Talk With Your Students About Trayvon Martin

Education Week ^ | April 9, 2012 | Jeffrey P. Carpenter and Scott Weathers

[Sopater]

Teachers, stop what you are doing and take some time to talk with your students about the Trayvon Martin case. We know you have a lot of content to cover. Accountability pressures lurk in the back of your mind. But this is a moment when you need to make time to discuss an issue with your students that is important to them and to our society.

The Martin case easily connects to history, literature, civics, and government curricula. For example, compare and contrast the case with the events of To Kill A Mockingbird, or the murder of Emmett Till. But even if there is no clear curricular connection, isn’t there room in a year or semester-long curriculum to spend at least 30 minutes talking with students about events that are being hotly discussed outside the school?

Yes, the Trayvon Martin case is controversial. Discussing the fatal shooting of this 17-year-old African-American youth in Sanford, Fla., could bring up emotions and conflicts that are not easily resolved. And many of the facts of the case are indeed still uncertain. We have heard of teachers avoiding the topic because it is too contentious.

[Sopater]

Urging teachers to talk about this in the classrooms even if it doesn't have anything to do with the curricula?

Keeping this story "hot" in the minds of the public may be the biggest mistake that liberals make this year.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Don’t attack strangers, children, and you won’t get shot.

[massgopguy]

Okay kids, this is real life. If you just walked away from trouble. Keep walking. Never turn around and go back at it.

[susannah59]

They have to be kidding. If I were a teacher, I wouldn’t touch this topic with a 10-foot pole.

[struggle]

I think my kids are fine without Trayvon being mentioned thank you very much.

Last thing that I want for a 50/50 white/black class to do is start screaming at each other over the incomplete “facts” that the media has been dishing out since March.

[Admin Moderator]

This is not considered Activism.

[P.O.E.]

OK kids, would you rather learn math or stand around all talking at once in increasingly louder voices?

YAY!

[JPG]

Trayvon, global warming discussions, LGBTG classes, sensitivity training...oops, there's the bell..class dismissed. We'll get to readin’, writin and rithmatic sometime next month (maybe).

[AAABEST]

This is another example of why I laugh (to myself) when I hear other parents telling me their kids are going to a "good" public school.

This type of manipulative, lefty type stuff rains down like diarrhea every day from any number of sources - and it's all destined for their childrens' young minds.

Then we wonder why the electorate is mostly moron.

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

Ugh! Thank goodness my kids have tests all week.

[Aevery_Freeman]

You would probably be amazed, or sickened, by the number of people that get their political positions from their children via the schools.

The largest welfare program in America is the government day-care system - you may know it as the school system.

Most parents rightly assume that whatever benefits the teachers, benefits the schools, the children and themselves.

[freedumb2003]

For the teachers that do this, how many will open with the words “rush to judgement”?

[Bringbackthedraft]

Standing on the grocery check out line I could not help seeing the smiling face of 8 yr. old Trayvon on the cover of People magazine. It was classic MSM manipulation of the public opinion. Who would look at it if it had the most recent pictures from Twitter? Tomorrow, the report comes out from the SPD?

[Lurker]

You don’t get it.

This is exact.y the kind of thing the educational establishment wants to spend time on. There’s no hard and fast criteria for correct or incorrect. It will spin the kids up on both sides. It will disrupt classrooms for a month at least, with any luck until June.

Anything, absolutely anything OTHER than actually teach match, science, English, or history....anything.

[Vigilanteman]

Listening to some of Kenny Rogers better songs would be shorter, more memorable and serve the same purpose. The Gambler and Coward of the County are just two that come to mind.

[butterdezillion]

This plan backfired after the teacher brought it up as an assingment and my son was thus able to inform his classmates about the evidence we do have.

They are barking up the wrong tree if anybody in their classroom is aware of the actual evidence. This would provide the means for the TRUTH to actually get out there. All it would take is one person in every classroom who is exposed to sources outside the treasonous media.

And even worse for them, the violent rhetoric out of the New Black Panther Party is actually the fruit of a deliberate training effort chosen specifically by BARACK OBAMA in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Obama wants us to think he’s not associated with the violent Black Supremacist movement but he personally chose to fund and mandate the training of Chicago teachers in the Sub-Saharan Supremacy cult.

IOW, what we are seeing being done to George Zimmerman and the 50-year-old white man who was assaulted by Black youths with a hammer.... is the oak resulting from the acorn BARACK OBAMA deliberately and specifically planted.

Read the initial post and at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2869819/posts?page=47#47 and following for more details.

We need the kids in our classrooms to know this information and to bring it up when the teachers address Trayvon. This could be a huge gift to all those who seek to get the truth out to people who only otherwise hear from the treasonous media.

[Hodar]

And many of the facts of the case are indeed still uncertain.

So, open your mouth and state a case; because you don't have a FREAKIN' idea what you are babbling about.

Only a Libtard would go off and lecture students about a case - without any facts to back them up. They did it with Global Warming, why not this too?

And then Teachers wonder why they are among the least repected professionals in the job market .....

[G Larry]

Yes....
Tell them how Bill Cosby and others would prefer that George had been beaten to death, rather than being able to defend himself against his attacker.

[DaveyB]

Yes connect the episode to history like Joseph Goebbels and propaganda, media and information manipulation - Creating cultural myths to advance totalitarian ends.

[butterdezillion]

What they think is their strength is actually a huge vulnerability. Because if there is even one student in each classroom who knows the facts and is willing to speak them, there will be exponentially more kids exposed to those facts who otherwise would only hear the lies of the media.

If they open up the subject, they open up every kid in that classroom to actually hear some real facts.

We need to make sure our high-schoolers are informed and equipped to speak out when their teachers bring this up. I’ve been praying for a way to access the people who are never exposed to truth. I had been thinking maybe Jesse Jackson could be persuaded to do the decent thing, but that isn’t happening. Now this. If the teachers open up this discussion in every classroom we have access to the illiterate masses (both children and their parents) like never before. We just need to be prepared to use this opportunity.

What they need to be prepared to bring up is not just the evidence that this was indeed a shooting in self-defense as the evidence suggests, but that the response of the race pimps including the New Black Panther Party is VIOLENT, which is exactly the seed that Obama himself planted through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and fits right in with the NBPP’s ties to the terrorist organization Hezbollah, which is also an ally to the Mexican drug cartels that Eric Holder is arming with non-trackable guns.

Read the initial post and comments starting at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2869819/posts?page=47#47 for more info and documentation of this.