Teacher wins Skirball Lottery for Sept 28th

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

My students will have the opportunity to view Stan's Cafe a British theatre company at the Skirball Cultural Center. I entered a drawing at the Skirball Cultural Center and my name was selected for the September 28th performance. Skirball is graciously paying for buses. Stan's Cafe is a state of the art innovative troupe that uses 11,000 pounds of rice to help students visually identify human life with a grain of rice. Every grain of rice is representational of one living person. This is a way for students to understand global statistics where one medium can be easily manipulated. Stan's Cafe performance will greatly benefit my sixth grade students because they will begin to have some understanding not only of the number of people in the world, but how culture, tragedies, and individuals have affected numbers of people within society. My students will watch as 300 million grains are manipulated into world statistics by five artists dressed as lab technicians. The performance of Stan's Cafe at the Skirball Cultural Center will greatly benefit my 6th grade English and History students because it will give them an opportunity to experience global awareness. Often when I spend time in my history class talking about current events from the last year's Tsunami to the tragedy of forty-two wars around the world the students do not understand the number of people that have been affected. By having the opportunity to use rice as a medium representational of people, I can continue the extended metaphor in explaining both current and historical facts that shape their future. There is also an opportunity for my students to use rice as a medium to explain current events or to show how many people were estimated on the earth during the hunter and gatherer period versus the Egyptian Empire. This extended metaphor can be strategically used by both teacher and student throughout the school year. I am a teacher at Robert Frost Math/Science & Technology Magnet. I teach sixty students English and History. Because I teach at a magnet school, seventy percent of my students are minority students and thirty percent of my students are Caucasian. The Robert Frost Math/Science/ & Technology Magnet focuses on working collectively in project based instruction. As a teacher, there are many opportunities both inside and outside of the classroom that shape the minds of my students. I am hoping that if my students have the opportunity to see Stan's Cafe that in some small way it may make their world a little bit smaller and their global awareness greater. I believe that my students need a way to understand global realities in a visual and interesting way. After my students experience Stan's Cafe they will never look at another piece of rice again without thinking about another person in another part of the world. In one brief sentence, this performance will raise their global awareness of the world.