Fatty Legs: A True Story

Use these activities to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity. 

Write Your Educational Philosophy

Write your philosophy of education.

• Use research, community and family interviews, and self-reflection to understand the different ways people define education, its value to a community and its children, and education’s ultimate purpose.
• Contrast what you learn from others with your personal experiences and beliefs.
• What feels most valuable? What feels most true for you?
• When complete, your philosophy of education statement should clearly state what you believe is the purpose and function of education and how best to carry out that function and purpose.
• Some questions to consider as you go through the research and writing process:

o How should people learn?

o What should people learn?

o What cultural traditions and wisdom do you want preserved for future generations in your family?

o How do you expect them to learn those things?

o What role should the government play in a child's education, if any?

o What are schools responsible for in a child’s education? Consider education’s relationship to self-esteem for children.

o  What are families and communities responsible for in a child’s education? Consider family and community's role in self-esteem for children.

Teaching Suggestion: Depending on time and resources, teachers can allow students to present their final project in the form of a traditional essay or manifesto, a video or audio presentation, or some other performance-based work (a play, short story). Teachers can also narrow the scope of this activity and allow students to debate different aspects of the topic, based on current events or primary principles of thought within the classroom, or one of the many sub-questions listed above. Use pre-reading context and the student and teacher resources to help students understand that educational projects always have a basis in societal, class, religious, and/or cultural beliefs, and differences arise when those foundations clash or differ greatly. Depending on student proficiency teachers can guide students to focus solely on what they think education should be, to study how society functions in US society, or to complete a larger project that incorporates their reflections on both.

Paired Text Extension

Read all or portions of The Mis-Education of the Negro for a deeper understanding of the personal and impersonal dimensions of colonial thinking on education for Black people. Through his challenges and critiques of education, Woodson tells readers what he believes education should do for Black people, if not all people.

Teaching Suggestion: Use this paired text as a writing model for opinion and social critique essays. Woodson’s writing can also serve as a research text. As a historian, scholar, and African American person living through the early 20th century, Woodson’s voice provides an authoritative (although singular and personal) perspective on education and insights into what the reality was for some African Americans during that time. His work did and still does spark debate, as he differed from two other prominent figures who also had strong ideas about education for Black people at that time: W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.