Documentary Explores Spanking in Schools

Would you give teachers permission to use corporal punishment (spanking, hitting, etc.) on your child in school if it were legal? I sure don't! It turns out that in 20 states, including North Carolina, the use of corporal punishment as a disciplinary measure, is still allowed!

The documentary film, The Board of Education, which is scheduled to be released sometime this year, examines the use of corporal punishment (spanking, hitting, etc.) in the U.S. public school system. Director Jared Abrams takes an in-depth and personal look at this controversial issue. In the film, Abrams actually returns to the school where he was hit as a child. Serving as script consultant is Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who has worked as a producer for such television shows as Lost, Medium, and Charmed.

The Board Of Education Documentary Trailer. from jared abrams on Vimeo.

(It occurs to me that these are just the reported cases.)

The Iron Lady: Are You Unwell?

"Are you unwell?/Yes, you are unwell."

"If this is the best you can do, I had better send you to hospital!"

"...and I should do your job, as well as my own, and everyone else's."

-- Meryl Streep puttin' it down in The Iron Lady

(Meryl Streep had me laughing so hard, I was crying during this scene. I highly recommend seeing The Iron Lady, if only for this part of the film when she's sitting in a meeting with all men).

Poem: Grace by Joy Harjo

In celebration of National Poetry month, here's one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets.

Grace
by Joy Harjo

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn't stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace.

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn't; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

Yummy TCBY Yogurt and Sky High Fun

Yep, this is the flavor I wanted.

Nothing like that first scoop of frozen yogurt.

Fun at Sky High Trampoline Park

Go Go Throwback: Trouble Funk, Still Smokin'

Featured in the film Good to Go (1986), filmed entirely in D.C. This video is from a U.K. show called The Tube:

Michigan Teacher Fired Over Trayvon Fundraiser

Brooke Harris, Pontiac, Mich. teacher

The Raw Story has an excellent post about the case of a Pontiac, Michigan school teacher who was fired after holding a teaching moment with her students about the Trayvon Martin killing and for organizing a fundraiser that grew from the session.

Brooke Harris was a teacher at the Pontiac Academy for Excellence Middle School in Pontiac, Michigan. When her eighth-grade class — many of whom are black — asked her about “the kid who was killed over some Skittles,” Ms. Harris attempted to “bring her students’ lived experiences into the classrooms.”

Her efforts included organizing a “dress down” fundraiser, similar to the One Million Hoodie marches that have taken place throughout the country. Students would pay one dollar to participate, and all proceeds would be donated to the family of Trayvon Martin.

The principal of Pontiac Academy signed off on the proposal. Superintendent Jacqueline Cassell, however, refused. When Ms. Harris’s students asked to make their case for the fundraiser to Superintendent Cassell directly, Ms. Harris passed the request along to Ms. Cassell. Harris says that Cassell suspended her for two days. When two days stretched to two weeks, Ms. Harris asked for clarification regarding the basis for her suspension, and Cassell fired her.

Tulsa Shootings: Hate Crime or No Hate Crime?

Harpers Weekly Review, April 10, 2012:

Police in Oklahoma arrested Jake England and Alvin Watts in conjunction with the murders of three African Americans who were among five shot in the course of seven hours in Tulsa.

The day before the shootings, England posted on his Facebook page that it was the second anniversary of his father’s murder “at the hands of a f***ing nigger.” “It’s hard not to go off between that and sheran I’m gone in the head,” he wrote, referring also to his girlfriend, who had recently committed suicide.

“It is way too early to call this a hate crime,” said FBI agent James Finch.

Some Cousins

Mike and Darren (Chubb)

Kevin (Boo) and Mike