Guest Post: What ELLs Taught Our School In A Week-Long Empathy Project. Editor’s Note: My talented colleague Pam Buric led an extraordinarily successful – on a number of levels – project at our school this month. She agreed to write about it in this guest post. I’ve added a few comments and links that might be helpful if you’d like to do something similar at your school. Pam Buric has been teaching at Luther Burbank High School for 18 years and has teaching English learners for most of that time. In addition to teaching, she is the lead teacher of a small learning community and the multilingual coordinator for the school site.
A few weeks ago, my EL students were given the opportunity to share their stories with the “mainstream” students at our school. The idea was dropped in my lap by administration as a means to promote empathy, our school social-emotional learning focus for the month of March. “…We are not rich. The stories of the lives of my students are heart-wrenching, poignant, incomprehensible. “Almost every child is involved with the gang…. Related. Eduardo García’s Path: Migrant Worker, Convict, Deportee, Star Chef - NYTimes.com. This Wisconsin dairy farmer knows what wages sent to Mexico can do. By Annie Baxter April 18, 2017 | 12:00 PM In the late 1990s, John Rosenow was expanding his dairy in Cochrane, Wisconsin. He struggled to find workers to fill positions on the farm as he went from milking 50 cows to more than 500. Other farmers had turned to immigrant labor from Mexico. Rosenow wasn't interested. “Diversity for us was whether you were Polish or Norwegian or you were Catholic or Protestant,” he said.
But eventually he ran out of options. “Great worker,” Rosenow said. From there, Rosenow kept hiring more guys from Mexico, mostly from the coastal Veracruz region. Some U.S. legislators want to tax those remittances to help finance President Trump’s plans for a border wall. The visits came about because Rosenow and other farmers hiring Mexican immigrants encountered language barriers early on. Duvall came to see language wasn't the only problem: there were cultural disconnects.
“And so employees might think, ‘Well, geez. “There weren't any phones. Gentrified Brooklyn Is Not My Brooklyn | The Huffington Post. I say, “I’m from Brooklyn,” like there’s a grenade exploding from my mouth. I walk different after saying it. My step is a little harder, my shoulders more square, nose held higher in the air. It’s a momentary self-assuredness that follows me for a spell. I feel it rise into my jaw when I see her approach across the water as I’m crossing the Williamsburg Bridge; when the train doors close on First Avenue and the L snakes under the East River.
The thing is, the Brooklyn I’m from isn’t the Brooklyn of today. My Brooklyn is the Brooklyn of the Domino sugar factory and rubble. When people speak of the old Brooklyn, when they refer to it in articles and essays, the Brooklyn before the organic markets and food co-ops, before there was a trash can on every corner and community gardens — they talk about it like it was all bad, like all there was was poverty and crack and single moms (because you know, we’re the bane of existence, right?)
I miss the sense of community of the old neighborhood. Here’s What It’s Like To Be A Black Migrant In Mexico – we are mitú. Filmmaker Ebony Bailey’s documentary film “Life Between Borders: Black Migrants in Mexico” is a glimpse into the lives of black African and Caribbean migrants in Mexico. The film dives into the situation at the U.S. -Mexico border, where many Haitian migrants are “stuck” in Mexico following an order by former President Barack Obama.
After the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, many Haitians left the country to find work in countries such as Brazil. When the U.S. suspended deportations of Haitian nationals and granted them humanitarian visas to enter the country following the 2010 earthquake, many Haitians began traveling through Mexico to enter the U.S. But the order was eventually reversed, leaving thousands of Haitians who were traveling from Brazil to the U.S., effectively stranded in Mexico. Bailey’s film also explores the relationship between Mexicans and migrants of African descent. (H/T: Remezcla) READ: These Peruvians Are Embracing Their Afro-Latino Pride Like Never Before. Una Vida Dos Paises: Children and Youth (Back) in Mexico. As West Michigan's Hispanic population rises, so do opportunities - Crain's Detroit Business. History of Latinos in Michigan. Since the 20th century, Latinos have had a significant role in America's economy.
When the first Latinos arrived in 1915, Michigan was first entering the industrial revolution and there was a high demand for labor.1 Sugar companies were on the rise, and began recruiting their employees from Mexico and Southern Texas to tend the state's sugar beets. Those who did not work in the sugar beet fields found work maintaining railways and assembly lines in the automobile plants. Detroit, once populated by nearly all European immigrants was now home to 4,000 Mexican citizens by the end of 1920.2 Many workers came to Michigan to escape the violent racism of Southern Texas or the political unrest in Mexico in search of a better life.
After a law was passed to restrict new immigration from Europe, the sugar beet industry soon became a dominant workforce heavily recruiting more and more laborers from Mexico. Unfortunately the pursuit of the “American Dream” was not as easy as it seemed. Inmigracion-en-espanol-1. Many Spanish teachers have used La Misma Luna in class. It is a wonderful movie that students love.
It also creates empathy for undocumented immigrants in the United States. This year and last, instead of just showing the movie, I decided to create a unit for my Spanish 1 class about immigration. It went really well so I am sharing it here in case other people might want to use it. Here is the unit packet. It includes the Essential Questions, the "I can" statements for the unit, a variety of activities for the two stories, Quizlet links, and a link to a textivate activity.The first story was the PBS short film "The Other Side. " I share this to help others teach in TL with comprehensible input. This Interactive Map Shows That Immigration Is NOT Just A Latino Thing. Surrendering. Reading and writing, like any other crafts, come to the mind slowly, in pieces. But for me, as an E.S.L. student from a family of illiterate rice farmers, who saw reading as snobby, or worse, the experience of working through a book, even one as simple as “Where the Wild Things Are,” was akin to standing in quicksand, your loved ones corralled at its safe edges, their arms folded in suspicion and doubt as you sink.
My family immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1990, when I was two. We lived, all seven of us, in a one-bedroom apartment in Hartford, Connecticut, and I spent my first five years in America surrounded, inundated, by the Vietnamese language. When I entered kindergarten, I was, in a sense, immigrating all over again, except this time into English. One early-spring afternoon, when I was in fourth grade, we got an assignment in language-arts class: we had two weeks to write a poem in honor of National Poetry Month. “Where is it?” Weeks earlier, I’d been in the library.
New Study Shows Just How Much Undocumented Immigrants Actually Contribute. One of the main reasons that Donald Trump has been able to successfully catapult himself from reality television star to dominant Republican presidential frontrunner is his unrivaled ability to vilify undocumented immigrants. More than any other candidate in the race, he's been able to capitalize on the anxiety among many conservatives that undocumented immigrants are people who take from citizens without giving anything in return.
One of the ways he does this is by referring to how much unauthorized immigrants cost, repeatedly charging that they don't pay taxes and benefit from "free tax credits. " But just as with so many other things the billionaire showman says, his claims on this front are contradicted by the facts. Read more: 5 Myths About Immigrants That Everyone Needs to Stop Telling Immediately Undocumented immigrants pay an estimated $12 billion in taxes to the federal government annually. But that's just for Uncle Sam. How do they do it? Mis Clases Locas: Immigration Simulation. Spanish 3 is just starting a unit on immigration using the novel Esperanza by Carol Gaab.
This group is new to novels, so we are starting easy to build confidence, while digging into complex ideas in Spanish, such as immigration and poverty. Here is my post from last year about teaching the novel Esperanza. This immigration simulation would also be great before starting the novel Cajas de Cartón. Last year at #CSCTFL15 I was at a session (ok multiple sessions) with the wonderful Carrie Toth @SenoraCMT. She brought up a simple but powerful way to get students to really start thinking about immigration, and has given me permission to share it here.
To do this small immigration simulation, do the following: Print large flags or signs for each "country" you are representing & post them in two distinct areas of the room. Allow students to enjoy their area for a while and realize what we were doing. Here are other things we have done so far in our unit before starting Esperanza.