MLK Day 2008 - Have we made progress?

I attended a church service yesterday where we reflected on this question. . . How far have we come?

Not far enough was the answer my minister gave. His argument was that basically, it is in education where there is still a huge rift between the races. White students get a better education, due mostly to funding, than African American students do.

I don't know if this is true, I believe it is, but I know almost nothing about this argument. What I do know is that I am in a working-class neighborhood with more African American neighbors than white ones, and our school is on probration and about to undergo restructuring due to poor test scores.

The population of their school breaks down this way: 85% African American, 10% white, and 5% Hispanic. I don't think that the education they are getting is equal to that of kids in more afluent neighborhoods, but I am not sure I understand why that is, how that is, how it happend, and how it can be fixed.

We constantly struggle at our school to keep programs running. The band program is so underfunded that each year band parents have to pay $600 for their children to participate. I am told that many teachers have taken pay cuts, and I know that activities have been cut.

WHY? I will be looking into this over the coming weeks and plan to blog about it here. I have many questions and few answers right now. I am hoping to change that.

Student of teen culture

I had an intersting conversation last night with my teenagers about, well, lots of things, but mostly about what scares them about school. My daugter had to watch Bowling for Columbine in her Government class over the past couple of days and this left her feeling worried and needing to talk.

We talked about gun control, an issue I am on the fence about, by the way. However, it seems my daugher thinks guns should be ban. Her strongest reasoning is that it is too easy for kids to get ahold of them now, and being as kids/teens are so unstable anyway, they need to be kept out of their reach at all costs. I guess since she only got one side of the argument in school, I will once again have to at least show her the other half of the argument so she can see both sides. Once again I have to step in and un-teach my daughter some crazy teacher's political agenda. Ah well. . .the price of freedom in America. . .I wouldn't trade it for the world!

As we were discussing this issue of gun control and school shootings, an opportunity for some instruction from my children came. It seems that the two boys from Columbine were what my kids would consider "emos." This term, "emo," was new to me. It turns out that this is a common teenage term for what my son called "emotionally disturbed" kids.

This was further solidified with me today when I stumbled upon a great readers blog and saw this video description of an "emo." Very funny stuff!!