In the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District John O’Connell High School is celebrating the premier of its new solar-powered “woodshop,” According to an article by Jill Tuckler in the San Francisco Chronicle. The barn sized space is equipped with power tools and according to David Goldin, the District Chief Facilities Officer, the space is big enough that students could wheel in a small airplane. The new building is impressive compared to the small classroom where carpentry classes were held before, a room that could fit roughly 15 students at a time. In addition to carpentry the school hopes to see robotics and aeronautics classes eventually taught there.
The introduction of the new space also ushers in a new curriculum where vocational and technical training are combined with college-prep, providing hands-on experience with the academics necessary to fulfill UC standards. Once frowned-upon, vocational training is now being seen as a viable means of giving student’s trade-skills necessary for career paths and the integration of academics with this training means students will be prepared for college as well.
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Robyn Gee, Turnstyle News
What is it like being a professor of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business when the Occupy movement takes the campus by storm?
For one thing, it makes for some great teachable moments.
Professor Kevin Sweeney, former executive of Patagonia, began talking about the Occupy movement with his class on Oct. 5, when protesters began camping out in San Francisco. But recently, they’ve had to look no further than the school's own backyard, with Occupy Cal protesters making Sproul Plaza their home base.
From Sweeney’s perspective, businesses and corporations should not be surprised at all by the Occupy movement if they are practicing corporate social responsibility. According to him, businesses should use NGOs and activists to read the tides of change. Sweeney likes to use a surfing analogy to prove his point.
“When you surf, you reach a point in the wave where you either ride that wave or you just get hammered by it... You try to find the people there who know the break really well... and they can say, ‘That bump out there, that’s a big hairy wave, we’ll get trapped by that one.’...You want to find NGO activists who can look out on the horizon and see which of those bumps are really going to be big waves... When you do that, you’re not surprised by Occupy Wall Street. This is a wave you can’t ignore,” said Sweeney.
And it has been hard to ignore the action on the UC Berkeley campus. Two weeks ago, protesters were met by UC police in riot gear. Several protesters were jabbed with batons as they attempted to block police from taking down tents that were erected on Sproul Plaza.
Sayre Quevedo, Turnstyle News
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Alexander Monsanto has achieved a lot of firsts. He’s a first generation American, the first in his family to graduate high school, and the first to get a college degree. All eyes are on him to succeed, but it’s been ten months since he got his accounting degree from Florida Atlantic University, and still no job.
“There are times where I would question what I was doing," said Monsanto. "I studied accounting for four years. If it’s going to be this difficult to get a job, is this really the field I want to be in?”
The jobless rate in the San Francisco Bay Area is above the national average, and unemployment is especially high for recent college grads. Month after month, Alexander Monsanto emailed resumes and wrote cover letters with little success. One morning he says he responded to every Craigslist ad in the San Francisco Bay Area that mentioned accounting, and didn’t receive a single response.
“It turns into this viscous cycle where it’s not helping to stay home to look for a job. You kind of have to just get out of the house and go and network and put yourself out there. I needed to find something different,” said Monsanto. And that is exactly what he did.
The lanky 25 year-old is a regular commuter on a 7:45 AM bus from Berkeley to San Francisco, but unlike most on the bus, Monsanto is hunting for a job instead of heading to one. When he arrives in San Francisco, Monsanto pulls two straps over his shoulders and begins walking the streets of the financial district wearing a sandwich board with the words "Hire Me" spelled out on the front with big black sticky letters. The sign beats against his chest with every step.
It’s a moment that he says fills him with embarrassment every time, but the need for a job eclipses any insecurities. “Whatever it takes, that's what I keep telling myself,” said Monsanto. “I mean a lot of people probably think I’m crazy but I’m not.”
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By Robyn Gee, Turnstyle News
When I heard the news that my former student Andy had been shot, gunshots echoed in my ears. How could he be dead? Andy - who always wore his uniform, even when it had a week’s worth of stains on it. Andy - who would wolf down a whole Subway sandwich at 9am. Andy - who could make everyone laugh.
He was in my 8th grade English class at a middle school in San Francisco. He was only a little older -- 16 -- when he died. I’m not teaching anymore, but I still feel responsible for all of the students who came through my classroom. After Andy’s death, my friends from the school immediately planned Skype dates, phone conversations, and get-togethers to talk. “Who could have seen this coming?” we asked each other.
That was the easiest and hardest question to answer - because it felt like WE could have, should have, seen it. I had 9000 minutes over the course of the year to influence Andy’s life and future. Did I miss a teachable moment??
My mind flashes back to a moment when we were reading a play in class. In groups, we played a version of group charades. The students silently acted out scenes, while the rest of the class guessed what the scene was. The first group took their places, one person lying on the ground, one person standing over her, and three people were whispering. The class was stumped. And then the group revealed it was the scene of a shooting. The class burst into laughter.
It’s not so funny anymore. Guns didn't scare them, and now their classmate is dead.
Teachers have the opportunity to change students’ lives - but we are blinded by the culture in education that exists today. Events like Andy’s brutal death are reminders of the real work that has to be done in the classroom. Andy’s last name started with a Z; he was the last student I called to walk across the stage, to claim his diploma and continue onto high school.
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Part of being a child is playing, dancing, going to the park, and enjoying the beauty of being a child. But there are certain parents with different parenting plans for their kids. Good Morning America sat down with a San Francisco pageant mom who injects her 8-year-old daughter with Botox. According to the mom, injecting kids with Botox is nothing out of the ordinary in the pageant world and she's only one of the many parents injecting their kids.
The mom claims that pageant competions are extremely competitive and by injecting her 8-year-old daughter with Botox is part of the winning process.
Belva Davis has true grit. Maybe you’ve never heard of her, but as she puts it - there were people dying in the south for her right to make it as the first black, female journalist in the West. There was no room for failure.
“Being beaten, being jailed - all of that had preceded my opportunity to do this work. I couldn’t let any possibility of not using all that I had to succeed - interfere with the journey to make it to the point of acceptance in the business,” said Davis.
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This story was originally featured on Turnstyle News and aired on 4/14/11, KALW San Francisco.
By Robyn Gee
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Intro:
A new photo book called Through Our Eyes chronicles the lives of homeless youth documented by youth themselves. The book was the brainchild of Mary Howe and Khristine Jones at the Homeless Youth Alliance in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.
Script:
Two years ago, Mary Howe and Khristine Jones had an idea. They wanted to see what would happen if they gave out disposable cameras to homeless youth, paying $5 for each returned camera. Over the course of two years, they gave out about 200 cameras, and got nearly 160 back. Jones says it was overwhelming.
Jones: So at the end, me and Mary had thousands of pictures all over her house, on top of the tv, underneath the table. Everywhere.
The photo project took over the lives of the two friends who had both been homeless themselves. Howe and Jones had noticed the same stock footage of homeless youth being used over and over again by mainstream media, and they wanted to find a way to get their photos into the mainstream too. With so much material, it eventually made sense to make the project into a book called Through Our Eyes. After the photos were developed, Howe and Jones asked young people to come back and write captions on their pictures. They spent one long night laying out the photos for the book.
Howe: Uhh I don’t know if fun... would fun be the word for that?
I kept Khristine up until 4 in the morning.... which I’m very astute because I have insomnia, but she was not feeling that.
Jones: I was not feeling that - I go to sleep real early, and get up real early.
Howe: We had a little slumber party at my house.
Jones: And then Mary in her insomnia finished it...
Howe: I did the layout and all that, but we did the physical layout in that one night.
A lot of coffee, a lot of insanity...
The layout process included organizing the photos into sections that capture themes in homeless life. The sections are both predictable, and surprising -- with titles such as "big sticks", "drugs and drinking", and "trains and traveling." They capture real life…even the parts that aren’t always pretty says Howe.
Howe: I think the Blood and Wounds section may get to some people, but you know that’s an aspect of people’s lives when you’re living outside and you’re under - you’re living in conditions that are not the best - and you don’t have access to running water and things like that on a daily basis... so blood and wounds occur.
Howe left home at 14, and found herself in and out of jail and rehab until she was 18. Now, she is the director of the Homeless Youth Alliance. Jones spent time in methadone clinics and panhandling before becoming an outreach counselor at the center.
The education policy committee in the California State Senate will hear testimony today for and against the FAIR Education Act, introduced by State Senator Mark Leno. This act would, “prohibit discriminatory education and ensure that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are fairly and accurately included in instructional materials,” according the the press release from the GSA Network and Equality California, the two sponsors of the bill.
Basically, LGBT people and historic events in the LGBT movement would legally have to show up in school textbooks. In what capacity? Leno hopes that the LGBT struggle will show up in textbooks as a civil rights movement, highlighting important events, like when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from their list of mental illnesses in 1972. "Imagine how different the interaction among students would be if, in an age-appropriate fashion - this issue of homosexuality and this issue of the LGBT community is all a part of a civil rights movement. Not unlike other civil rights movements,” said Leno.
"I think we’ve all been horrified by this ongoing phenomenon, if not crisis, of bullying going on within our schools, leading to tragic suicides among our LGBT youth in the past couple of years,” said Leno. “And it seems to me that as human beings, it’s not uncommon that we fear and dislike that which is uncommon or unknown to us.”
Leno contends that dealing with this fear of the unknown could help eliminate peer violence in schools. “If we were to better educate our students so that there would be more familiarity with those who are different from the societal norm, children would grow up with a more understanding and accepting attitude, and there would be more respect from students on school campuses,” he said.
As the awards ceremony approaches, Youth Radio is profiling each of the six 2010 Brower Youth Award winners. The Brower Youth Awards go to six outstanding environmental activists between the ages of 13 and 22. The awards ceremony takes place in October in San Francisco.
De’Anthony Jones, 18, San Francisco, CA
Fostering Service LearningThrough the group Environmental Service Learning Initiative (ESLI), an organization that works in seven public high schools in San Francisco, De’Anthony has worked to connect social justice and global climate change at the forefront of education. De’Anthony’s engages youth of color in the environmental movement through integrating community learning, environmental service, teacher-student partnerships, collaboration with community-based organizations, and hands-on learning. He is helping to create a new youth culture that takes environmental stewardship as a given.
In the fall of 2008, during my first year at Mission High School in San Francisco, as a junior, I met some people who became my mentors, including Jay Pugao and Dave Room. I had just finished a summer in the CORO Exploring Leadership Program in SF, where I learned about the energy crisis. That’s when my passion was sparked. Jay Pugao started the ESLI program at Mission High, and I got involved then. Read more...
