Journal of a Black Teacher

COMPETENCY ACTIVITY Form GED 8150: Initial Leadership Assessment Name : Don Allen Term : Spring 2022 Identify the area of your ICA where you identified a need to gain more exposure and growth through experiences, skill or knowledge development, or by opportunities for observation.  (Include both the competency area and the indicator/sub-competency or competencies. Policy and Law 1. Understand and implement policy to meet local, state, and federal requirements and constitutional provisions,standards, and regulatory applications to promote student success; 2 . Recognize and apply standards of care involving civil and criminal liability for negligence, harassment, and intentional torts; 3. Demonstrate an understanding of state, federal, and case law, and rules and regulations governing general education, special education, and community education. Fiscal Management 1. Demonstrate knowledge of factors that affect school finance, including sources of revenue; expenditure classificatio

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Mined by Don Allen, M.A. Ed./MAT   Introduction      When you have been intellectually abused you recognize it by the types of human biological functions that happen; sweaty hands, upset stomach, headaches, and anxiety levels too high it will trigger your reptilian brain into flight or fight mode. The assignment, this paper was to identify a problem at work and insert it into intercultural communication using the early chapters of our class text Communicating Across Cultures at Work (2017), and the later chapters to propose solutions; this is what I interpret to be the assignment. In reflection, to see a problem for what it is and the realness of the effects on team members, systems, and outcomes in efficacy leads me to ask “What can you do when teams inside Educational constructs don’t know what they don’t know?”        The first time I became aware of intercultural communication, which refers to the communication between people from two different cultures was when I was much younger

We must study humans as we would study other animals to discover what their “nature” is. Look among the species; see who are the thriving and successful and in what activities do they engage? For Aristotle, this is how to determine what is and is not appropriate for human and human societies .    ~ Aristotle - Rejection of Plato’s Rationalism Statement from Don Allen, M.A. Ed./MAT: Teacher and Servant Leader Please, everyone - cast a spell, wave your magic wands, pray, rub the chicken feet (I have mine, it’s a Jamaican thing), and hope teachers don’t strike. The results from a strike in this critical moment will disrupt all levels of society. The Twin Cities are not prepared to have thousands of K-12 scholars unstructured; yes, the achievement gap is alive and growing, but educators need this time between now and June to kill it. Parents must work; childcare is critical. We are just easing back in because of COVID-19, bad Wi-Fi hotspots, we have kids who are seniors that can’t get in

This is Black History Month. It seems to me the point of studying Black History is to provide insight into how injustices of the past relate to what is going on in the present and to put an end to these injustices. One example is the case of Rodney Reed , an innocent black worker who is the victim of a racist frame-up orchestrated by the police, prosecutors, state and local politicians working in cahoots to execute Rodney Reed for a murder carried out by a racist white cop who was assisted in his bestial murder by other racist white cops here in Texas. History is very important in this case because the Texas criminal justice system was devised by slave-owners who refused to acknowledge Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the fact that the North had won the Civil War and for two years used this time to put on place institutions that would maintain racist injustices in every facet of life… including the criminal justice system. This is all explained in the book, the “1619 Project,” a

Video Blog by Don Allen, M. A. Ed./MAT  What do you tell students about the death of 22-year old Amir Locke in downtown Minneapolis by  the  MPD? It's like peeling an onion - so many layers, so many people, missed opportunities, along with policies and procedures that date back to the 1970s. Many local politicians are complicit in this death, maybe this death brings about the change like they said about George Floyd, Dante Wright, Winston "Boogie" Smith, and the future dead Black Men in the Twin Cities - game over. 

No one should be treated differently but addressing race and inequitable education is toxic; but in Minnesota, spending more than $600 million a year on closing the achievement gap with ZERO successes in any district is considered a win?   By Don Allen, M.A. Ed./MAT - Journal of A Black Teacher©  2022 All Rights Reserved (Editorial Opinion - Not Written for the Guilty or Weak Minded) Besides everything else, W.E.B. Du Bois must have also been a fortune teller back in the day.  In all of his authored books, Du Bois sternly warns Black folks in the United States about our Black and Brown children being used as “doormats to be spit and tramped upon and lied to by ignorant social climbers.” Today, the proverbial ‘doormats’ and ‘spit’ come in the form of the generational minimal proficiencies for Black and Brown children born in the United States, and the phenomenon has spread quickly to our new kids - some Somali, Latin, and Asian children whose families exited a bad situation in their hom