Apparently having a dissertation draft due makes me want to blog more.
The first grader I tutor is possibly the smartest kid in FTON. Her family is from Tanzania. Both her older siblings are in college and her mother checks in on her at school all of the time. Even though they are Muslim and don't celebrate Christmas, they get me a vanilla scented holiday candle every year. I wonder how they feel about the neighborhood.
Today, we were picking flashcard words and trying to make sentences out of them. Since it has been snowing all day, I put down, "Today is full of white ---." "How do you think I am going to finish the sentence?" I asked. She looked around her inquisitively and said, "Today is full of white children?"
"lumbering our minds with literature..."
"Somewhere between prayer and revolution....:"
"This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes...I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning. This, then, was the difficulty, this sweet dessert in the morning and the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all around her, and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for it breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide which overwhelms her." -Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House
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About Me
- Heather
- These are my thoughts about living in my community in Franklinton, and studying and teaching English.
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