Category Archives: Education

UNESCO’s Celebration of World Teachers Day

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superteacher_colorToday is the sixteenth UNESCO celebration of World Teachers Day. The celebration is intended to spotlight the importance of the world’s teachers, and bring awareness to all those students worldwide who are in need of teachers.

So, today, take the opportunity to sincerely thank a teacher, and tell them just how much of a positive influence they have had on your life, and how much you appreciate all they do to make the world a little bit better. It could be your teacher, your child’s teacher, or a friend who is a teacher.

If you would like to know more about UNESCO’s celebration of World Teachers Day, here is a link to an article: 2015 World Teachers Day.

Chalkboard Champion Leonard Covello: He Created the Perfect Union Between School and Home

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9781592135219_p0_v1_s260x420[1]Here’s a great book for anyone who is interested in progressive education or pluralism in education: Leonard Covello and the making of Benjamin Franklin High School: Education as if Citizenship Mattered. 

Leonard Covello came to the United States in 1896 as a nine-year-old Italian immigrant. Despite immense cultural and economic pressures at home, Leonard wanted to get an education. As an adult, he analyzed these cultural and economic pressures, which were common in Italian immigrant households at that time. He realized that Italian parents viewed the school as a wedge between their children and the family; he recognized the pressure even the youngest Italian children faced to go out and get a job rather than succeed in school. His answer? Involve the parents in the school, and involve the students in the community. The result was New York’s Benjamin Franklin High School, a truly innovative union of school and home. Lots of lessons in this story are relevant even in today’s times, especially for school personnel who are clamoring for more involvement from parents in the school system.

You can find this eye-opening book on amazon.com at the Leonard Covello link. You can also read the abbreviated version of Leonard Covello’s life story in Chalkboard Champions: Twelve Remarkable Teachers Who Educated America’s Disenfranchised Students.

Chalkboard Champion Maritcha Remond Lyons: Educator, Abolitionist, and Humanitarian

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Maritcha2American history abounds with stories about teachers who have accomplished heroic achievements. One such teacher is Maritcha Remond Lyons, an African American woman who served the New York City public school system for forty-eight years. She was also an accomplished musician, an avid writer, and a published author.

Maritcha was born on May 23, 1848, in New York City, the third of five children born to parents Albro and Mary (Marshall) Lyons. She was raised in New York’s free black community, where her father operated a boarding house and outfitting store for black sailors on the docks of New York’s Lower East Side. Her parents emphasized the importance of making the best of oneself, and they also modeled the significance of helping others.

A sickly child, Maritcha was nevertheless dedicated to gaining an education. Maritcha once said she harbored a “love of study for study’s sake.” She was enrolled in Colored School Number 3 in Manhattan, which was governed by Charles Reason, a former teacher at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia.

Maritcha’s parents were abolitionists, and were both active in the Underground Railroad. Obviously, these activities were not without dangers. The family home came under attack several times during the New York City Draft Riots of July, 1863, when Maritcha was just a teenager. The family escaped to safety in Salem, Massachusetts, but after the danger passed, her parents insisted on sending their children to lie in Providence, Rhode Island. In Providence, Maritcha was refused enrollment in the local high school because she was African American. Because there was no school for black students, her parents sued the state of Rhode Island and won their case, helping to end segregation in that state. When she graduated, Maritcha was the first black student to graduate from Providence High School.

After her high school graduation, Maritcha returned to New York, where she enrolled in Brooklyn Institute to study music and languages, When she graduated in 1869, she accepted a teaching position at one of Brooklyn’s first schools for African American students, Colored School Number 1.

Maritcha’s worked first as an elementary school teacher, then as an assistant principal, and finally as a principal. During her nearly fifty-year career, she co-founded the White Rose Mission in Manhattan’s San Juan Hill District, which provided resources to migrants from the South and immigrants from the West Indies.

This remarkable chalkboard hero passed away at the age of eighty on January 28, 1929.

 

Elaine Goodale Eastman: The New England Teacher that Advocated for Her Native American Students

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imgresElaine Goodale Eastman, originally from Massachusetts, was a talented teacher who established a day school on a Sioux Indian reservation in the territory of South Dakota. She believed very strongly that it was best to keep Native American children at home rather than transport them far away from their families to Indian boarding schools. She hadn’t taught on the reservation very long when she was promoted to the position of Superintendent of Indian Education for the Two Dakotas. In this capacity, she travelled throughout the five Dakota reservations, visiting the more than sixty government and missionary schools within her jurisdiction, writing detailed evaluation reports on each school she visited.

It was because of her work that Elaine just happened to be visiting the Pine Ridge Reservation when the tragic Wounded Knee Massacre took place. As a result of this tragedy, more than two hundred men, women, and children from the Lakota tribe were killed, and another fifty-one were wounded. In addition, twenty-five government soldiers were also killed, most by “friendly fire,” and another thirty-nine were wounded. Following the massacre, she and her fiance,  physician Charles Eastman of the Santee Sioux tribe, cared for the survivors and wrote detailed government reports to accurately describe what happened.

In her later years, when America was experiencing a back-to-nature revival, Elaine and her husband operated Indian-themed summer camps in New Hampshire. Read more of the life story of this fascinating educator in Theodore D. Sargent’s biography The Life of Elaine Goodale Eastman, or an encapsulated version in  Chalkboard Champions: Twelve Remarkable Teachers Who Educated America’s Disenfranchised Students, both available on amazon.

 

Gladys Kamakuokalani Brandt: A Chalkboard Champion for Native Hawaiian Culture

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brandtThis beautiful lady is teacher Gladys Kamakuokalani Brandt, a Native Hawaiian old enough to have attended the funeral services in 1917 of Queen Liliuokalani, the last reining monarch of Hawaii, and still young enough to witness the unprovoked attack upon Pearl Harbor in 1941 which precipitated World War II. Gladys began her career as a teacher, working in public schools and eventually becoming an instructor at the prestigious Kamehameha Schools, a private institution set up to educate Native Hawaiian students.

As a youngster, Gladys was deeply ashamed of her Hawaiian heritage, so much so that she rubbed her face with lemon juice to lighten her complexion. By the time she became the principal of Kamehameha Schools, however, she had resolved to fight tirelessly for the inclusion of courses to preserve Native Hawaiian culture. She supported instruction in Hawaiian language, song, and the controversial standing hula dance which had been forbidden by the school’s trustees. The story of her work is an inspirational one.

Equally inspirational is the story of the dedication and sacrifice of Hawaii’s teachers in the days and weeks following the bombing. From serving as ambulance drivers, setting up shelters for survivors, teaching their students how to use gas masks, taking their students into the sugar cane fields to harvest the crops, and re-establishing some semblance of order for their students when school resumed, their deeds are truly remarkable. You can read about Gladys and her fellow Hawaiian teachers in my first book, Chalkboard Champions: Twelve Remarkable Teachers Who Educated America’s Disenfranchised Students.