Why Long Term Thinking is Crucial, on Day 17/67

               All I can think of as I schedule this is “the faith that the dark past has taught us” and the need for  far better education of various types, on this 17th Lesson Plan Day.   (Lift Every Voice and Sing)

Especially in this country.

   And remembering Toni Morrison’s admonition not to succumb to this world’s malevolence.

    I look forward to your impressions, Thoughtful Readers.

Shira

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Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan: Muhafiz/Protector & Sihirli Annem,  Lupin, or La Casa de Papel/Money Heist Reviews

Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

           or Long Range Nonfiction, or Historical Fiction Writing

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

Shira

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Why Emancipation, Parenting, and Education All Matter on Day 16/67

   First of all, no one can be free in any way without legal freedom, from the first Compensated Emancipation in DC,  which had long been celebrated as Emancipation Day on April 16th, with a parade, even, through the early 1900s or so, in The District, to the final end of that process, for areas in rebellion to the Union, on Juneteenth in Texas, although most border states like Maryland, which had remained part of the Union, had also emancipated slaves, except for Delaware and Kentucky.  Slaves in those states had to wait until ratification of the 13th Amendment.

(src: The Washington Post)

      Then, no one can be entirely free of self-doubts without a loving, respectful, and supportive father.

    Finally, no one can be wholly free to expand and thrive without education of various types.

    I look forward to your impressions, Thoughtful Readers.

Shira

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Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan: Muhafiz/Protector,  Lupin, or La Casa de Papel/Money Heist Reviews

Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

           or Long Range Nonfiction, or Historical Fiction Writing

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

Shira

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

On Lesson Day 15, Saved By Libraries?

     This is GED/HiSET lesson plan Day 15 of 67, and a reminder of how libraries have historically been places of learning both intellectually and socially.  The Carnegie library, which was the DC Central library for many years, was, for instance, one of the few non-segregated places in the city where all could learn together in safety. 

      I am working on Draft 6 of my nonfiction offering to communities in our country of one long term proposal, and then hope to get back to my historical fiction stories, for which I appreciate the appreciation many of you sent me when I was writing Ann and Anna.  The work is hard, and the hands are few.  I hope that more will volunteer to serve, even before Phase II.

     I look forward to hearing your ideas, Thoughtful Readers.

We can really  Do Better.

-Shira   

Action Prompts:

    Share your thoughts on how to build buy-in to create a more equal, or at least less inequitable, society, please.   Guest posts are always welcome.  Writing, by the way, is my personal contribution to Project Do Better. 

What would yours be, if you had time?

***************** 

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan:Muhafiz/The Protector, Lupin, or La Casa De Papel/Money Heist Reviews,

Holistic College Algebra & GED/HiSET Night School Lesson Plans,

           or My Nonfiction  & Historical Fiction Serial Writing

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BsCs

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

On Lesson Day 14, Can Numbers Transport Us As Far as Reading Does?

     This is GED/HiSET lesson plan Day 14 of 67, and the end of a dreadful past several weeks.   Not only do we need good transit systems to transport us, but we need good writing to transport us away from the current situation: fiction, to let us get away just long enough to take a deep breath, and nonfiction to help us build solutions to the problems. 

      I am working on Draft 6 of my nonfiction offering to communities in our country of one long term proposal, and then hope to get back to my historical fiction stories, for which I appreciate the appreciation many of you sent me when I was writing Ann and Anna.  The work is hard, and the hands are few.  I hope that more will volunteer to serve, even before Phase II.

     I look forward to hearing your ideas, Thoughtful Readers.

We can really  Do Better.

-Shira   

Action Prompts:

    Share your thoughts on how to build buy-in to create a more equal, or at least less inequitable, society, please.   Guest posts are always welcome.  Writing, by the way, is my personal contribution to Project Do Better. 

What would yours be, if you had time?

***************** 

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan:Muhafiz/The Protector, Lupin, or La Casa De Papel/Money Heist Reviews,

Holistic College Algebra & GED/HiSET Night School Lesson Plans,

           or My Nonfiction  & Historical Fiction Serial Writing

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BsCs

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Lesson Day 13, and Ratios of Sweat to Sorrow: “Refuse to Succumb…”

     This week’s lesson plan is Day 13/67: Five Month GED/HiSET, Ratio of Fact to Opinion, Adulting, and Discoveries?

   I continue to sweat over following Toni Morrison’s advice, rather than giving in to the sorrow of these recent days.  Her admonition reminds me that we have indeed been blessed with more hope than those who did their work from far worse places: 

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

     So, I continue to work on editing, because despite the pain of this world, “it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence.”

     I look forward to hearing your opinions, Thoughtful Readers.

We can really  Do Better.

-Shira   

 

Action Prompts:

    Share your thoughts on how to build buy-in create a more equal, or at least less inequitable, society, please.   Guest posts are always welcome.  Writing, by the way, is my personal contribution to Project Do Better. 

What would yours be, if you had time?

***************** 

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan:Muhafiz/The Protector, Lupin, or La Casa De Papel/Money Heist Reviews,

Holistic College Algebra & GED/HiSET Night School Lesson Plans,

           or My Nonfiction  & Historical Fiction Serial Writing

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BsCs

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Lesson Day 12 σήμερα, Cooperation, and Signatures

     This week’s lesson plan is Day 12 of 67, from my GED in 5 month plan set.   This lesson on cooperation, using the example of Medieval Andalucia during the time of La Convivencia (link to a cited Yale article in Lesson Day 5 plan…), seems especially apt right now.

I’ve also decided that I like my old  “sig”     enough to change it:

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking for CCOVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport

   Now it no longer references Twit, but it still may be a distraction if I add it to my three link signature at the bottom of my posts.  Thoughts?

     I look forward to hearing your opinions, Thoughtful Readers.

We can really  Do Better.

-Shira   

Action Prompts:

    Share your thoughts on how to build buy-in create a more equal, or at least less inequitable, society, please.   Guest posts are always welcome.  Writing, by the way, is my personal contribution to Project Do Better. 

What would yours be, if you had time?

***************** 

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan:Muhafiz/The Protector, Lupin, or La Casa De Papel/Money Heist Reviews,

Holistic College Algebra & GED/HiSET Night School Lesson Plans,

           or My Nonfiction  & Historical Fiction Serial Writing

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BsCs

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Lesson Day 11, and Old Signatures?

     This week’s lesson plan is Day 11 of 67, from my GED in 5 month plan set.  I’m also wondering about part of my old “sig” from previous posts that I’ve been deleting in favor of a simpler sig.   I kind of miss it:

 

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking for CCOVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport

 

   This sig has the advantage of a neat hover-over that I’m not sure even the new editor can do, so I am glad to remember a bit of html from my previous life as a s/w engineer.  But I’ve also been told that my ending sig, if which this was a part, was too complicated.   Now, I just try to get a Project Do Better link in via the Twitter link, but that is not as explanatory as this list, I thing.  So, Thoughtful Readers, what do you think? 

     I look forward to hearing your opinions on this matter, Oh, Thoughtful Ones.

We can really  Do Better.

-Shira   

 

Action Prompts:

    Share your thoughts on how to build buy-in create a more equal, or at least less inequitable, society, please.   Guest posts are always welcome.  Writing, by the way, is my personal contribution to Project Do Better. 

What would yours be, if you had time?

***************** 

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, Hakan:Muhafiz/The Protector, Lupin, or La Casa De Papel/Money Heist Reviews,

Holistic High School Lessons,

           or Long Range Plans, & Historical Fiction Serial Writing

 

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BsCs

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Lesson Day 10/67, Plus: Snow Riots, and Heroes Escaping Gatekeepers…

     This week we revisit an updated Lesson Plan 10 of 67 in our GED/HiSET series, and then, we see how the very first race riot in the USA took place, right in the District of Columbia, and how that relates to gatekeepers, but before that, a quick word about Isaias: 

   We have finally met the hero of Who By Fire:   I Will, Isaias, an escaped slave, now a fugitive from the law, in 1838.  But, how did he escape?  Well, we can’t let the cat out of the bag entirely, can we?  A hint: it has to do with these riots we mentioned a second ago.

    In reflecting on my time as a tour creator in DC, and wondering how slavery still influences us, today.   I loved giving the first tour of my Underground Railroad and Black History series Singing Community Cooperation tours back in DC, and then writing about them.

Interesting points that I tried to make during my tours, from a fascinating book about DC´s 1st race riot, by Moreley, in his book, Snow-storm in August : Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the forgotten race riot of 1835, not only puts together a sound context for the Snow Riots, but also draws together strands which began then, and still define, he claims, our politics today.  I found most striking his juxtaposing of property rights and individual vs. community as well as freedom of speech, and whether free speech is applied best for owners (elites) vs. the people (the 99%).

Snow, the almost unrelated star of the event, was in the habit of  placing very attention-getting, and mouth-watering ads to   attract customers, and was a manumitted former slave who’d established a very successful Epicurean Eatery in DC, featured in this post’s image above, and described in Morley’s excellent book, which I got from the DC Public Library.

 

With my DC Black-Jewish Walking Tours, I started by melding the Black and Jewish DC histories, which was way too big, and looked at how other groups give their walking tours to try to cut down my tours while keeping the essential, and then shared that information (yes, I was severely criticized by one person, acting as gatekeeper for me, I suppose, without my approval, for not keeping my sources secret, but that goes against my principles), hoping to attract allies and build a cooperative.  

Tying the past to the present:  Do gatekeepers enslave human potential?

In Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839, Frances Ann Kemble points to the reactions of slave owners and overseers in the capacity of gatekeepers, preventing the voices of slaves from being heard.

More generally and in the same vein, Voices of Dissent’s C. Heifetz and Sarah Ariste (magazine article from abt. 2006 now unfindable…), ask in “Voices Without Authority” whether our gatekeepers are preventing us from living up to our values as a society.

I further that question:
Are our gatekeepers, and particularly, those who choose the gatekeepers, preventing humanity from reaching its full potential? For, if we fail to live up to the values we profess as a society, such as freedom for all, or equality before the law, then are we not also limiting the potential contributions of some, and thus failing to achieve all that we could, as a whole?

I realize the need, in certain situations, for gatekeepers. However, when the gatekeepers act on the basis of privilege or perception, rather than on the actual needs of the given situation, they can be counter-productive. They can artificially prevent access, resulting in uneven or misleading outcomes, or in simple outright injustice. This reduces our effectiveness as a society in providing each person the opportunity to contribute fully to the creativity and productivity of the human race, and that, is a shame for all of us.

Gregorian Date:           Thursday, September, 2020AD 

Holocene Calendar:  Thursday, September, 12020 HE

Action Items:

1.)   Think of how you, personally, have been affected by gatekeepers?  How did you feel about that process?

2.)  Do you know of others who went through similar experiences, and how did that seem, to you?  Did you get to see the process from the other person’s point of view?

3.)  What do you know of other gatekeepers?

4.)  What do you think is the use of gatekeepers, and why? 

originally posted in:

September, 12020 HE

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Click here to read, if you like:

B5, La Casa De Papel/Money Heist, & Lupin & Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector Reviews

Holistic High School Lessons,

           or My Long Range Nonfiction, & Historical Fiction Writing

Thoughtful Readers, if you are on Twitter, please consider following   #Project Do Better  on Twitter.

Shira

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Four Complementary Ways to Build Empathy on Day 9/67, with Diverse Learning Tools

Walking, study, and story, in themselves, are each powerful ways of learning, and can each be used to build empathy, while tying that learning all together so that it sticks. Walking facilitates thinking, or reflection, often generating both empathy, especially if walking with others, and new ideas for further study. Study can also build empathy, of course, if directed down the pathway of thinking of others. Story, it is well-known, has long been used as a teaching and empathy-building tool in many societies throughout human history.

Today is day 9 of my traditional 67 lesson plan set for teaching in Adult High School Equivalency diploma and GED preparation night school classrooms. This particular lesson is meant to cover, mostly, some starter questions about the salt trade, with the related mathematics, reading, grammar, and history, but… What if we put them all together, as part of our Learning Toolbox?

1.) One example of walking to learn is found on page 46 of my book Stayed on Freedom’s Call, via some of the walking Black-Jewish Cooperation DC history tours I created. That page, as part of the entire book, is freely available on The Internet Archive in various formats.

2.) A second example is my favorite lesson, Day 17, of my holistic GED set of lesson plans for a five month semester. For many students, it should be possible to complete preparation for the HiSET or GED in that time. These lesson plans tie together the mathematics related to the lesson of that day with a history reading, often also a science reading, grammar, and a writing assignment, all designed to connect to a central theme, often using a mind-map or a chart to generate and reinforce the new ideas in connection with already learned material. The use of realia (objects or activities used to relate classroom teaching to real life materials) and kinesthetic (movement or hands-on building related methods, like making models with string or clay…) methods is also encouraged to aide in problem solving and recall, across the set of lessons.

3.) Then, third, is learning through story. By reading historical fiction, many adults have expressed the fact that they can learn more about historical or even current topics, like slavery as it contributed to the modern trafficking problem. Stories that explore difficult topics have long held the power to teach, and to change hearts and minds, like my serial story Ann & Anna.

And, 4.) which I forgot initially, is language learning, as a fourth tool for empathy building.

Using methods like these three broad techniques, we can make learning easier, more effective, and fun. This is crucial to building a more empathetic society.

We can Do Better.

Shira

*****************

Click here to read, if you like:

Babylon 5, Hakan:Muhafiz (The Protector), Lupin, & La Casa de Papel (Money Heist) Reviews…

Holistic High School Lessons,

           or My Long Term Nonfiction Writing and Historical Fiction prose

Thoughtful Readers, if you are on Twitter, please consider following   #Project Do Better  on Twitter.

 Shira Destinie Jones’ work  is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Day 4/67: GED in 5 months, and context — Inspiring Critical Thinking and Community via Books, Lessons, and Story

As healthy adults, do we always make sure to look at the full context of a given situation, comment, or quotation, when we make judgements about things we hear, or even see?  Learning to take the context of a situation into account, much like figuring out the meaning of a word based on the context […]

Day 4/67: GED in 5 months, and context — Inspiring Critical Thinking and Community via Books, Lessons, and Story