"On my last trip home, I lost my arm," is clearly designed to hook people in--and definitely, her writing style is...luminous. Beautiful.
Even more than that, the first sentence is telling on a re-read. Because knowing that Dana refers to it as "home" even after everything really shows how her experiences have shaped her in her time in Maryland.
The graduate multicultural course I taught was taken by many working teachers who told me all sorts of reasons they could not assign such books in their classes (including the white principals who ordered them never to assign anything that talked about race...).
Yeah. That's sort of the reason I believe it SHOULD be taught, even if there are reasons why I think many school systems never would.
Unfortunately what should be and what is possible (or at least easily done) are not the same thing. I went to a school system which quietly had the same kind of policy about not teaching anything that delved too deeply into race, and that included what got taught in history classes.
Unfortunately, I went to schools that were never less than 40% black, which made it an even worse policy, because it pretty well deprived a good chunk of the student body of being educated about their heritages and histories.
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Date: 2009-06-15 12:49 am (UTC)Even more than that, the first sentence is telling on a re-read. Because knowing that Dana refers to it as "home" even after everything really shows how her experiences have shaped her in her time in Maryland.
The graduate multicultural course I taught was taken by many working teachers who told me all sorts of reasons they could not assign such books in their classes (including the white principals who ordered them never to assign anything that talked about race...).
Yeah. That's sort of the reason I believe it SHOULD be taught, even if there are reasons why I think many school systems never would.
Unfortunately what should be and what is possible (or at least easily done) are not the same thing. I went to a school system which quietly had the same kind of policy about not teaching anything that delved too deeply into race, and that included what got taught in history classes.
Unfortunately, I went to schools that were never less than 40% black, which made it an even worse policy, because it pretty well deprived a good chunk of the student body of being educated about their heritages and histories.