Teacher of the Year Down the Memory Hole

lame54

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Fri Nov-30-07 10:53 AM
Original message

Teacher of the Year Down the Memory Hole

Edited on Fri Nov-30-07 10:56 AM by lame54

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/11/29/14174/432
Disney and Me: On Being Erased From Official Corporate History
by SteveUFT
Thu Nov 29, 2007 at 01:06:57 PM PST

On the Disney Company's corporate website, the reader will find a honor roll of teachers from across the United States who have been recognized by the American Teacher Awards, starting with the first class of 1990 and concluding with the last class of 2006. A close examination will reveal that there is no teacher listed as the 1992 honoree in the category of Social Studies. Two of the three Social Studies finalists are listed, but the teacher who was actually named Social Studies Teacher of the Year is missing.*

SteveUFT's diary :: ::
I am that missing teacher. My name disappeared some time after I organized a public letter, signed by twenty-five American Teacher Award honorees, protesting Disney's sponsorship of John Stossel's Stupid in America, an ideological broadside against public education and the teachers who labor in our public schools.

The story begins in the fall of 1990, six years into my teaching career. I was teaching Social Studies at Clara Barton High School in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, and spending much of my free time preparing my Political Science class for participation in the national We The People competition. This was the third year of what would be a remarkable decade long run of Clara Barton classes in that competition: our classes -- entirely students of color, predominantly female and majority immigrant -- won the New York City championship every year, took the New York State championship in four of those years, and twice came in fourth in the entire nation. Immense amounts of work and effort went into preparing students for that competition, and the office of the then Congressman for our school, Major Owens, played a major role in bringing together judges and lawyers active in the community to conduct practice sessions. When the liaison from the Congressman's office asked me to apply for the American Teacher Awards, I did so more out of a sense of obligation to her than a belief that Disney would be interested in honoring a teacher of inner city students.

I was surprised, therefore, when I received notification that I was a finalist, and even more surprised when the crew which came to New York City to film my classes and my school did an excellent job of capturing the reality of our work at Clara Barton for a five minute television vignette. Watching it fifteen years later, I am struck at how the fruit of that work continues to blossom: the young African-American female student who speaks about how the Political Science class inspired her to direct her life in a positive fashion and consider a career in law is not only a lawyer, but the Educational Director of Legal Outreach, a program that provides legal education for New York City public school students.

When all of the finalists were assembled in Hollywood for the awards ceremony, modeled after the Academy Awards, I learned why our group reflected the diversity of American public education...

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pansypoo53219

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Fri Nov-30-07 12:40 PM
Response to Original message

1. stoseel AND disney can go

to hell.
actually stossel might.

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