Day -36: More Juan Stories + Colonization

Juan was wearing my favorite shirt today. It's a long-sleeve kelly green t-shirt with a picture of a stick of butter being sliced and in loopy 70s script the phrase "Smooth Like Butta" printed below. It's such a hipster shirt; it cracks me up to see it on a 9-year old in my classroom. Plus, thinking of Juan as smooth as butta cracks me up. I covet the shirt. I asked him where he got it and, not surprisingly, he had no idea.

Today Juan had his once a week session with our school's "counseling intern" (translation: we don't have funding for real counselors, so we get a person studying counseling to come see a handful of the 800+ students at our school one day a week for free). He walked in the door and said gleefully, "It's 220 steps from the cafeteria to here."

Then we were making collages to introduce the next theme in our Houghton-Mifflin language arts series "Nature: Friend and Foe." (One of the only ways I can fit any art into my schedule now is to try to make some oblique connection to Houghton-Mifflin themes.) Juan decided to add a person's face, wheels from a car, and the trunk of a car to the body of an elephant seal. It looked awesome.

I got to teach about colonization today, too. I love teaching about colonization. Fourth graders have more righteous indignation than anybody, so teaching any group of fourth graders about colonization would be powerful. But to get to teach a roomful of Latino students, most of whose families are from Mexico, about how Spain colonized Mexico and parts of the United States, is a particularly amazing experience. Usually, they can't believe that people in Mexico didn't always speak Spanish. And they also usually can't believe that California used to be part of Spain and then part of Mexico. It feels so powerful to help my students feel connected to the history of this place where they live. We acted out sixth graders from the middle school next door trying to colonize our classroom and then acted out conquistadors trying to claim our classroom for Spain. They just could not believe that people would try to do that. Which I guess is the really hard part - helping students come to understand why colonization happens and what could be going through the minds of the colonizers. Fourth graders don't really get that. But maybe that's part of why I like teaching fourth grade - injustice is so clear to them.