Nonviolent Responses to Violence

As we begin a new school year, I've been looking for new and interesting resources to use with my students. After hearing about TED talks for some time, I decided to explore their website. What a treasure trove!

Today, they started posting new talks after a summer hiatus. There is a brilliant talk from Scilla Elworthy exploring the issue of fighting violence with nonviolence. I plan to incorporate this into our Civil Rights Movement unit in the spring. This will be particularly useful for my gifted students to take these ideas that we study in social studies and applying them to real situations in the world. They CAN change the world, and Scilla Elworthy is an excellent role model for them to begin to emulate. She is particularly eloquent when saying "Anger is like gasoline. If you spray it around and somebody lights a match, you've got an inferno. [But] if we can put our anger inside an engine, it can drive us forward." What a wonderful analogy. The video is embedded below!

Getting Started

Throughout my [brief] teaching career, I have seen a considerable rise in the number of teacher-run blogs out there. I have gotten so many wonderful ideas from fellow educators who want to share their best with the rest of us, and I wanted to start my own for a number of reasons. First, to put what I'm doing out there in case anyone can benefit from it, but also to chronicle what goes on in my classroom on a daily basis. It's a very exciting prospect to be able to look back on this blog and see how my students and my teaching change.

A little snapshot of me for an introduction:

• I am a fifth grade Language Arts and Social Studies teacher in South Carolina, a state that is constantly criticized nationally for our lackluster (they think) test scores. 
• I teach Language Arts and Social Studies to two sets of students each day. This year, both sections of students are considered "Eagle" classes, meaning they are state-identified as gifted and talented OR are considered to be high flyers. 
• I integrate practically everything I do, so that our reading, writing, and Social Studies are tied together at all times. There are not enough hours in the day as it is, so I have to combine things to cover the standards sufficiently.
• I am our school's representative on the district ELA textbook adoption committee, so I have heard a lot about the impending implementation of the Common Core standards. I have mixed feelings about this, and I look forward to writing on here to help me sort out my feelings about this change. 

I suppose that's all you really need to know! I genuinely love teaching and interacting with the kids--if only they would streamline the paper- and busy-work so that I can spend more time on my students and less on paperwork and putting out fires!