Reading Resources

Free Access to Bluford Books Online

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Prior to today, a free two-week grace period applied to all new students in the Learning Center. Starting now, that grace period will extend through June 19th. If for whatever reason students are unable to get automatic access, you can manually enter this access code for them (or have us do it for you): 31GJ-A9G1-FF8E-NUV5

Image result for Until We Meet Again Anne Schraff

The code gives students TOTAL ACCESS, which includes Vocabulary Plus, Ten Steps Plus, English Plus, and ebooks of the Townsend Library and the Bluford Series, along with numerous other features. All of this content is hosted in the Learning Center. You and your students will each need an account to get it. Get yours here.

How Canceled Events and Self-Quarantines Save Lives, in One Chart

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By Eliza Barclay and Dylan Scott

The main uncertainty in the coronavirus outbreak in the United States now is how big it will get, and how fast. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Nancy Messonnier told reporters on March 9, “many people in the US will at some point, either this year or next, get exposed to this virus.”

An infographic that shows the goals of mitigation during an outbreak with two curves. The X-axis represents the number of daily cases and they Y-axis represents the amount of time since the first case. The first curve represents the number of cases when no protective measures during an outbreak are implemented and displays a large peak. The second curve is much lower, representing a much smaller rise in the number of cases if protective measures are implemented.

According to infectious disease epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch at Harvard, it’s “plausible” that 20 to 60 percent of adults will be infected with Covid-19 disease. So far, 80 percent of cases globally have been mild, but if the case fatality rate is around 1 percent (which several experts say it may be), a scenario is possible of tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US alone.

con’t @ Vox

Most School Books Don’t Reflect Diverse Characters

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By Ann Schimke

Julia Torres spends a lot of time thinking about whether students see themselves in the books they read for English class or check out from the school library.

She missed that sense of familiarity during her own teen years.

“Most of what I was assigned to read did not reflect anything close to my lived reality,” said Torres, a school librarian in northeast Denver 

It’s part of the reason Torres, with three other educators of color, founded a grassroots effort called Disrupt Texts, which aims to make traditional school reading lists and curriculum more inclusive and equitable. 

Torres, who works on a campus with five small middle and high schools, talked to Chalkbeat about the problem with books that focus on the suffering of people of color, her worries about gentrification, and the decision to double her library’s manga collection. 

con’t @ Chalkbeat