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Jefferson students award ‘peace prize’ this month

Car wash scheduled Saturday to raise funds

By Jennifer Anderson

The Portland Tribune, May 6, 2011, Updated May 6, 2011 (2 Reader comments)

Anyone who doubts the rigor at Jefferson High School can look to the “On Democracy” Senior Inquiry class, a partnership between the high school and Portland State University.

The class this month is organizing the city’s second annual PDX Peace Prize, created to recognize a Portland activist or organization working to promote peace, democracy and sustainability in the community.

Co-led by teacher Brady Bennon, who dreamed up the concept while teaching at Portland’s Leadership & Entrepreneurship Public Charter High School last year, the 33 students this year have been studying and reading books by Nobel Peace Prize winners. The class is also taught by Jefferson teacher Jennifer Doncan and Michael Lupro of PSU.

The course of study is “a way of investigating barriers to peace and democracy and analyzing the strategies and tactics used to overcome those barriers,” Bennon says. “They hope the award causes a positive ripple in our Portland community.”

Next week, students will interview the 20 nominees they’ve received so far. Nominees come from groups including Ceasefire Oregon, Northwest Earth Institute, Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, Raphael House, Reach Community Development and Peace and Justice Works.

Later this month, the class will form a consensus decision process for selecting the winner.

Last year’s winner was Daniel Garcia of Resolutions Northwest, which brings restorative justice and conflict resolution programs to schools. Garcia visited the class at Jefferson recently to reflect on what the prize meant to him. Also recently, students read the Maathai book, “Unbowed,” and planted a tree on campus in his honor.

This year’s PDX Peace Prize winner will be announced May 26 at an event at the Ecotrust building. There will be booths from local nonprofits as well as a silent auction, with all proceeds benefiting the prize winner’s nonprofit of choice. Students will display the Nobel Peace Prize lesson plans they created and taught, as well as their poetry and essays.

Last year’s event drew more than 80 attendees.

Students are holding a car wash Saturday, May 7, to raise money for the PDX Peace Prize event or the winner’s organization. The car wash is from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Moonstar Parking lot, 7410 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

For more information, to donate or nominate a candidate for the prize, e-mail Bennon at bbennon@pps.k12.or.us.

Jefferson-McNair Panel reflections

Remember that incredible McNair Panel I described here? Well the students reflected on the experience back in their classroom at Jefferson, answering these three questions:

1. What were the most important insights offered by our panelists?
2. What was the most unexpected advice?
3. What was the most useful information?

Instead of retyping 20 reflections, I am going to scan them and upload them in a way you are able to read them anonymously.

The missing Jeff visit

Jefferson visited PSU last week and I never blogged about it. A shame because it was a SUCCESS! I have done a lot of blogging just now, so this might not be super descriptive, but I might come back to this and add more.

We had Smith labs 448 and 450 reserved, the students were finishing up an assignment about cover letters and resumes. I noticed some students struggling with Word. We worked in the lab for about an hour or so then we headed to Melissa’s VERY well planned panel of McNair scholars in the Urban Studies building, on the second floor. There were 5 or 6 McNair scholars and they all told their unique and moving stories of overcoming hardships and their journeys through education and

it

was

simply

amazing.

I’m serious.

The Jeff students were full of questions at the end, it was AMAZING, I am getting chills and tears in my eyes just thinking about it a week later. I am sure not all the Jeff students have struggled, sure, but I know for a fact that there are a couple of young mothers in the class, people whose family are in a different state, and in different countries- these students needed someone to relate to and now they have 6. It was beautiful experience, and I could tell the McNair scholars got a lot out of the visit themselves. At then end, after Q&A I saw some students get the contact info of the scholars.

I got an email from Michael that they had the students reflect on the experience and that the responses were really encouraging. He is going to share them with us next week.

BREAKTHROUGH!

Jeff and Joe

Wednesday Jeff visits from 9:30 to 12:30 and I am free to do anything, with the condition that they have at least some fun.

9:30-10 Warm up with News articles and looking at Google Earth

10-10:30 Joe talks

10:30-11 Q&A (with buffer room)

11-11:30 UNICEF documentary available in 5 parts on this page: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/drcongo_44641.html

11:30-12 CIA World Factbook and discussion of figures all together

12-12:30 Share http://measureofamerica.org/maps/ and http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/comparing_us_states_countries random, but interesting

or in better order:

9:30-10- UNICEF video http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/drcongo_44641.html (in this order, students will be more familiar with the conflict and might have more questions for Joe) and google earth exploration of DRC
10-10:30- Joe talks
10:30-11 Q&A (with buffer room)
11-11:30 Split room up into like 4 or 5 groups and give them each a very brief news article to read and discuss and maybe I can print out some really key CIA world factbook figures and give them to each group to discuss as well (ideas include rich natural resource list, that they are 12th largest land size for a country on earth, 19th most populus on earth, 10th on earth for population growth rate, etc)
11:30-12 maybe in the last time slot, each group can have a different news article and we can have half of each group rotate groups- in newly formed groups, half describe the article they read and then the other half describes their article. I want them to try and brainstorm possible solutions to the issues, pretending that they are government officials capable of making changes. What issues do they tackle in what order?
12-12:30 those other random links http://measureofamerica.org/maps/ and http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/comparing_us_states_countries

but the students want to talk about Egypt too, so:

Meet in Smith Cascade Room (rm 236), although some students might meet between Smith and Cramer.

9:30-10- UNICEF video http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/drcongo_44641.html (in this order, students will be more familiar with the conflict and might have more questions for Joe) and google earth exploration of DRC
10-10:30- Joe talks
10:30-11 Q&A (with buffer room)
Hand out DRC Q&A sheets from BBC
11-11:30 I want them to try and brainstorm possible solutions to the issues, pretending that they are government officials capable of making changes. What issues do they tackle in what order? What are the challenges?
11:30-12 Egypt: Open CIA WFB and point out Egypt’s population, GDP country comparison to world, GDP per capita. Watch some of this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12307698 Hand out Q&A article from BBC, discussion and answer questions
12-12:30 those other random links if there is time http://measureofamerica.org/maps/ and http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/comparing_us_states_countries

———————-

The result was mostly positive. The students were sitting the entire time (my bad) so they got pretty restless towards the end. I really need to have the students up and about for their next visit.

Knowledge is power

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The theme for the Jefferson visit of January 19th was “Knowledge is Power”. I many choices of what I could do with our three hour visit, and due to the month of January resonating with MLK day and the one year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, I had my options narrowed to these two focuses. Since Michael told me that he had been considering doing MLK things, and since I KNOW the students know about MLK, I thought I’d allow us to focus on and honor Haiti. To remind you, here is the agenda with commentary of how things went:

Theme for our visit: Knowledge is Power

• 9:50-10:10 10:25 warm up. Read BBC news articles (I picked several from the Jan. 18th regional homepages) in table groups, discuss how to summarize and one person from each table should volunteer to share with the rest of the class.

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12212843

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-12205338

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12220862

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12214195

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12214905

  This turned out very well actually, even though we went way over. I had the students present: name of article, what is going on, why is it important to people in article and how it is significant to us at Jefferson/in the US. I loved that most of the students were very serious, taking notes, highlighting and writing on scratch paper. I LOVE THEM!! One thing: it is a pet peeve of mine when people refer to Africa as a country, and although no one did that today, one of the students made it apparent to me that they are not familiar with the incredible differences within the continent. I really want to have the students go back to the CIA World Factbook and compare DRC to South Africa or something- two countries that are on pretty extreme ends. DRC would be interesting because of the INSANE wealth in natural resources yet poverty of the people. Note: email Jeff fac about having my friend Joe come in some time…
  

• 10:15-10:35 10:25-10:40 Income from HS to BA to MA to PhD http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf go over entire document. Ask if students know why measure with median and not average is beneficial.
  The numbers and figures were kind of discouraging, but also really important to know, and as the theme goes: knowledge is power. I emphasized how this is an official government article, but I regret making it sound so absolute. Although I believe the numbers to be accurate, as with any research and measure there is interpretation and presentation which can be really dramatic one way or another. I’d kind of like to emphasize that revelation next time I see them.
• 10:30-10:45 10:40-10:50 Read article http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/harvard-apps-2011/?emc=eta1 and talk about it
  I had forgotten to make copies of this so M projected it and we still discussed it. I just now sent the students an email with the link for them to read closely on their own.
• 10:45-11:20 10:50-11:25 in lab- Haiti project.
  Before leaving to the lab I handed out the worksheets and described the activity. I told them about paying attention to dates of when data was collected and to question the significance, especially in relation to a country like Haiti who has suffered from a recent disaster.
• 11:25-12:10 LUNCH BREAK

• 12:10-1:20 in lab
• Recover passwords for people in need (a good quarter/third of the class, dang)
• Accessing grades and transcripts on banweb
  This seemed to be extremely helpful for students. It occurred to me earlier that it might be a good idea to go over myths about college, such as attendance expectations… or maybe just that one.
• Eportfolios, be sure everyone adds jeff teams email as an owner (only 9 have already)
  Now we are at 24 added, I think it is like a 30 person class, maybe a few less, so we are close.
• Work time for students to finish Haiti hunt if needed and work on eportfolios more

Day=success!