Parent Teacher Conference

In 1989, The Business Roundtable (an organization started in 1972 of the top CEO's in this country), decided they wanted to transform public schools.  Since then, the BRT has engineered a coalition of business organizations to push high-stakes testing at the state and national levels.  Teachers, parents, students and many others oppose this version of education reform but have yet to figure out how to stop it, never mind create an alternative vision shared by enough people to move public and private education away from its role as the primary socializing and sorting agent for the workplace.

Around 2007, two organizations (T4SJ and Justice Matters) sponsored a workshop consisting of half parents and half teachers to explore the obstacles in the way of creating parent-teacher collaboration.  They wrote a skit as a means of illustrating some truths that they agreed upon.  I took the transcript of that skit and made it into a "movie"  -- see below.  I was moved to do so after recently watching many home movies  (for example) that seemed only to be engaged in the blame game. The comments on many of these youtube movies are worse than the movie.

See if you can identify one or two obstacles to parent teacher collaboration dramatized in this skit.

Holocaust Literature w/ Dr. Alan Rosen

                 

 present

Teaching Holocaust

 Literature

An Educators’ Workshop and Community Conversation

featuring

Dr. Alan Rosen, author, scholar, lecturer

Monday, February 4, 2013 / 4:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Location:  Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St., San Francisco

FREE!

RSVP online

Or call 510 786-2500 x 222 for more information

Join Facing History and Ourselves and guest scholar Dr. Alan Rosen for an educators’ workshop and community conversation on using literature to teach about the Holocaust.  Dr. Rosen will introduce practical and theoretical uses of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in Holocaust education. 

Dr. Rosen has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem. He has taught at universities and colleges in Israel and the United States and lectures regularly at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies. His most recent work is The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Interviews of David Boder. He is also the author of Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of English.

Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and anti-Semitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives.

This program has been made possible by the generous support of the Ingrid D. Tauber Philanthropic Fund in collaboration with TCI, a program of Jewish LearningWorks.