ basic needs, their education and their mental health.

Tre works at a computer repair company and has started training to become an emergency medical technician and firefighter. And Jenny, a dental assistant, wants to finish training to become a dental hygienist.

The older siblings devised a plan for how to finish their education while paying the bills and taking care of the girls.

“When I was going through EMT school … my sister would drop them off at school. I would pick them up, and (then) I would head to school. That was our plan,” Tre said.

“And my sister would be the one at home with them, making sure they’re getting their homework done, making sure they’re OK mentally. And obviously I would help with that whenever I’m not in school. And basically I would get through that, get through the fire academy, doing the same thing,” he said.

“And then once I’m done with schooling, the roles will kind of be reversed. So I’ll be the one that’s dropping them off, and I’ll be home with them (while) my sister’s at school, getting her career situated.”

It’s a daunting task. But it’s nothing compared to what his own mother did, Tre said.

“My biggest (concern) was just making sure I can fill her shoes,” he said. “I never really understood exactly how much she was doing until now, when my sister and I are the ones who have to do it.”

Tre is also immensely grateful to the countless strangers who helped him and his siblings find a home and stay together.

And it all traces to Janie giving him a ride home from school that dark autumn evening.

“Without her,” he said, “we wouldn’t know what we would have done.”

And Janie has learned from Cindy’s children, she said. Perhaps they inherited their mother’s fortitude.

“I know they have the same instinct inside of them, just like their mom did – that hey, even if it sucks, let’s get up and make the best of it,” she said.

“They’re my inspiration now.”

[ad_2]

Source link

October 9, 2022
Instruction about race may be under siege across the US, but this course is empowering students at a Southern high school | CNN

[ad_1]

Washington
CNN
—

In the early 2000s, when I was a student at Ridge View High School, in Columbia, South Carolina, I loved to parse the legacies of certain historical figures: W.E.B. Du Bois, in AP US History; Malcolm X, in AP English Language and Composition.

At the same time, I wanted more. Too often, Advanced Placement curricula seemed to give attention to just a handful of Black heavyweights and, as a result, neglect the countless ways Black Americans have shaped US society. Only rarely were Black students like me reflected in lessons. (I remember learning about “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s jewel of a play about a Black family in south Chicago, from my mom and wondering, Why aren’t we studying this in school?)

But things are beginning to change. Ridge View is one of about 60 high schools across the country piloting AP African American Studies in 2022. The interdisciplinary course will be the newest addition to the College Board’s panoply of AP offerings and delve into the history of the African continent and Black contributions to music, literature, science, politics and mathematics, among other fields. Mere weeks into the pilot course, students and faculty at Ridge View already see AP African American Studies as something of a salve. The course arrives at a moment when instruction about race is under siege: Educational gag orders abound, and “critical race theory” has become a lightning rod for the right.

Given the meager representation I observed as a high school student, I was stunned – and thrilled – to learn that Ridge View, which is majority Black, is piloting AP African American Studies. It would’ve been so welcome, I thought, to see myself in this context, to probe questions of identity and inheritance.

Plus, it’s no small thing to test out the course in South Carolina, which didn’t banish the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds until 2015, in the heartrending aftermath of a White supremacist massacre.

The significance of the moment isn’t lost on Ridge View students.

“It really makes me happy to be in this class – to know that I’m a part of history,” Nacala McDaniels, a senior, told CNN.

In August, the Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the architects of the AP African American Studies curriculum, stressed the course’s educational value.

“Nothing is more dramatic than having the College Board launch an AP course in a field – that signifies ultimate acceptance and ultimate academic legitimacy,” he told Time magazine. “It is a mainstream, rigorously vetted, academic approach to a vibrant field of study, one-half a century old in the American academy, and much older, of course, in historically Black colleges and universities.”

Like so many in the Ridge View community, McDaniels wants AP African American Studies to help not only other Black students but all students become well-versed in under-told histories and cultures and incubate meaningful discussions about race.

“I hope that the course will be offered to other people who look like me and to other people who just want to learn about history that’s been covered up and history that’s been ignored,” she said. “And I hope that the course makes room for more conversation. Lots of people are scared to talk about race, but with more conversation comes better understanding.”

High schools had been hungry for an AP African American Studies course for years. However, when the College Board asked universities about a decade ago if they’d give credit for a corresponding exam, they said no.

But the uprisings of 2020 caused a long-overdue shift.

“The events surrounding George Floyd and the increased awareness and attention paid toward issues of inequity and unfairness and brutality directed toward African Americans caused me to wonder, ‘Would colleges be more receptive to an AP course in this discipline than they were 10 years ago?’” Trevor Packer, who heads the College Board’s AP program, told Time.

Yes, was the answer.

Maybe the most exciting thing about teaching AP African American Studies is the fact that educators get to talk about people, subjects and slices of history students don’t know much about, according to Daniel Soderstrom, who leads the course at Ridge View.

“Over the past few decades, we, as a society, have done a better job of teaching Black history and African American Studies. But I’d argue that many teachers still fall short,” he told CNN. “What I mean is that our kids hear the same stories every year. And that’s not to diminish the contributions of Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. But if those are the only people our students are learning about in school, they’re missing a lot of what’s really there.”

The first part of the course examines early African kingdoms and some of their foundational figures, including Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, located in present-day Angola.

“She was a very strong woman – a heroine – and fought on the front lines with her soldiers,” Soderstrom said of Nzinga, celebrated for pushing back against Portuguese colonization and the trade of enslaved people in Central Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries. “But we tend to skip the stories of people from Africa.”

So far, the lessons appear to be resonating with the kids.

“I didn’t even know that there were any queens in Africa in any time period. Like, at all,” Ashton Walker, a junior, told CNN. “We got to learn about Queen Nzinga and Idia. They’re both very interesting because they were powerful women leaders who did amazing things for their kingdoms.”

Walker, who’s White, sees AP African American Studies as a means toward visibility for her Black peers, who get to be participants in their history.

“It matters that we get to learn all these things as a society. We don’t ever really get to hear about any of these figures or what they went through,” she said. “And my (Black) classmates deserve to hear this history. It’s awesome that Ridge View is a majority-Black school and gets to help create this course.”

Her mother, Nicole Walker, who was involved in bringing the pilot course to Ridge View and is the director of the school’s Scholars Academy Magnet for Business and Law (she also was my 9th grade English teacher), echoed some of these sentiments.

“We know that what’s best for kids is for them to see themselves reflected in the curriculum, for them to celebrate their cultures, for them to feel valued,” she told CNN. “We know that a kid who feels safe and valued is going to do better in school.”

Jacynth Tucker, a senior, is intimately familiar with the power of inclusivity. She said that at a previous school, she and other Black students felt invisible.

“I can’t even remember a time when we really explored Africa – talked about the history and the culture,” she told CNN. “Being in a class where that’s more of a focus is very special to me.”

Further, the course gives Black Americans more dimension, per Clementine Jordan, a senior.

“One activity I really liked was when our teacher showed us a collage and asked, ‘What do all these people have in common?’” she told CNN. “Their commonality was that they’re all Black. But the point of that discussion was that, yes, they’re all Black, but there’s so much diversity within the Black community, within my community: diverse religions, gender expressions, sexualities, things like that.”

Crucially, Soderstrom noted that AP African American Studies isn’t a standard-issue history course, though it proceeds in a relatively chronological fashion and will eventually make its way to the US.

“We’re studying Black excellence and African American success through art, through literature, through culture, through dance, through mathematics, through science, through lawyering,” he said. “It’s interesting that one day we’re looking at an art piece, the next day we’re listening to music, the next day we’re reading a poem and then the day after that we’re listening to a mathematician speak.”

In other words, while the course charts struggles – including the mid-century civil rights movement – it also underscores Black excellence in a variety of disciplines.

It’s pretty much impossible to separate the debut of the AP African American Studies pilot course from the Republican-led racial panic looming over many schools.

According to an August analysis by PEN America, a literary and free expression organization, legislators in 36 states have introduced 137 laws this year restricting discussions about race, US history and gender in K-12 schools and higher education. This figure is a 250% increase over 2021.

And last month, the American Library Association predicted that the number of attempts this year to censor books in K-12 schools, universities and public libraries grappling with race, gender and sexuality will exceed 2021’s record count. The ALA tallied 681 attempts between January 1 and August 31; the 2021 total was 729.

These attacks seek to determine what content is and isn’t legitimate in an academic context; they’re part of a much broader counter-mobilization against efforts to topple racial and social hierarchies.

“We’re not seeing different political conflicts. We’re seeing one big political conflict – one big reactionary political project,” as Thomas Zimmer, a visiting professor at Georgetown University, where his research focuses on the history of democracy and its discontents, told CNN in July.

Yet Soderstrom minced no words: AP African American Studies is a vital course, regardless of anyone’s political affiliation.

“Henry Louis Gates Jr. is one of the senior minds when we’re talking about American studies and African American history. He was quoted recently explaining that the course isn’t political,” Soderstrom said. “We’re teaching factual information, and everything is verifiable.”

Lylou, a sophomore, shared this conviction.

“I’m a White person, and I wanted to take this class because I don’t know that much about Black history,” she told CNN. “The course should be in the curriculum. Because why would we want to ignore this history?”

(Lylou’s mother asked that her daughter’s last name not be included, given the intense political climate hovering over lessons about race in the US.)

The pilot course is expected to expand to include additional high schools next year and then be available to all interested schools the following year, per the College Board.

Ridge View kids, for their part, seem eager to see how the rest of the year unfolds.

“The class is a learning opportunity for everybody. I take every interaction I have with anybody as a learning experience,” McDaniels said.

Then, mirroring the same fundamental curiosity I had as a high school student nearly two decades ago, she added, “I’m just excited to see what’s next.”

[ad_2]

Source link

October 2, 2022
After negotiating a peace deal, Jimmy Carter taught this Bible class | CNN Politics

[ad_1]

A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

CNN
—

If you know anything about Jimmy Carter, this may be it: He never lost touch with his home in Plains, Georgia, and he never gravitated away from teaching his Baptist faith.

Until just recently, the former US president and Nobel Peace Prize winner could be found teaching Sunday school in Georgia.

What might be even more remarkable is that he maintained that grounding even when he was leading the free world, frequently popping up 16th Street to teach a couples’ Bible class in the balcony of the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, DC. Carter intertwined a first-person, real-time account of world events with his thoughts on the scripture.

A week after celebrating the historic high point of his presidency – the 1978 Camp David Accords, which created a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt – Carter was telling his students, members of the First Baptist Church, about praying with then-prime minister of Israel Menachem Begin and then-president of Egypt Anwar Sadat.

“I think some of the most unpleasant moments of my life occurred during the last two weeks,” he told the class. “And of course, also some of the most pleasant.”

The photos of the three world leaders during their two-week negotiations at Camp David and signing of the agreement at the White House have followed Carter into the history books. Sadat was assassinated in 1981 and Begin died in 1992, but the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is still in effect.

Carter tells Bible class about Camp David Accords

In today’s tightly controlled media environment, when the fences around the White House keep getting higher and the barricades farther away, it’s incredible to think that any parishioner could stand in the balcony of a church and interact with the US president.

He attended the church regularly, and his daughter Amy was baptized there – things I learned after hearing from Christi Harlan, a former reporter who has been a member since the ’90s. She showed me the plaque on the second-row pew where Carter would sit with his family, in view of a stained-glass window of George Washington Carver, the agricultural scientist who, like Carter, was a peanut farmer.

Harlan also gave me CD copies of taped recordings of the couples Bible class that Carter sometimes led when he was president and which have been sitting in the church’s archive ever since.

This being a Bible class and the subject being peace in the Middle East, Carter talked about the importance of faith to the negotiations that brought a lasting truce between Israel and Egypt.

“I was meeting with two leaders who are deeply devout and religious men who spent a great portion of their time at Camp David in prayer,” said Carter, adding that they all agreed they “worship the same God.”

Sadat, Carter said, accepted that he and Begin were both descended from Abraham and were therefore brothers of a sort.

“That was one of the things that I believe gave us kind of a clear, unshakable purpose, because we all believe that God wanted us to work toward peace,” Carter said. “It was one of the few things on which we agreed, at first.”

While the fly-on-the-wall reports from Camp David are fascinating, these were primarily Bible classes. You get the sense that teaching was a sort of escape for Carter, who goes deep into the scripture. The week after the Camp David Accords, he focused on St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, when the apostle was imprisoned and facing death but still eager to advance the gospel.

In other Bible class lessons, there are often moments where the weight of Carter’s words were influenced by his day job – such as when he brought along Georgi Vins, a Baptist pastor from the Soviet Union who had recently been exiled from Siberia.

Despite the gesture, Carter insisted the class should not be about world affairs.

“I would particularly want you this morning not to think about the time of Ahab, not to think about even the Soviet Union – but to think about the United States, the Washington, DC, community, and preferably, my life and your life and our actions in the eyes of God,” Carter told the class.

Carter brings exiled Soviet pastor to Bible class

His discussion about the murder of Naboth ultimately turned into a dissection of man’s law versus God’s law.

Citing the Vietnam War, Carter told the students that the US government, which he led at the time, must be accountable:

“American citizens have not only a right but a duty to constantly inquire into the righteousness of our nation’s actions. And that is not treason. And that is not in violation of God’s law.”

Carter discusses man’s law vs. God’s law

Most recent presidents have complained about the cloistered life in the White House and sought refuge in a private space.

Donald Trump invited world leaders to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida. George W. Bush went down to his remote ranch in Crawford, Texas, to clear brush.

Carter, on the other hand, joined the First Baptist Church.

When he prayed in those years, he tried to distance himself from the presidency, Carter told Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” in 1996, noting that he intentionally joined a church outside the White House and went there almost as a physical separation of church and state.

“I worshipped as I would if I had not have been in public life at all,” Carter said.

But praying as president is different, he added – more frequent and “maybe on average, more heartfelt than any other time in my life, because I felt that the decisions I made were affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people.”

The Princeton University presidential historian Julian Zelizer told me that the distance presidents feel from the people they lead can be difficult.

“The challenge is that they become further and further removed from the people who elected them – seeing the country through the prism of advisors, reporters, and colleagues,” he said in an email.

But Carter’s insistence on staying grounded in a community was a key part of his appeal at a time when Americans’ faith in their government was shaken.

“Carter – in the aftermath of Watergate – was determined to lower the barriers between himself and the electorate,” Zelizer said.

In the “Fresh Air” interview, Carter talked more directly about his prayers as president. He wanted to keep the nation at peace and help spread peace to other nations, and end the Iran hostage crisis that lasted for more than a year – things that did eventually happen.

“I never prayed for popularity. I never prayed to be reelected, things of that kind,” he said.

“I think God always answers our prayers,” he told Gross. “Quite often God’s answer is no. We don’t get what we ask for.”

[ad_2]

Source link

April 12, 2021