I think the presentations have gone well for the first two groups who have presented. One takeaway from this weeks group for me was how they didn’t split the speaking parts in half where one person did their part then the other went. I like how they continued to go back and forth through the whole presentation. I think it makes the presentation more interesting to not listen to the same person for an extended period of time. I think Jennifer and I will follow their lead.
The conversation about bias in children’s books is always a very eye-opening, educational time in these classes. I want to focus on the Presidents birthday cake book we talked about. Stating the obvious, we all know that slavery was horrific and never should have taken place like it did. That being said, I still wonder about the bias part of the book (or any book) that depicts African Americans being happy and shown with smiles. We all know that there is no person that wants to be enslaved, but my question would be, if you put yourself in that time period the way it was and you were a slave and head chef for GW, I would assume that his life as a slave was much better than that of a slave who worked under the hot sun all day for someone that was not as prestigious as GW. Would I be completely out of line in saying that the chef and his family could have been happy/happier living with GW and clearly doing something that he might enjoy and is good at such as being a chef? It sounded like he was well known and well taken care of due to his talents even though he was a slave. I guess my point would be, just because an African American is smiling in a book during that time period, should it not be considered just because of that?
The lesson plan activity in working with a classmate was a great way to go about addressing concern with the lesson plans. We have gotten halfway to three-forths of the way completed and we have already learned a few things from each other about how to start the plan and how we can change things to make it ours. I am looking forward to see how different our plan is from others and what kind of tidbits I can pick up from other classmates that will help me be successful going forward.
Hi Mike, I can see you are wrestling with the idea of the representation of slavery as presented in the story about the president’s chef.
While the circumstances in the book of Washington’s chef living a life that appeared to be less threatening than the lives of slaves living on cotton plantations, comparisons such as this cannot be qualified. While Washington’s chef looks to be highly respected because of his talent and freely walk about in the story, it was all a facade. In the blink of an eye, due to his enslaved status, Washington’s chef could have been removed from his role at anytime and placed in shackles. Presenting young students with this story makes slavery not look so bad and they can quickly see that Washington took good care of his slaves and that was ok…when really slavery was never ok.