Boston Debate League + Boston Marathon = Awesome Cause!

I wanted to let you know about an exciting upcoming event for me - the Boston Marathon on April 18th! There are two ways to run in the Boston Marathon, one is to be crazy fast and the other is to run on a charity team. I am doing the latter, since I'm closer to the speed of a tortoise than a hare. =) The charity that I’m running for is one that hits very close to home for me. Actually, very close to school would be more accurate. I’m running for the Boston Debate League which is an active and growing organization at my school, Brighton High.

I felt particularly moved to run for this charity for three reasons. One reason comes right down to social justice and a desire to provide quality opportunities to all students. I work in the Boston Public School system and we are facing a $63 million deficit resulting in cutting the majority of the non-athletic opportunities at my school (along with a whole lot of other essential resources…). Since 90% of my students are living in poverty, their parents don’t have the financial resources to support other opportunities for them. The Boston Marathon is the primary fundraising opportunity for the Boston Debate League, which in turn provides opportunities to over 50 students at Brighton.

This leads to my second reason for running. BDL is not only something fun for my students to do, it is also an engaging, educational opportunity that builds literacy, critical-thinking and social skills with the capability of motivating students both inside and outside of the classroom. The bottom line for me is the impressive stats on how the Debate League encourages kids to stay in school and graduate:

• debaters attend school more frequently, improve their GPAs by 10%, decrease risky behaviors and achieve a 25% increase in literacy scores compared to non-debaters
• African-American males who participate in Debate are 70% more likely to graduate high school than non-debaters with similar skills
• more than 75% of urban debate league participants eventually graduate from a 4-year college or university

The last reason I’m running for the charity is that the work they are doing is powerful and directly impacts my students. I spent a week this summer in a BDL workshop, Debate Across the Curriculum, with the intent of using debate in my classroom. Although a challenge to link math to debate, it provides a powerful opportunity for students to defend their ideas about mathematics and bring more energy into the classroom. Since I teach exclusively English Language Learners, an added bonus is that they practice their speaking and listening skills which are key to language development. I have found that debate engages all of my students and adds to the academic rigor in my classroom.