0 What We're Reading Today (8-24-13)

College Football's Most Dominant Player? It's ESPN - New York Times James Andrew Miller, Steve Eder, and Richard Sandomir Taking Middle Schoolers Out of the Middle - New York Times Elissa Gootman Thriving on Chaos, Manziel Shocks a Traditional System - New York Times Campbell Robertson Profiting from Racism? Reflections on White Allyship and the Issue of Compensation - Tim Wise Tim Wise How my white mother shaped me into a black man - Melissa Harris-Perry Albert L. Butler The Economics of Hook-Up Culture - Policy Mic Michelle Juergen An Intimate Look at the March on Washington- The Atlantic Garance Fanke-Ruta Which Colleges Should We Blame...

0 What We're Reading Today (8-17-13)

'Dropping Science': Profile of the Science Genius Program - NewBlackMan (in Exile) Mark Anthony Neal The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries - New York Times Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari When the Lights Shut Off: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative - LA Review of Books Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Bill De Blasio's Vision - New Yorker George Packer The Betrayal of Helen Thomas - Counterpunch Barbara Lubin and Danny Muller This Week in 'Nation' History: James Baldiwn's Four Decades of Prophecy, Confession, Emotion and Style - The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel White is the New White - The Nation Aura Bogado Black...

0 Help Me Show My Students that Reading is Wonderful

Hi friends, so as many of you know, I will be teaching 6th grade reading in Houston this coming year at Black MS.  As a reading teacher, I am excited to cultivate a love of reading with my students and expand their knowledge of what is possible for them to achieve in their own lives. Something I noticed this past summer as a teacher for a different group of students was just a general foreignness to the process of reading, an unfamiliarity with the joys of it and a rejection of the notion that reading was something done for pleasure.  This isn't unsurprising considering how these students are bombarded with passages from standardized...

0 What We're Reading Today (8-10-13) - Featuring the Mantis Shrimp

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave - Mother Jones Mac McClelland Grand Jury Decides Not to Charge Officer Who Fatally Shot Unarmed Youth in Bronx - New York Times Joseph Goldstein Forget Hitler - it was America that snubbed black Olympian Jesse Owens - Daily Mail Philip Delves Broughton Where are the White Folks?  Your Sympathy is not Solidarity - Osaynde.Org Ewuare X. Osaynde The Minor Glories and Dank Humanity of Kiese Laymon - Random House Anupa Mistry Hip-Hop as Performance Art: Jay Z, Appropriation, and Critiques of Whiteness - The Feminist Wire Janell Hobson How Many Gentrification Critics Are Actually Gentrifiers Themselves?...

0 What We're Reading Today (8-8-13)

The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington - Dissent Magazine William P. Jones How Sleep Deprivation Makes Us Want to Eat Fat - The Atlantic James Hamblin The Surprising Reason We Find Babies Cute - Huffington Post Dan Dennett Scales of Activism, Allyship, and the Embodiment of Resistance: a dialogue - The Becoming Collective Morgan Clare and Sarah Hunt You Are the Second Person - Guernica Mag Kiese Laymon Education Reform, Chicago Style - The Nation Rick Perlstein Why I Started Running How to Drake it in America - Jamelle Bouie Jamelle Bouie Why we must do more than repeal 'stand your ground' laws - Al Jazeera Addie...

0 What You NEED To Read Today 8.5.13

I've been reading numerous articles on Trayvon Martin and the resulting dialogue on race, anti-blackness and white supremacy in the United States. I've been waiting for an article that calls out our lack of focus of the criminalization, the repression, and the exploitation of black women more explicitly and more boldly; an article that recognizes the need for collective and community memory when the women gather crying. This article discusses one of the many implications of this case, and of many cases, that are too often left out. The criminalization and persecution of black men and boys AND black women and girls. We must be angry at ALL...

0 What We're Reading Today (7-31-13)

Don Lemon and the Failure of Respectability Politics - Buzzfeed Jesse Taylor Why Don Lemon Was Wrong - Ebony Dr. R. L'Heureux Lewis-McCoy What Has ObamaCare Done for Me Lately? Don Lemon and the Middle Class Embrace of Pathological Blackness - For Harriet Kimberley Foster Images of Bedouin displacement foreshadow a "Nakba in the Negev" - +972 Mag Matt Surrusco Chicago's rap scene produces some of the genre's best music amidst waves of violence - Washington Post Chris Richards 8 Shocking Ways America Leads the World - AlterNet Lynn Stuart Parramore This Charming Man - New Yorker Sasha Frere-Jones Don Lemon and the Complexity of Race -...