As you may have already heard, today the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to rule on the Trump Administration’s travel ban in the fall, but allowed parts of it to be enforced beginning on Thursday.
Lots of questions remain about how the Administration is going to implement the those parts of the ban in Thursday, particularly about how it relates to refugees.
Check out my New York Times post for English Language Learners on the Winter Olympics and using picture dictation in the classroom. It includes a student interactive and teaching ideas. It’s about the last Olympics, but the ideas can easily be adapted and modified.
Tricks is a NY Times feature: “Snowboarders and skiers have an extensive vocabulary of spins and flips. Some tricks are named for their technical requirements, others for their flair. Here, some of the best riders describe the joy and fear that come with these jaw-dropping maneuvers.”
How Olympians Stay Motivated is an excellent article in The Atlantic, and here’s an excerpt that tells you about it:
We can’t all be Olympic athletes. (In fact some of us, including your humble narrator, should not be allowed anywhere near ice or blades.) But we all face times when we really don’t want to do something that we, nonetheless, really have to do. Drawing from interviews with top athletes and their coaches, along with psychological studies of athletes, here are seven ways Olympians stay motivated through the training slog. I doubt teachers will find a more useful article on the Olympics — piece combines the high interest and topic subject of the Olympics with just about every priority in Social Emotional Learning.
Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery is a site for genealogists and researchers where they and others can search through incredibly tragic and moving ads former slaves published looking for their lost family members.
Here’s their official description:
Last Seen offers genealogists and researchers a new tool for telling family stories of separation and survival during slavery, emancipation, and Civil War. The site offers easy access to thousands of “Information Wanted” advertisements taken out by former slaves searching for long lost family members. The ads taken out in black newspapers mention family members, often by name, and also by physical description, last seen locations, and at times by the name of a former slave master.
You can help bring this new powerful genealogical tool to life by transcribing these ads!
It seems to me that invitation to transcribe could offer a powerful opportunity for students to begin to grasp the human toll of slavery and, at the same time, contribute to a greater good.
YouTube has created a great series called “#MoreThanARefugee: Everyone Has a Story to Share.” You can see the entire playlist at this link. Here’s a sample:
The Ford Foundation has recently published a useful quiz to help people examine their own privilege and a similar older BuzzFeed quiz has recently been making the rounds on Social Media (I’ve also shared them here previously). Though I wouldn’t necessarily use those quizzes for high school (though they could be very effective for professional development purposes or for college classes), there are other resources I think would be usable. I thought I’d share them all here.
