What happens when students are supported in caring about their community?
The Wake UP! Student Empowerment Program demonstrates how it can be done. Through this program, students like myself from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) and beyond are becoming advocates for themselves and their education.
TFA teachers start a Wake UP! club at their schools—inviting students to be a part of it. Then throughout the year, the club meets and decides how to improve their school by developing and implementing educational equity projects.
Wake UP! has been active since October 2012 when we had our kickoff event at UNC-Charlotte. In November, we took virtual school tours to see the differences in our schools, held an open forum with college students, and attended a college fair at Johnson C. Smith University. In January, we had a School Board Meet and Greet to see how decisions are made and to voice our opinions on critical issues.
Students then created a range of projects on topics such as mentoring, diversity, recruitment, and tutoring. On March 16, all students from the Wake UP! clubs at nine middle and high schools came together to present their projects “TedTalks” style to a community audience during the second annual Wake UP! Student Empowerment Summit at the Charlotte Convention Center.
At the Summit, myself and other members of The Possibility Project-Charlotte (TPPC), one of the organizations that made Wake UP! happen, opened the event with a performance of our latest original show, Take No Prisoners. We used the metaphor of war to tell three stories based on our experiences in high school. The audience related well to the metaphor. A corps member approached me after the 30-minute show and told me how thankful she was that students did performances like ours.
Photo courtesy of Allen Bosbyshell
This week Pass The Chalk features posts from contributors who learn, teach and work in Native communties in honor of Native American Heritage Month. Tracie Michelle Benally is a senior at Crownpoint High School in New Mexico.
PB&J cookies and Bikram Yoga on the Navajo Reservation are about as easy to find as a dancing, Vietnamese, Teach For America corps member now working for Bridge International Academies in Kenya. Finding such a woman is rare—in fact, it’s about a one in a million chance.
She exists. Her name is Ms. Dang.
I met her when I was a sophomore at Crownpoint High School in New Mexico. I was fifteen and uninspired—as far as I knew, educational success just wasn’t possible for me. I wasn’t expected to graduate high school or leave my community; unemployment hovered around fifty percent on my reservation and the drop-out rate was increasing. The odds of failing at attaining higher education were greater than succeeding, so trying seemed useless.
Her class, Geometry, was my first period. She greeted me with a fist bump and said something like, “GeoMonsters wahoooo!” When class began she referred to a schedule that looked like, “Greet Students—1 min. Intro—2 mins.”
I gave her two weeks.
Photo courtesy of Tracie Benally
Wondering what students want the newly-elected President to focus on for the next four years? Well, we asked them. And as it turns out, they’ve got a lot on their minds.
E.E., 5th Grade
Given the importance of mobilizing the youth vote in this country, I want to introduce you to Daranesha, a former student of mine. Even sharper and wittier than she was as a 7th grader, I have been admiring Nesha’s political activism on Facebook and Twitter these past few months. We had the opportunity to connect about today's election, and, not surprisingly, she is wise beyond her 19 years. In fact, she voted early, a step ahead of me!
CV: Nesha, you already cast your vote in Houston, Texas. Had your parents or anyone taken you to the polls before? What was the experience like?
DD: My parents have always voted. They were always stressing to me the importance of voting regardless of who I was voting for, because my vote could make a difference.
This election was my official first time voting. I must say that this experience was one that I will forever remember. Walking into the polls, I had the biggest smile on my face. I definitely felt the "freedom of speech" vibes kicking in. For the first time, I actually felt like I had a voice and it mattered, even though I didn't have to say a word. I didn't need to convince or explain to anyone who I was voting for and why. I could just simply walk in and speak through voting. Definitely a priceless moment marked in the books.
Photo courtesy of Daranesha D.
It’s the first Friday of the school year, and I’m perched on my desk, screaming at the top of my lungs. My students’ jaws drop; has Mr. Rigonan lost it already?
“I AM THE LORAX AND I SPEAK FOR THE TREES,” I yell in my best Mario Salvio-exhorting-Berkeley-students voice. The teacher next door knocks to make sure everything is OK (“I thought you were in trouble already,” she told me after school). I hear giggles, and 37 sets of eyes are glued to my next move.
“Remember to take observations on this mythical creature,” I whisper, switching from Lorax mode back to Mr. Rigonan. After 15 minutes of this one-man Seussian show, my students recite the Lorax’s final words in a rousing chorus: “UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
Though reading a seemingly juvenile book to sixth graders who want so badly to grow up didn’t make sense to many of my friends and colleagues, I wanted to share my favorite piece of literature with my life science students. The Lorax introduces essential scientific concepts like note-taking, observation, systematic thinking, and the scientific method. More than that, I saw Dr. Seuss’s book as a foundation for the distinct culture I want to see in my classroom.
Photo by David Bjorgen via WikiCommons
Alex Almaguer is a ninth grader in Dallas, Texas.
My name is Alex Almaguer and I graduated from T.C. Marsh Middle School in Dallas. This summer, I had the chance to attend the Roadmap to College Tour with my aunt, some friends, and amazing teachers including Ms. Isaak. The main reason to attend this tour, for me, was to determine the location of the college I would like to join in 2016.
I have always wanted to attend college outside of Texas, to get a new point of view of other places and to be independent. Before registering for this trip, I never knew exactly what I was searching for in a college. To be honest, I really didn’t focus at all about the details to attend a college and all the years in between. My dream is to become a family attorney. All I knew was that to make this possible I must go to law school.
Alex Almaguer during her college tour. Photo courtesy of Courtney Isaak
During this trip I visited nine different colleges around Texas, including Texas A&M, Austin College, Rice, and others. All these colleges are different in many ways; some are big, some are small, some offer study abroad, many don’t, many have traditions, and some don’t. It made me realize that there are many unique colleges I could go to. If I really put my mind to it and become a well-rounded person I could choose any college that’s right for me.
We believe education is the most pressing issue facing our nation. On Pass the Chalk, we'll share our takes on the issues of the day, join the online conversation about education, and tell stories from classrooms, schools, and communities around the nation.
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