A Columbia professor who has written a book on the topic defines them as “brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral or environmental indignities — whether intentional or unintentional — which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative slights and insults to people from marginalized groups.”
Public disclosures of microaggressions have recently become a popular way for people to share their personal experiences with racism, homophobia, sexism and other forms of bias, and several of the video and photo collections they have created to document the phenomenon have gone viral.
In this Text to Text, we pair New York Times reporting on microaggressions with a widely-taught piece from the 1961 collection “A Puerto Rican in New York, and Other Sketches” by Jesús Colón. Use these two texts — or choose from any of the other related pieces we link to or embed in this post — to spark discussions about identity, difference, bias and awareness. Or, suggest your own ideas below.
Snow falls during a football game in Brooklyn between the Yorkville Eagles and the Greenpoint Spartans in a rare October snow storm in 2011. Related ArticleCredit Josh Haner/The New York Times
A new Poetry Pairing appears on the first Thursday of each month. To view all the Poetry Pairings we’ve published in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation since 2010, and to find activity sheets to help with teaching them, visit our collection.
And if you are teaching with this feature, here are two activity sheets that may help:
Times Square’s first wartime national election crowd, numbering from 200,000 to 500,00 persons predominantly and noisily pro-Roosevelt, strained a large police detail last night.
President Reagan greeting crowds of supporters at a rally during his bid for re-election in 1984. Related ArticleCredit Dirck Halstead/Time & Life Pictures, via Getty Images
Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.
We get our political identity from all sorts of influences. Maybe from our parents, friends or communities — or perhaps from caring deeply about key issues.
How do you identify yourself politically? Would you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent? Read more…
: the quality of being bland and gracious or ingratiating in manner
The word suavity has appeared in 13 New York Times articles in the past year, including on Feb. 25 in the opera review “Polish Your Hooves When the Devil Calls a Tune” by Zachary Woolfe:
Note: We have published two additional lessons about the Ebola virus in West Africa and the United States.
Overview | What mathematical principles describe the spread of disease? How can we mathematically model an epidemic?
In this lesson, students explore the fundamental mathematical concepts underlying the spread of contagious diseases. Using a simple exponential model, students compare and contrast the effects of different transmission rates on a population and develop an understanding of the nature and characteristics of exponential growth. Students can then compare their projections with actual Ebola data from West Africa, to create context for analyzing the strengths and limitations of this simplified model.
Senator Mitch McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chao, celebrated his re-election with supporters during a party in Louisville, Ky. Related ArticleCredit Todd Heisler/The New York Times
6 Q’s About the News
Read the article and answer the news questions below.
Last week’s crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, killing one test pilot and seriously injuring the other, was a new setback for commercial spaceflight. Still, the prospect of space tourism seems quite real.
… In recent years I have interviewed a wide array of people involved in the private space industry, including both pilots involved in the crash on Friday. Almost universally, they viewed themselves as pioneers at the dawn of an era of exploration whose apogee is beyond our generation’s imagination. Just as the Wright brothers did not have a precise image in mind of jumbo jetliners ferrying people around the world so routinely and so safely at more than 500 miles per hour that we have long since stopped considering it a miracle, we can’t really know where we’re headed in space. Read more…
