Tag: SLAVERY
Teacher fired for making black students play slaves in class plans $1B lawsuit
A white city public school teacher — who claims she was wrongfully fired over a controversial lesson on slavery in which she was accused of having black students lie on the floor while she stepped on their backs — plans to sue the city for $1 billion.
Patricia Cummings, 37, was canned in October after complaints about the highly unorthodox teaching method that left some students feeling humiliated and singled out by the exercise.
But Cummings insisted Thursday that she initiated the lesson in her class at MS 118 in the Bronx in good faith — and only one student and her parent objected.
Her sacking — and the torrent of criticism that followed — has rendered her permanently unemployable, Cummings said at a press conference alongside her lawyer, Thomas Liotti. “I have no career at this point,” she said.
She filed a $120 million lawsuit in Suffolk County, where she lives, against a slew of defendants ranging from the city Department of Education to Mayor Bill de Blasio to media outlets. But Liotti said they plan to build a $1 billion class-action case with other teachers claiming similar forms of discrimination.
Cummings said she was initially cleared after an internal school investigation but that the case was revived after media reports on the incident.
The teacher said her suit will be supported by the testimony of a black teacher at the school who witnessed the lesson.
That colleague found it effective — and said he would not have objected if his own kids had taken part.
“That 20 seconds of a teachable moment changed my life,” she said, adding that she was pelted with emails calling for her murder and was widely vilified as a racist.
“Anyone who has met me knows I don’t have that bone in my body,” she said. “I was brought up — you treat everybody the way you want to be treated.”
Liotta argued Thursday that the lesson only drew objections because of his client’s race.
“How does the City of New York expect to attract effective teachers when people like Patricia Cummings have to go through this kind of abuse?” he asked. “It’s outrageous.”
The Education Department initially reassigned Cummings before firing her after an investigation, according to agency spokesman Doug Cohen.
Their probe found that she used poor judgment but did not substantiate the corporal punishment charge.
“Ms. Cummings was terminated based on a thorough investigation and a review of her performance as an educator,” Cohen said Thursday. “We’ll review the complaint.”
Photo Credit: Twitter
White student tells Black student ‘You are my slave’ in school’s ‘Civil War Day’ has mom furious
KENNESAW, Ga. — A new battle line has formed in the national debate over Civil War flags and symbols — this time at a Georgia school not far from a mountaintop where Confederate soldiers fired their cannons at Union troops more than a century ago.
The school near Kennesaw Mountain last month invited fifth-graders to dress up as characters from the Civil War.
A white student, dressed as a plantation owner, said to a 10-year-old black classmate, “You are my slave,” said the black child’s parent, Corrie Davis.
“What I want them to understand is the pain it caused my son,” Davis said of her child, who did not dress up that day. “This is bringing them back to a time when people were murdered, when people died, when people owned people.”
Davis recorded an emotional video in which she explains how she was affected by what happened to her son. It has attracted about 70,000 views on Facebook. The distraught mother said she met with school officials, but was dismayed when they refused to promise that they would never conduct a class in that way again. The issue could come to a head in a couple of weeks, when Davis plans to bring it up at a regularly scheduled school board meeting.
“No student was required to dress in period attire and any student that did so was not instructed, nor required, to dress in any specific attire,” school system spokesman John Stafford said in a brief statement. Cobb County school officials haven’t said whether the annual Civil War Day will continue next year at Big Shanty Intermediate School.
However, the note sent home to parents before the event said “it creates a more realistic simulation when dressing in Civil War clothing.”
Its suggestions included overalls — which Davis believes could have been meant to represent the clothing worn by slaves — and dark pants and white button-down shirts. White button-down shirts have become synonymous with demonstrators protesting the removal of Confederate statues in recent months. They were worn, for example, by some of the white nationalists who staged a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that led to violent clashes in August.
Communities around the country have removed Confederate monuments under pressure from those who say they honor a regime that enslaved African-Americans. The debate over such symbols intensified after a self-proclaimed white supremacist who had posed in a photo with the Confederate battle flag fatally shot nine black parishioners in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. And it has shown little signs of waning since the Charlottesville clashes that left one woman dead.
“BE CREATIVE and use your resources to ensure that your costume is as accurate as possible,” the Georgia school’s note informed parents. It included a small picture of a man in Civil War dress with what appears to be one of several flags used by the Confederate States of America.
“If they’re requiring that the costume be as accurate as possible … some kid is going to come to school dressed as a plantation owner,” Davis said in her video. “My son is going to be looked upon as a slave at the school.”
The best way to help students learn about difficult historical events such as the Civil War is to create an environment in which they can talk about them and learn different perspectives, said Andy Mink, a former Virginia teacher and now vice president of education programs at the National Humanities Center, a nonprofit organization that works to strengthen teaching.
“I think the best reason to teach history is to teach empathy,” said Mink, who works with schools nationwide on teaching strategies.
“The question we have to ask is whether or not dressing in a particular outfit is really achieving a learning outcome of some kind.”
Davis said she doesn’t object to learning about the Civil War. “I’m simply saying the way in which you are going about teaching this standard is offensive,” she said.
Earlier this month, students in Georgia’s largest school system, Gwinnett County, were asked in a class studying the rise of Nazism to come up with ideas for mascots that might have been used as propaganda for the Nazi party. Gwinnett County schools spokeswoman Sloan Roach said it wasn’t appropriate, and that the matter was being addressed with the teacher.
“We don’t want to do things in our classrooms that would intentionally provide traumatic experiences for young people,” said Sandra Schmidt, associate professor of social studies education at Teachers College at Columbia University.
Schmidt said educators have been aware of the possible pitfalls of student role-playing exercises since the late 1960s’ “Blue Eyes-Brown Eyes” experiment, in which Iowa teacher Jane Elliott designated blue-eyed students as superior to brown-eyed peers.
“She quickly realized how out of hand it got,” Schmidt said.
Davis said she won’t back down in her effort to stop the dress-up aspect of the school’s Civil War Day. She said she doesn’t want other students going through what her son did.
“What they can do is say, ‘We’re not going to do this anymore,’” Davis said. “It is mind-boggling to me that no one will say that.”
via: http://nypost.com/2017/10/13/you-are-my-slave-elementary-school-civil-war-day-has-mom-furious/
High school sparks backlash with mock slavery lesson with tying wrists together, lie on floor and watch Roots
A California high school is facing a backlash after administering an interactive mock slavery lesson to students.
In the activity at Whitney High School, 8th grade students played the part of slaves, with their hands bound with masking tape, CBS Los Angeles reported. The teachers played the part of the slave ship captains.
An explainer of the lesson plan was emailed to parents Sept. 5, describing it as a “simulation activity” looking to teach “students about the slave system in colonial America.” One parent posted a copy of the letter to Facebook.
It also said that the activity was meant to be a surprise because it was “more powerful” when it was something the students were “not prepared for.”
After detailing the activity, the teachers wrote, “The idea is for them to be uncomfortable and to feel mistreated, like a piece of property. However, please rest assured that your child will not be physically or emotionally hurt/harmed in any way.”
The parent who posted the letter on Facebook reportedly told the school that her son would not be participating.
“As the mother of a black child, I feared that my son’s participation would lead him to experience trauma, perhaps at a cellular level, and have a visceral reaction of anger and fear during the exercise itself,” she told the Huffington Post.
The program was removed from the curriculum on Monday, according to CBS Los Angeles.
Other faculty members at the school reportedly agreed with the decision.
“I think there are other ways to teach tolerance and maybe even better ways and best practices to broach these sensitive topics,” an English teacher at the school told CBS Los Angeles.
Whitney High School did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment.
http://nypost.com/2017/09/20/high-school-sparks-backlash-with-mock-slavery-lesson/