Caitlin+French-+1965

1965  The year of the picketing The year of people screaming Crying Bleeding The year peace advocates’ voices were stifled By violence The year hundreds of thousands of men were asked to love their country enough For the ultimate sacrifice For a war Nobody believed in

The year the U.S. government wanted the American people to unite as one Unless you were black Or a woman Or gay Or anything other than a white, straight, middle-class man Because what is more patriotic?

Drug use was normalized Psychedelics, glamorized Blacks, marginalized Vietnam, victimized Military, mobilized Everything, politicized America, scrutinized

The year Dr. Martin Luther King And twenty-six hundred others Had their black wrists cuffed in iron And thrown into shiny white police cars The ironic red and blue lights Blinding them

The year people up and moved to communes In search for a true sense of community Because society no longer was It was cold And cruel And unfair And violent

Right?

Then why is it so, That when I Google 1965, I have to push past five pages of images of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Chrysler Convertibles, and sports advertisements

before I see a single picture of

The Civil Rights movement, The Vietnam War, Mohammad Ali, Or the Watts Riots?

Maybe it is because fifty plus years later We still like to remember the good times When white boys sang rock songs and grew their hair long When white girls cut their skirts short and kept their mouths shut

Then again, I suppose that it is easier To forget the picketing And emulate The White picket fences

Pedagogy: This project would be very possible for middle school students. I will likely assign my students to do a similar project in the future (especially if I am teaching both social studies and language arts at the same time). I would apply this assignment into my curriculum at the end of a unit, and have students focus on writing some form of literature (song, poem, letter, etc.) that focuses on the era. What would be especially important to me, however, would be that students additionally comment on how they perceive the era, the people, the politics, etc., in modern day. As I mentioned, this would be an assignment at the end of a unit, and would be primarily be a formative assessment used to determine what my students had learned and what their thoughts on the content were. The first step of this project would be having students write out main concepts and events within the unit. I would then ask them to begin organizing their ideas in the form of literature of their choice. I think that students would really enjoy the creative push behind this activity, because it allows for a different type of assessment and is an interesting twist on learned material.