Maya McFadden photo
Robinson leads a junior class book talk Tuesday ...
... about Stamped, a "present book" about race and America.
Should former presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson have their faces on America’s paper currency?
Sayvion Saley asked himself that question for the first time in English class as he and his Career High School classmates grappled with this country’s long, painful, sordid and complicated history of racism — with the help of a “present” book that seeks to set the record straight.
That question came to Saley’s mind this past Tuesday while in his Hill Regional Career High School English class during a discussion of the book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds.
The junior class read the remixed version of Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi as a part of the class’s “American Experience” unit.
During Tuesday’s session at the Legion Avenue high school, the students began a project that involved making a timeline of important historical moments discussed in the book.
The class is led by Career High English teacher Karen Robinson, who has worked in New Haven’s public schools for 17 years. As the nation engages in a fraught debate over how even to broach the subject of race in the classroom, Robinson had her students engaged in nuanced learning.
"Sustainability." "Fortitude"
Robinson checks in with students.
To start off her first-period English class, Robinson gave the 22 students before her their daily prompt of two new vocabulary words. She asked her students to write the definitions for those two words in their notebooks.
On Tuesday, those vocab prompts were the words “sustainability” and “fortitude.”
Next, Robinson did a “check-in” with the students, asking them about what moods they felt they were in that morning. Robinson showed the students a slide of several images to depict moods like exhausted, excited, nervous, and angry.
“Anybody feeling like Tom today?” Robinson asked.
Nearly the entire class raised their hands for the image depicting the character as exhausted. Since returning from remote learning and Covid restrictions, Robinson said she has found it helpful to focus parts of her daily lessons on social and emotional learning (SEL) like these mood check-ins for all her students.
"A Non-White-Washed Version Of Our History"
During the portion of the class dedicated to discussing Stamped, students discussed historical facts that many said they had never learned before.
Those included such topics as the racist targeted bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 that killed four young Black girls; the hypocritical beliefs of former President Thomas Jefferson who owned enslaved Black people and drafted the Declaration of Independence to state “all men are created equal”; the public reaction to the publishing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and Abraham Lincoln’s complicated stance on racial equality.
Several students described the book as “interesting” given that many of these episodes of American history were new to them.
Robinson encouraged the students to add important moments to their timeline that weren’t mentioned in the book and are more recent, like the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020.
The in-class project requires the students to make a timeline of at least 15 events that stood out to them and that were discussed in the Kendi and Reynolds book.
Students gathered in groups of two to four members each to work on those timelines Tuesday.
The students’ work with Stamped on Tuesday and during the entire “American Experience” unit as a whole was not just a one-off book discussion, but instead part of their teacher’s attempt to introduce critical thinking about systemic racism and the role race plays in everyday society into the classroom.
Chaance Moore and Della Smith talk project plans.
In one small group were partners Della Smith, 16, and Chaance Moore, 16.
The duo agreed that the book sparked their interest because of its style and substance of its writing.
“It was very eye-catching,” Moore said.
Moore drafted up a timeline with paper and pencil that showed a total of 10 houses lining a street. He suggested to Smith that they write the timeline events on the houses, to which he later added details like windows and doors.
“I liked it. Everything was interesting and you can tell it was made for teens,” Smith said. “It’s written in our way of learning.”
In another group, junior Sayvion Saley, 16, said he often isn’t interested in history. But this book sparked his interest by opening his eyes to such matters as President Lincoln’s “actual reasons for abolishing slavery.”
He said the book taught him that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 not just in a kind-hearted move to free enslaved Black people, but also as part of a military strategy to give the Union the upper edge in the ongoing Civil War.
“It’s interesting to see different perspectives on American heroes,” he added.
“It’s interesting to learn a non-white-washed version of our history,” said Brianna Grey, 16.
Smith re-reads Stamped text to get ideas for timeline.
Robinson gave each of her English classes several choices of how to read Stamped in class.
This was different than last year’s reading unit, for which she asked all of her classes to read the entire book. She said last year students told her that reading the entire book for some made it difficult to grasp all of the author’s challenging concepts.
So this time, students chose between reading the entire book in either English or Spanish independently or aloud as a class, listening to the audio book, reading a PDF version, reading a modified version, or reading one section and presenting about it to the class.
A month ago, Stamped was banned by Pickens County School District in South Carolina.
The debate about the book is what sparked Robinson’s interest in teaching it here in New Haven. She decided it would be the perfect fit for the school’s “American Experience” unit.
She began teaching with the book last year and helped host a district-wide Zoom conversation with Jason Reynolds about the book.
The class also uses materials like the short story “Snow” by Julia Alvarez and the movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
In between writing bathroom passes on Tuesday, Robinson stopped at each small group to talk through students’ plans for their respective timelines.
Students consistently described Stamped as not a history book, but rather a “present book” that details how the country got to be the way it is today.
“This isn’t how we learned it in history class,” said one student in reaction to the book. “I always just learned that Lincoln ended slavery and Jefferson was so great that they put him on money.”
“How can we talk about the American experience without talking about racism?” Robinson recalled asking her students before reading the book.
While reading the book, Robinson said it prompted many students to do their own research about the events and people the book mentioned, from Trayvon Martin to Thomas Jefferson.
Robinson said she also selected the book for the unit because it has helped her own personal and professional growth.
“Until recently, I wasn’t completely open minded,” she said. “I wasn’t always able to acknowledge my own biases.”
After reading the book she added it to her lesson plans in hopes of making her students feel recognized and acknowledged, she said.
Phone Usage, Exhaustion On The Rise
Karen Robinson.
The Independent also spoke with Robinson on Tuesday after her first period English class about what teaching has been like for her this school year in the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) district.
She said so far the year “feels like things are getting back to order” after the major disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and online-only classrooms. She said the major exception she’s noticed this school year to that sense of pre-pandemic normalcy is that more students than ever use their phones during class.
“They’ve been locked in homes for two years and got addicted to technology and their phones. I even see it with my son,” Robinson said. “We just can’t compete.”
In her classes, Robinson reminds students of their professionalism grade that docks points off for unnecessary phone usage.
She has increased her small group work assignments in her classes to get students socializing with their peers rather than on their phones.
Robinson has also taken on teaching a sixth class this year. That extra class she has now taken on is a creative writing class that was previously covered by several different subs for its first month.
Career is down to two English teachers that would typically teach freshmen and senior English classes, she said.
While the creative writing course is a fun addition for Robinson and her students, she said her workload — and her resulting exhaustion — have only increased.
Same old, same old