Little Bee by Chris Cleave

I read this book over the past summer, and found myself discussing this book in my SEED class this month. While the book had little directly about education, it provides a lot of background knowledge of the experiences of asylum seekers.

On one level, you’ve got a book that puts a face on the struggles of asylum seekers. However, it might also make the struggles seem too big to solve. Here you have a country, Nigeria, that was supposedly peaceful, and yet you have some awful autrocracies occuring. Nigeria should be a country modernizing thanks to all oil, but instead that oil is leading to bloodshed and autrocracies.

Some might respond to this book by saying that the story is fictional and therefore some of scenes mentioned in the story are sensationalized. Some of the specific scenes might have been written to highlight certain aspects of each character, the situations in the story are all too real. Amnesty International has condemned the UK government for their detentions of asylum seekers. The violence in Nigeria is all too real.

As an educator, this book really encourages me to be more understanding of the asylum seekers in my own community. In Minnesota, we are fortunate to have large groups of Somalian and Hmong immigrants, many of whom immigrated to escape similar situations as that that little bee faced. When the families struggle to adapt to the American education system this book provides perspective on what all they have had to struggle with. They have decided to leave their home to provide a safe environment for their family. They very well might not have wanted to leave, but were forced to by the violence. It's up to me as an educator to make their school experience on that celebrates their cultural experiences while at the same time preparing them for their new life in the United States.

Teach like a Champion looks like a good book

From the Huffington Post...

"The first is Doug Lemov's 2010 debut, Teach Like a Champion, a groundbreaking, controversial catalogue of 49 techniques "that put students on the path to college." Based primarily on thousands of hours of video and in-person observations of teachers who have helped their students dramatically raise scores on standardized tests (a metric Lemov calls "necessary but not sufficient"), the book is the most concrete, specific, and immediately actionable set of recommendations I've ever encountered as an educator. Those recommendations are also, often, shockingly simple and unglamorous -- from standing still while giving students directions (Technique 28: "Entry Routine") to ensuring that all students begin each class period with their materials out, ready to learn (Technique 33: "On Your Mark")."

Really interesting book, and I love that it's based on video and in person observations, rather than some writers idea of what worked in their own classroom. Very good looking book, and I have it reserved from my library.

How to Really Teach Like a Champion