AVReading

  In Brandon Taylor’s novel Real Life, he describes a scene where the main character Wallace, a black man, at a party is confronted by a racist comment made by someone there.  He says, “No one said anything to him (the person making the racist comment).  No one did anything. . . There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down.  It is easier for them to let it happen, to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation.  No matter how good they are, how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen”.             The passage is a painful one to read, but it puts voice to the all-too-common experience where white people consciously ignore acts of prejudice for fear of disrupting the racial order of a group.  This is my str...

  Guidelines for Writing a Commencement Address The draft you write for consideration does not need to be a final version, but should give the panelists a clear idea of what you plan to say in your speech. The traditional commencement address has had content which reflects back on the class's experiences and also gives advice or guidance for the future. The tone should be one which inspires and motivates the listeners. Although the Commencement Address is directed at the graduating class, the message needs to be meaningful and appropriate for the adult audience present as well. Content, language, or style which parents or grandparents might find offensive is not suitable for a Commencement Address. Humor can be an effective minor element of a Commencement Address. The predominant message, and consequently the predominant writing style, should be serious, thoughtful and inspirational.   Format: This a general map of graduation speeches.  It is not required. Feel ...

  For many of those who lived through it, the outbreak of COVID-19 brought about a tremendous disruption to daily life.  Virtually all segments of our community were impacted in one way or another. And from this, we are beginning to recognize the many different ways that we took things for granted.  It took a major disruption to our lives to come to this realization.             When it comes to thinking about racism, it often takes an equally jarring event for the white community to become more aware of its prevalence.  For many of us, we were not really aware of the prevalence of police shootings and brutality within the black community until we read about Eric Walters, Michael Smith, and Philando Castille.  Our NFL games were disrupted by the silent protests of players who hoped to bring more awareness to the injustices.  For many of us, it took books like The New Jim Crow and do...

  As we become more and more familiar with the way that white supremacy acts and flourishes within our community, we have been able to identify some of its defense mechanisms.  One of which is the mechanism of white fragility.  The concept was originally coined by Robin DiAngelo in the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy (2011) to mean the following:  White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. (54) Though the concept itself is not difficult to understand, the way it operates and how it plays out can be rather complex. Typically, white fragility comes out in a number of thoughts expressed by people when they feel confronted by racist choices they have made.  Sharkey Holie ca...

               Because culture is so deeply embedded in language, it is often important that we spend a little time thinking very specifically about the words and phrases we choose to use, and under what circumstances.  While some might bristle at the thought of adapting our language to accommodate the latest trends and thinking, I see it differently.  For the change isn’t with our trends or thinking, but with a greater awareness of inequities that have always existed.   Our goal isn’t to jump onto the next passing fad of buzz words or acceptable terminology, but rather to raise an awareness of language and how it can potentially perpetuate stereotypes or marginalize members of our community.  The idea is that we work harder to avoid the “but I didn’t know” category of mistakes.  And better yet, to help our students figure them out as well.   Here is a case in point.  Not too long ago, some typ...

            Last week, one of my colleagues asked me if poor spelling meant that a student was dyslexic.  It’s a great question, and in light of our focus on dyslexia last month, I thought I would spend this month’s newsletter unpacking that question.  The simple answer is “no”.  Poor spellers are not always dyslexic.  To understand this, let’s begin with a quick review.  Reading text involves the decoding process, while writing text involves encoding.  We will see a little later how the two coding processes do correlate and have strong relationships, but they do operate independently, and it is good to remember that the one is more than just the reverse engineering of the other.  It is entirely possible to be a strong reader but a terrible speller.  In fact, there is a related disability more specific to orthography (spelling) known as dysgraphia.  While trouble spelling is certainly an indicator of dys...