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From The Buoys and Dakota to Kane & Kelly and ‘Classic Hymns’

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David A. Jolley: Chalk another one up for the oldies but goodies, especially Arians, Brady

DALLAS TWP. — One teacher plans a lesson with brown and white eggs (spoiler alert, they are the same inside). Another had students look up modern celebrities born the same year as a young Black activist from the 1960s to show “we have to remember this wasn’t so long ago.”

A third, Cara Nolan, talked of how Ruby Bridges had to be escorted by U.S. Marshals as the first Black girl attending a segregated school because of the hateful protesters she encountered, prompting a student at Dallas Intermediate school to blurt out “that just explains how crazy those people were.”

Black History Month is being marked throughout area school districts with a wide range of projects and lessons, and as Dallas Intermediate Principal Thomas Traver gladly pointed out during a tour showing off the variety and depth of lessons at his school, “It’s really diverse compared to what it used to be.”

“We used to focus on Martin Luther King,” he continued, rattling off a list that included Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, Ruby Bridges, Alma Woodsy Thomas, Scott Joplin, Maya Angelou, The Little Rock 9, The Tuskegee Airmen and Benjamin Banneker.

Many students pick a person of Black history fame for a report, he added. Then, just before ushering a reporter into a classroom, Traver added, “I’d pick Charley Pride.”

<strong>Virtual virtues</strong>

With the pandemic dramatically reshaping education this year, even school districts that decided to return students to class in time for Black History Month had to deal with virtual attendance. Some districts remain fully remote, others such as Dallas are in hybrid mode with half the students in person while the other half attend online live. Even Lake-Lehman School District, which has allowed all students who want to attend in person to do so, has a substantial number still opting for live online or asynchronous cyber lessons.

Taver’s tour showed classrooms with online student faces projected onto white smart boards, either filling the screen in tiled squares or off to one side as the teacher used the screen to show some aspect of the lessons. The teacher — and Traver, who seemed to know every student by name — routinely stepped to a laptop with a camera to ask online students a few questions and interact.

How are things working at other schools?

Dallas Middle School Choral Director Hollie Baker said via email the music department “has been adding Black music history in each class.” That includes “listening to and studying musicians, vocalists and groups from genres like Gospel, Soul, Doo-Wop, Jazz, and how these styles of music shaped American music as we know it.”

Artists have covered the gamut of much of Black music in America: Duke Ellington on piano, Dizzy Gillespie with his trademark puffed-cheeks and bent trumpet, Erskine Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, rag time great Scott Joplin, pop legend Stevie Wonder, jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and female artists like Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Audra McDonald from Broadway, Marian Anderson from opera and jazz violinist Regina Carter.

Baker noted one innovation prompted by the forced change to full remote last March at the start of the pandemic.

“I joined a group on social media called Music Educators Creating Online Learning, a place where fellow music educators share ideas, lesson plans, resources and more,” she wrote. “Music educators from around the country began sharing ideas, lesson plans, and resources with each other.”

She credited that new resource with the breadth of artists in this year’s Black history repertoire.

At Wilkes-Barre Area, where the district remains in full-remote learning, GAR Memorial High School English Teacher Tara Komorek waxed eloquently about the importance to infuse history science “and every possible ideal in between into her classes. “The people who have come before quite surely have laid the groundwork for us.”

For her seventh grade students, she wrote, Black History Month has been a continuation of “an epic journey through poetry,” including the works or rising star Amanda Gorman, who garnered high praise for a recitation of her original work “The hill we climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, and again for a poem recited as part of Super Bowl 55 events.

“We have spoken in depth about the rise of literature, art and music during the Harlem Renaissance,” she wrote. “Now we are continuing with the Civil Rights movement and the people who have put their feet to the pavement for change.”

Greater Nanticoke Area Superintendent sent a rich list of activities at various grades, starting with the pre-kindergarten class at the Kennedy Early Childhood Center where students watched the YouTube video “Celebrate Black History Month by helping children recognize contributions” and visiting Sesame Street to listen to Will.i.am sing “What I am.” The autistic classroom is making hand prints, painting them and adding the label “I have a dream.”

Older grades had longer lists of readings and projects. One included reading “The Sneetches,” a story Dr. Seuss wrote expressly to address discrimination, with a group of yellow, bird-like creatures, some with stars on their bellies who considered themselves superior (“snoots in the air”) to the sans star sneetches. The story fits smoothly into lessons of real-world discrimination and segregation.

<strong>Eager advocates</strong>

At Dallas Intermediate, students quickly rose to the challenge when Traver popped in with a bit of a pop quiz. Asked about Rosa Parks, third-grader Elliott Van Tassell fingered a large, slim book with the iconic activists face on the cover and talked of how “she wouldn’t give up her seat to a man on the bus.”

Her teacher, Julie Bird, held up a Scholastic magazine cover and asked what they had learned of Bessie Coleman (Answer: The first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license).

In a fourth-grade class, Cara Nolan wore a mask that did not hide her enthusiasm as she peppered a lesson about Ruby Bridges with questions, animated gestures and photos from a book about the first Black girl to attend a state-mandated integrated school in New Orleans in 1960, escorted by U.S. Marshals who protected her from crowds of segregationists protesting the move. “Who else was in her class with her?” Nolan asked.

“No one,” one student answered. Indeed, it was just Ruby and her teacher for much of the first year.

In the library, students learned the often-unsung story of Lonnie Johnson, who defied claims by whites that he could never succeed as an engineer and became one, inventing one of the most popular water toys of all time: the Super Soaker.

Traver offered his own impromptu lessons a few times, once pointing out the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape to the north ran through two Northeast Pennsylvania towns. “It used to run through Beaumont,” he said of the bucolic town in Wyoming County. “People would hide them in their basements.”

Black History Month is more than just MLK?

Indeed!

Little Rock to Montgomery to Beaumont: Black History Month in school