My students need Lesson Before Dying to teach the Civil Rights in a lit class and my writers need freedom writers to experience the power of writing beyond a test.
This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
A typical day in my classroom is a grind. Every day, every minute students are working towards our goals (reading and writing growth). They work voraciously and joyfully, fully engaged in the content and materials. Our ambitious goal is to make 2.5 years of growth in 2 quarters.
The majority of my students come from generally under-served, low income, singe parent or no parent households in the northwest of Miami-Dade county, Florida.
They have never experienced many things that the rest of us have been lucky enough to see, and the best way for them to see these things is through reading. My school has given lots of flexibility to my classroom as I produce results and the students are the ones that need to benefit that by a push in rigor and critical thinking. The school rarely has the financial resources to support a dynamic curriculum, so therefore students are not exposed to new novels, personal copies of text, or sometimes even enough books to go around.
My Project
They will be reading. In the freshman class, we are going to rewrite the given curriculum to focus on a unit plan of race and race relations in our hometown, and branch out from there. The book I selected describes the life of a man sentenced wrongly to death because of the color of his skin. In the sophomore writing class, the students completed their FCAT writing exam the last week in February. They need to be reading and shown the importance of writing in their everyday lives and how it can lead to successes down the road; thus Freedom Writers.
Like I mentioned before, my students are rarely given the opportunity to have tangible, personal resources in front of them.
They are forced to share antiquated materials that are not relevant to their lives or experiences. These materials would help them relate to what we do in school every day and give them a sense of self-worth. Even something as small as having a book at their disposal is enough to make many of them happy. At the end of the day, happy learning is what we want in our schools.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Weber and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.