Christopher Peak Photo
Third-graders Payton and Gabriel with their model bike.
A fire extinguisher made from soda bottles. A pair of elevator doors made from aluminum foil. A roller coaster made from miniature gears.
Replicas of those inventions, all originally dreamed up and patented by African Americans, filled the school hallways at John C. Daniels Inter-District Magnet School of International Communication for the last few weeks, as teachers taught about Black History Month.
On Thursday, two third-graders, Gabriel and Payton, toured the school, showing off those devices. They said that seeing all the inventions on display had taught them that skin color didn’t dictate creativity, even though people had believed that just a few generations ago.
Other third-graders learn about Thomas J. Martin’s fire extinguisher.
Their class built a life-size model of a bicycle. The class trimmed cardboard boxes into the outline of a frame, then wrapped the frame in aluminum foil to give it a metallic sheen.
Who’d been behind the original idea?
A little-known black man named Isaac R. Johnson, the students said.
Born in New York in 1812, Johnson updated clunkier bike frames of the past into a diamond-shaped one that could be easily disassembled, which is commonly found in contemporary models today.
Payton, with a writeup on Isaac R. Johnson.
“He built the bike before the — what’s it called?” said Gabriel, an aspiring techie.
“Before the civil rights came,” said Payton, an aspiring nurse. Back then, “It wasn’t like the future.”
Gabriel said he “felt bad” to hear that African-Americans were barred from society’s opportunities, and he said the perpetrators of discrimination deserve to be punished. He said he still has a lot of questions about that history.
“Those people who did wrong things to black people deserve to go to jail,” he said. “I ask my mom questions like why were the white people mean to the black people. She explained it to me, told me why and told me different people who fixed it,” like Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks.
Pre-K and SpEd students learned about Garret Morgan’s multidirectional stoplight.
Gabriel tries out the seventh-grade’s roller coaster, based on Granville T. Woods’s designs.
At Daniels, the school’s magnet theme focuses on the all different cultures that are present just within their Congress Avenue classrooms. The students said they’ve learned that some of their classmates who come from different countries don’t speak much English.
“It’s hard for us to understand them, but we’re still friendly classmates,” Payton said. Even with different accents, “they accept them. In the past, that happened. But in the future, they have kindness in them.”
they are learning some real history, unlike the myths my generation was taught.
This is what a creative school and teacher look like.