I looked over the list of museums and tried to come up with a focus that would fit me, but I couldn't. Instead, I returned to reading Black Gotham. I have read Beloved, which Peterson refers to, and I agree that it's important for us to know where we come from. I teach English 9, and I start the year off by assigning an adult interview essay. Some English teachers feel that it's cheating for students to interview their parents, but I disagree. Over the last five years, I have read some incredible tributes to parents and grandparents, and I am convinced that my students learn things about their heritage that they did not know before. (I have students who don't know why their parents named them the way they did!)
Anyhow, second quarter, students select biographies and learn how to ask questions about the historical events etc. that paints the background for their biography person. Reading Black Gotham, I began thinking how cool it would be if students interviewed someone in their grandparents' generation first quarter, and then during second quarter read a biography from the time period of the grandparents' youth. That would help the students to come up with visuals of what it would have been like for gram or grampa back then.
Well, I don't know how all of this fits to my trip to NYC, but I would like to explore my heritage a bit. Somehow, it would make more sense for me to go to the scandinavian museum. It's in Brooklyn, evidently. Here is the link: http://scandinavian-museum.org/about.html
How would that help my teaching? I don't know. I do know that I want my students to learn more about where they are from. I don't want us just to understand what the Somali students have gone through; I want everybody to learn something about themselves. Does any of this make any sense?
