BLACK HISTORY month: Education

The Tale of Two Sides 

A Bronx teacher sparks outrage for using black students in cruel slavery lesson
Americans are up in arms about a white public school teacher teaching her students about slavery by demonstrating or rather trying to recreate the experience for her students. The story reads thus:

Kids and parents say this Bronx teacher needs a lesson — in racism.

"Middle School 118 teacher Patricia Cummings shocked and traumatized children in her social studies classes when she singled out black students and told them to lie on the floor for a lesson on U.S. slavery — and then stepped on their backs to show them what slavery felt like, students and a staffer said.

Students said Cummings, who is white, pulled the insensitive stunt in multiple seventh-grade classes as part of a unit on the infamous Middle Passage, in which Africans were kidnapped and brought to America as part of the slave trade.

Kids and adults in Cummings’ school, where the student body is 81% black and Hispanic and just 3% white, were horrified by the offensive lessons they said occurred roughly two weeks ago. 

“It was a lesson about slavery and the Triangle Trade,” said one of Cummings’ students, who asked to remain anonymous.

“She picked three of the black kids,” the boy said, and instructed them to get on the floor in front of the class. “She said, ‘You see how it was to be a slave?’ She said, ‘How does it feel?’ ” 

When a girl on the floor made an uncomfortable joke and said she felt fine, Cummings stepped on her back, the student said.

“She put her foot on her back and said ‘How does it feel?’” the student said. “ ‘See how it feels to be a slave?’ ” 

Cummings was removed from her post for a couple of days following the incident but then returned to class and was in school Thursday.

However, the $68,934-a-year teacher was reassigned away from children later Thursday, after the Daily News contacted the city Education Department about her slavery lesson.

“While the investigation has not been completed, these are deeply disturbing allegations, and the alleged behavior has no place in our schools or in society,” said Education Department spokeswoman Toya Holness.

MS 118 Principal Giulia Cox declined to comment. - story by Kerry Burke for the New York Daily News Thursday, February 1, 2018 

I just have one reaction and it isn't alarm. I am annoyed at the several things about this badly researched article, but one thing initially catching the teacher within me is this: "How shallow are Black Americans?"

There are hands on approaches that must be employed teaching children about slavery because we are moving further and further from the 'feel' of the era. Lies and denial are slowly are eroding the feel of the reason the lessons need to be told to children, who are being raised remotely.

This Bronx teacher was paid to teach in a school with only 3% white students about a subject whites across the country are trying to rewrite. Trying to avoid this history are we to understand no creativity is allowed to teach this subject? Why is the teacher's vision and written plan not made public? Is the issue really about a white woman who has taken the place of the African Storyteller? Do Black Americans tell their stories in depth to their own children, or rely on the schools?

There are more unanswered questions this article did not explore and each one tells on us. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories Feb. 2, 2018