“Our trailer, which is booked for 47 weeks this year, allows us to take the training to businesses and directly address the region’s manufacturing skills gap,” said William Gary, executive vice president of work force, community and economic development at Tri-C. “Employers allow their employees time, and they can walk right out of the plant and into our trailer for an hour, or three hours, to conduct the training right on site.”
Oatey currently has 15 employees enrolled in mobile training. The curriculum includes: modules on blueprint and schematics reading; sensors, pneumatics and hydraulics; and advanced troubleshooting. “We recognized a need to grow the skills of our internal technical talent,” Bob Rodgers, Oatey’s chemical plant manager, said.
In turn, the company expects a bang for its buck. “We anticipate seeing improved machine uptime,” Mr. Rodgers said. “When machines are running, we achieve greater efficiency and production. Moreover, with this investment, we see enthusiasm and engagement from our maintenance team who appreciate our commitment to their professional development.”
The Cuyahoga Community College Mobile Training Unit is a retrofitted 53-foot trailer that travels in Northeast Ohio to companies and schools.CreditDustin Franz for The New York Times
For workers who have been on the job for decades like Mr. Santos, the training is a way to keep digital skills current. “For those who are mid- or late career, who perhaps haven’t had to navigate the enrollment process, time commitment and commuting aspects of college, the convenience of the mobile classroom has been a welcome innovation,” said Maureen Pansky, senior human resources manager at Oatey’s manufacturing plant.
There is a real demand for these mobile units, especially for older workers who need to learn new skills or enhance their skills to move forward, said Phyllis Cummins, senior research scholar at the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She is examining the role that community colleges can play for workers ages 40 to 64 to help them remain competitive in the labor market.
The students she has interviewed were all “very concerned about keeping their skills up-to-date and having opportunities to improve their skills,” Ms. Cummins said. The good news: “Because of very low unemployment rates, employers are taking on more of the responsibility for providing training and opportunities, which can also help workers, for example, shift to a new position in manufacturing as technology makes some jobs obsolete.”
One of the mobile lab pioneers is Northeast Wisconsin Technical College in Green Bay. “We started in 2010 with our first one, which taught computer numerical machining,” said Mark Weber, dean of trades and engineering technologies. “Our goal was to bring training to rural high schools and introduce students to advanced manufacturing careers. We give them hands-on experience with electromechanical and automation engineering training and teach maintenance technician skills for manufacturing plants.”
1. This graph shows the length of daily delays on one woman’s 40-minute commute between Munich and a town in the German countryside during 2018. The graph originally appeared elsewhere on NYTimes.com.
The commuter knitted two rows each day. Gray for delays under five minutes, pink for up to 30 minutes, and red for a delay of more than a half-hour or delays in both directions.
After looking closely at the graph above (or at this full-size image), think about these three questions:
• What do you notice? • What do you wonder? What are you curious about that comes from what you notice in the graph? • What might be going on in this graph? Write a catchy headline that captures the graph’s main idea. If your headline makes a claim, tell us what you noticed that supports your claim.
The questions are intended to build on one another, so try to answer them in order. Start with “I notice,” then “I wonder,” and end with “The story this graph is telling is ….” and a catchy headline.
2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment. Teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say, or they can have their students use this same activity on Desmos.)
3. After you have posted, read what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting a comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.
On Wednesday, Feb. 27, our collaborator, the American Statistical Association, will facilitate this discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern Time to help students’ understanding go deeper. You might use their responses as models for your own.
4. On the afternoon of Thursday, Feb. 28, we will reveal more information about the graph at the bottom of this post. Students, we encourage you to post an additional comment after reading the reveal. How does the original New York Times article and the moderators’ comments help you see the graph differently? Try to incorporate the statistical terms defined in the Stat Nuggets in your response.
Students initially focus on writing a strong, convincing argument using at least one New York Times source and one other source for support. They know that they’ll ultimately need to write a counterargument and rebuttal, a call to action, and a compelling title, but I teach strategies for each of these elements as mini lessons once students’ arguments are fully developed and supported.
If you listened in on our editorial conferences, you would hear students asking, “Do you know where I can find _____?” or “How do I make people care about this?” — along with the more difficult question, “How do I acknowledge the opposing side if I really don’t understand their position?”
As students craft their counterarguments, they must consider alternate perspectives, and try to empathize with the people who hold these opposing viewpoints, that are sometimes part of a mind-set that they find offensive. Yet by doing so, it leads students to a deeper understanding of people who might view the world in ways that were previously incomprehensible to them.
In the two years my classes have participated in the Editorial Contest, and from the thousands of student editorials received by The New York Times, four of my students — Ruhee Damle, Neha Narayan, Aarsha Shah and Maya Mau — have had their work recognized by the judges.
Perhaps the best part of this recognition is that a few of these students were genuinely shocked to have their writing recognized, as they certainly didn’t consider themselves to be the best writers in their class. What these students did have in common is that they gave up lunch periods, sent me numerous emails about their pieces, and sought, listened to and implemented feedback that sometimes must have been hard to hear.
In 2017, one of my students, Ishita Bhimavarapu, was recognized at the state level in the Library of Congress Letters About Literature Contest. She wrote about trying to find her voice again after feeling it had been silenced by the criticism of other students. It was a triumph to know that her voice, which she had felt had gotten “small,” was heard by others. That very same year, Ishita was again recognized, this time in The New York Times Student Review Contest. Ishita’s voice is continuing to get louder, and she is one of the many teenagers we all need to listen to.
In a world where young people often feel powerless, these authentic writing experiences make students feel as if there is a real possibility for their voices to be heard … and that they can quite literally write to change the world.
_________
You can find Beth Pandolpho on Twitter @bethpando. She is currently writing a research-based book for Solution Tree that examines how a learner-centered classroom built on strong relationships and a sense of belonging can support student achievement in the development of literacy skills.
Codecademy’s very own Nick Duckwiler (left) and Ryan Tuck from Warby Parker (right) in our office. (📷: Mitch Boyer)
Last month, Codecademy and Warby Parker came together to work on a special Learn SQL from Scratch Capstone Project. It was during this time when I met Ryan Tuck, a Data Engineer at Warby, who played a major part in this partnership. So when he decided to drop by our office for the final QA round, I had to break out my notebook and ask some questions. Enjoy.
Hey Ryan, let’s start off with a question I’ve had for a while — what is a Data Engineer? (Is it similar to a Data Analyst or a Software Engineer?)
At Warby Parker, data engineers are responsible for creating and maintaining the plumbing required to support the data and reporting needs of the business. We use software engineering practices to automate the work of data cleaning, normalizing, and model building so that data is always ready to be consumed by data analysts in every department.
What languages/frameworks do you use at Warby?
On data engineering, we use Python as our general purpose programming language, as do most of the other teams in our Technology department. When it comes to databases, we use PostgreSQL for the majority of our SQL needs, and are beginning to use Amazon Athena and Google BigQuery for some of our larger datasets. We use Looker as our exclusive business intelligence entry point to all of this data.
What are some of the projects you worked on?
I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of of smart people in every department at our company to help them solve their varied data needs, from reconciling financial data with the Accounting team to automating and modeling standardized performance metrics for our team of over 200 customer experience advisors.
As part of a team of five supporting the data needs of a rapidly growing company, I’ve tried where possible to focus on helping our analysts solve their own problems. This includes helping people learn Python and commit to our codebase, guiding the creation of data models in SQL, and encouraging people to submit pull requests to add features in Looker, our BI tool.
Seeing dozens of otherwise “non-technical” colleagues opening up PRs on a daily basis, and consequently being part of the democratization of tech that we value at Warby Parker, is probably the most rewarding “project” I’ve been a part of.
One project finished recently during our first annual “Hackweek” is called Pipes, which allows anyone at the company to easily move large amounts of data from wherever to wherever (Looker, Google Sheets, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, etc) on a regular cadence, or manually through a simple one-line chatbot interface. The adoption has been overwhelmingly positive and we’re looking to grow this sort of tooling out even more.
“We use software engineering practices to automate the work of data cleaning, normalizing, and model building so that data is always ready to be consumed by data analysts in every department.”
What got you into the data field?
I’ve always been drawn to analytical fields like math, and became pretty proficient in Excel during some internships in college. Once I had learned to program and learned more about data science and its applications in artificial intelligence, I knew that anything I could do to immerse myself in the world of data would be a step in the right direction.
Three and a half years ago, I landed a job as a junior software engineer at Warby Parker not fully knowing what I was in for, but am so glad I got the opportunity to help build tools to support an interesting and ever-changing data-driven culture here.
Where did you learn SQL and Python?
I had a background in C++, and was exposed to Python through an Intro to Data Science course. When Warby Parker hired me onto the Data team in 2015, I had never written a SQL query in my life, but picked it up quickly and within a few months started up internal SQL training classes, which I still teach on a monthly basis.
What does your tattoo say?
The ultimate cheatsheet.
This is Bayes’ Theorem, which is an equation that describes how to update probabilities given new evidence. Two summers ago I worked on building a tool to help predict weekly fantasy football performance. Some colleagues suggested a Bayesian approach would be appropriate, since there aren’t really enough data points in an NFL season to be able to use statistical approaches that require larger datasets, and I’d want to regularly update my predictions after each player’s latest performance.
I did a deep dive into understanding the (simple) math underlying Bayes’ Theorem and came out of that experience with a whole new worldview, understanding my entire knowledge of the world as a big and intricate probabilistic model that I was continuously updating with every experience I ever have. It was pretty transformative, and I figured that was worth a tattoo.
What is a concept in SQL/Python that’s essential to your work?
Donald Knuth said, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” I’ve generally found this to be true, and try to live by it in my work. For example, I’ll generally prefer to keep a data model simple by rebuilding it for all time on a daily basis using a single SQL query instead of making a more complicated model that requires iteratively adding to a table, keeping track of state, updated timestamps, when something last ran, etc.
A wise man once said, “Duplicating data makes things go fast,” but databases are already impressively fast to begin with, without implementing anything to improve performance. Ultimately, I almost always approach a problem thinking about optimizing for my time over machine time, for readability over performance, and for introducing as little cognitive overhead as is required by the problem at hand. Only once performance issues or readability issues present themselves will some code be worth a rewrite.
Last question! Since you wrote Warby Parker’s internal SQL training courses, I know there gotta be some inner Curriculum Developer in you. Can you teach a SQL concept in 2 minutes?
Sure! Have you ever written a query that yields some result set and you think, “I’d love to query the stuff I just produced like it was a table?” Enter the WITH clause.
Suppose I have a mega query that gives the transaction summaries:
select
transactions.date as transaction_date,
sum(items.price) as total_cost,
count(*) as number_of_items
from
transactions
inner join
customers
on
customers.id = transactions.customer_id
inner join
transaction_items
on
transactions.id = transaction_items.transaction_id
inner join
items
on
items.id = transaction_items.item_id
Using WITH, I can create a temporary table within my query that I can SELECT from and treat it just like a regular old table.
I will put everything from the previous query in a parentheses and use WITH to give it the name transaction_summaries.
Then I’ll apply the date and customer filtering down below for a more readable query, to separate out all the JOIN logic from the actual WHERE filters that I want to apply on that data.
with transaction_summaries as (
select
transactions.date as transaction_date,
sum(items.price) as total_cost,
count(*) as number_of_items
from
transactions
inner join
customers
on
customers.id = transactions.customer_id
inner join
transaction_items
on
transactions.id = transaction_items.transaction_id
inner join
items
on
items.id = transaction_items.item_id
)
select
*
from
transaction_summaries
where
first_name = 'beyonce'
and
transaction_date > '2018–01–01'
order by
total_cost desc
limit
5
If you’re familiar with subqueries, this does a similar thing but makes the SQL far more readable, even if your query isn’t quite as performant as it would have been. This is essentially an implementation of the mantra “Don’t Repeat Yourself” that’s common in the world of programming.
Incredible. And love the SQL styling! 😍
Huge shout out to Ryan and the whole Warby Parker team for making this partnership happen. Special hat tips for behind-the-scenes support from:
A Day in the Life of a Software Engineer (via Life of Luba)
With Airbnb came a revolution of sorts in the world of vacation travel and culture. We sat down with Luba Yudasina, a YouTuber, an opera singer, and a Software Engineer on the Airbnb’s Homes Platform team, to discuss software engineering and her programming journey—from Codecademy to Airbnb!
Hey Luba, let’s start with the basics! What does a Software Engineer on the Platform team do at Airbnb?
Homes Platform’s mission is to create the building blocks to power all Homes categories. Any project undertaken by our team should be reusable and extensible in some way. This means that as a backend engineer, I have a lot of opportunities to work on impactful technical projects that create systems and services to support Homes, as well as collaborate across teams to come up with the best architectural decisions and designs.
Recently, our team wrote a blog post on classifying Room Types into categories using Machine Learning and computer vision. The room-type classification problem largely resembles the ImageNet classification problem, except our team’s model outcomes are customized room-types.
After a few experiments with various models, the team chose ResNet50 due to its good balance between model performance and computation time. To make it compatible with our use case, we added two extra fully connected layers and a Softmax activation in the end.
Let’s rewind a little bit. Coming from a chemical engineering background in college, how did you make the switch into programming?
I went to the University of Waterloo in Canada—a university with the biggest co-op program in the world. Co-op means that to obtain a bachelor’s degree you must complete a certain number of internships. If you are in Engineering at Waterloo, you must complete 5 internships to graduate.
In my first and second years, I interned at chemical engineering companies and afterwards I couldn’t see myself working in the field full-time. That’s why I’m particularly grateful that I studied at Waterloo: if not for co-op, I probably would not have realized I didn’t want to work in chemical engineering until getting a full-time job after graduation.
I happened to have a lot of friends in Computer Science and Software Engineering right when I realized Chem Eng wasn’t for me. They really encouraged me to try coding, and when I decided to follow their lead I never looked back! My first online programming course was Web Development on Codecademy 🙂
“It’s a really cool time to be a software engineer and even cooler to be a female software engineer, because this is the time when women start to embrace their own unique identities and be ok with not being ‘one of the dudes.'” -Luba Yudasina
When I decided I wanted to learn computer science on my own, my goal was to get an internship in the field because working as a software engineer at a tech company would be the best test to really know if it was for me.
I happened to be in Munich, Germany on academic exchange for a whole year when I was learning how to code, so I hustled as much as I could while being there to get experience to learn quicker and have something to put down on my tech resume.
Almost immediately after arriving in Germany, I got a part time job as a developer at a game publishing company. I had a good friend in Computer Science at my German university: her and I ended up working on an Android app as a side project, etc. When I was ready, I started preparing for technical interviews. I then leveraged my network to refer me to companies and do mock technical interviews with me.
Yelp was really random though—a Yelp recruiter looked at my LinkedIn profile and didn’t even message me, but I messaged them anyway asking about internship opportunities, and that’s how I got my interview there!
Airbnb HQ in San Franciso
What is an essential app/item in your day-to-day?
Code searching! A lot of software engineering is problem solving and a lot of it is understanding other people’s code and the reasoning behind writing it a certain way. Searching through the codebases is almost essential to my day to day. Whenever I build something new or build on top of already existing tech, I need to understand how it works and is written, and code search is vital to this.
At Airbnb we use Google’s Codesearch for these purposes, but developers (myself included) also frequently use their IDEs to search for relevant code. I mostly use RubyMine or IntelliJ (depending on the codebase I’m working with).
In your videos, you’ve mentioned the intersection of gender and technology. Can you speak a bit more about that?
It’s a really cool time to be a software engineer and even cooler to be a female software engineer, because this is the time when women start to embrace their own unique identities and be ok with not being “one of the dudes.”
I think it’s particularly important to redefine the stereotypes, and I hope that with my own example I can show young girls and women interested in the field that you don’t have to give up your feminine side to be a software engineer and still be into fashion, or makeup, or art (I personally sing opera) and have other interests outside of coding and be successful in the field.
Before we wrap up, do you have anything else you would like to say to our learners?
Don’t be discouraged, learn and absorb as much as you can! If you don’t understand a concept or can’t build a project right away, know that with practice, perseverance and concentration you will get there!
Take advantage of such amazing tools as Codecademy that are there for you to take and learn. Learning anything new can be frustrating, but knowing that you can do it, staying curious, asking questions and not losing your motivation is the key to success.
Huge shoutout to Luba for this insightful interview. It’s always incredibly moving to see a Codecademy learner go on to do bigger things. Go subscribe to her YouTube channel, Life of Luba.
And thank you to the whole Homes Platform/Engineering team at Airbnb for the support. Check out their wonderful open source projects on airbnb.io.
While there may be very good reasons to be cautious about laptop use in the classroom – e.g., laptops with internet access may invite multitasking which is detrimental to the learning of the student engaging in multi-tasking, but also has negative effects on students sitting in proximity of the multitasker (2) – their use to take notes, it turns out, is not one of them. Or, put differently, based on the existing research evidence we have no grounds to make bold recommendations for or against laptop note-taking. A recent paper by Morehead, Dunlosky, and Rawson (3) highlights this point. They have directly recreated the original study setup of Mueller and Oppenheimer (using the same note-taking methods and study materials) and were unable to reproduce the original finding. Let’s take a closer look.
General study setup
Participants studied a TED video and took notes either longhand or on the laptop. After 30 minutes, all participants were given a final test with factual and conceptual questions.
Original findings
Participants in the longhand note-taking condition performed better on conceptual questions than participants in the laptop note-taking condition. There was no difference in performance between the two note-taking conditions on factual questions.
Participants who took laptop notes produced notes with more words in them and with a larger verbatim overlap with the video compared to the longhand participants. One idea of the original researchers was that this could explain the superiority of longhand note-taking: Longhand notes contain more paraphrased and fewer verbatim statements which is more beneficial for knowledge retention.
New findings
Morehead, Dunlosky, and Rawson found that participants in the longhand note-taking condition performed better on factual questions than participants in the laptop note-taking condition. There was no difference in performance between the two note-taking conditions on conceptual questions. In a second experiment they found no significant difference between longhand versus laptop note-taking on an immediate test – in fact, in this experiment they included a “no note-taking group” and found that these participants did not perform worse than participants in any of the other note-taking groups (Below, I discuss this latter finding in the context of other contributing factors that need to be taken into consideration). Thus, the results pattern directly contradicts the original findings.
In the new study, the researchers added a delayed test condition, to test if the effect would hold when participants’ knowledge is assessed two days later. In two experiments, they found that note-taking method had no effect on delayed test performance (factual + conceptual questions). Thus, on a test given two days after studying it made no difference how notes were taken.
“Our trailer, which is booked for 47 weeks this year, allows us to take the training to businesses and directly address the region’s manufacturing skills gap,” said William Gary, executive vice president of work force, community and economic development at Tri-C. “Employers allow their employees time, and they can walk right out of the plant and into our trailer for an hour, or three hours, to conduct the training right on site.”
Oatey currently has 15 employees enrolled in mobile training. The curriculum includes: modules on blueprint and schematics reading; sensors, pneumatics and hydraulics; and advanced troubleshooting. “We recognized a need to grow the skills of our internal technical talent,” Bob Rodgers, Oatey’s chemical plant manager, said.
In turn, the company expects a bang for its buck. “We anticipate seeing improved machine uptime,” Mr. Rodgers said. “When machines are running, we achieve greater efficiency and production. Moreover, with this investment, we see enthusiasm and engagement from our maintenance team who appreciate our commitment to their professional development.”
The Cuyahoga Community College Mobile Training Unit is a retrofitted 53-foot trailer that travels in Northeast Ohio to companies and schools.CreditDustin Franz for The New York Times
For workers who have been on the job for decades like Mr. Santos, the training is a way to keep digital skills current. “For those who are mid- or late career, who perhaps haven’t had to navigate the enrollment process, time commitment and commuting aspects of college, the convenience of the mobile classroom has been a welcome innovation,” said Maureen Pansky, senior human resources manager at Oatey’s manufacturing plant.
There is a real demand for these mobile units, especially for older workers who need to learn new skills or enhance their skills to move forward, said Phyllis Cummins, senior research scholar at the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She is examining the role that community colleges can play for workers ages 40 to 64 to help them remain competitive in the labor market.
The students she has interviewed were all “very concerned about keeping their skills up-to-date and having opportunities to improve their skills,” Ms. Cummins said. The good news: “Because of very low unemployment rates, employers are taking on more of the responsibility for providing training and opportunities, which can also help workers, for example, shift to a new position in manufacturing as technology makes some jobs obsolete.”
One of the mobile lab pioneers is Northeast Wisconsin Technical College in Green Bay. “We started in 2010 with our first one, which taught computer numerical machining,” said Mark Weber, dean of trades and engineering technologies. “Our goal was to bring training to rural high schools and introduce students to advanced manufacturing careers. We give them hands-on experience with electromechanical and automation engineering training and teach maintenance technician skills for manufacturing plants.”
Thick or thin crust? Pepperoni and mushrooms, or just a classic margherita with tomato sauce and cheese? Fast and cheap, or artisanal with high-quality ingredients? Fresh out of the oven, or reheated the next day?
So many choices … so much to debate. How do you like your pizza?
It’s hard to nail down the most improbable thing about Upside Pizza, a new slice joint a few blocks from the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Is it that the cooks make fresh mozzarella in the basement every morning, and that the mozzarella is just one of four cheeses on the plain pie? Is it that the chief pizza maker, Noam Grossman, positions batches of dough in front of the closed-circuit camera when he goes home at 1 a.m. in order to wake at 4 a.m. to see how much they’ve risen?
Or is it that they refuse to put a shaker of garlic powder on the counter alongside the red pepper flakes and the oregano, denying New Yorkers the right to customize their slice?
“I respect the garlic powder,” Mr. Grossman said, looking pained. “But that’s just not what we’re trying to do here.”
What Mr. Grossman and his partners are trying to do at Upside Pizza, which opened in January on Eighth Avenue at 39th Street, is to approach the New York City slice joint with the same culinary rigor associated with top-flight chefs and white-tablecloth restaurants. (In that world, the chef decides how much garlic is enough, and only garlic in its natural form would be used.)
The most improbable thing about it all is the fact that Upside Pizza is owned by the same Brooklyn natives — the brothers Eli and Oren Halali — who own the 2 Bros. dollar-slice pizza chain, prized by New Yorkers, commuters and tourists for the cheapest, fastest lunch in the city.
The article continues:
“This was always the dream,” said Eli Halali, 36, gesturing at the slowly fermented dough balls, dollops of housemade sausage and freshly roasted mushrooms that make an Upside slice so different from the 2 Bros. one. The other big difference is the price: from $3 for a plain cheese slice to $5 for a Sicilian-style rectangle with pepperoni.
“The dollar slice is a business slice, nothing wrong with that,” said Anthony Falco, the baker who helped put the artisanal pizza at Roberta’s in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the map.
But the brothers, who are passionate about pizza, also craved respect for their product, he said. “They made the cheapest slice, and they wanted to prove they could make the best slice.”
The author compares the two pizzas owned by the Halali brothers:
How do the two pizzas compare? A 2 Bros. slice is not exactly delicious, but it is good, hot and usually — because of the nine high-traffic locations selected by the Halali brothers — fresh. It’s uniform and predictable, tasting mainly of sauce, brought together by the rich texture of cheese and the bland crunch of crust.
But each bite of an Upside slice has multiple flavors and textures: Tang from the inside of the crust, smoke from the outside, funk from the caciocavallo cheese (alongside Parmesan, fresh and low-moisture mozzarella) and warm grassiness from the olive oil are just the start.
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
— What’s your favorite kind of pizza? Describe your ideal pizza in detail — and try to make our mouths water!
— How picky or particular are you about pizza? Is pizza just pizza or does it have to have specific qualities to meet your tastes or standards? At Upside Pizza there is no garlic powder — only fresh garlic. What pizza “no no’s” do you abide by?
— What are your favorite and least favorite toppings? What are the most adventurous or strange toppings you have ever tried? What would you never touch even if they paid you to try it?
— How much would you be willing to pay for pizza? Is $1 for a slice too little? Is $5 too much? Which pizza described in the article do you think you would most like to try: from the fast and cheap fast 2 Bros. or the more upscale and costly Upside Pizza?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
For today’s article, you will read an obituary for Dorothy Bolden, a domestic worker who started a movement for the protection of domestic workers in the United States in the 1960s. She died in 2005. This piece is from Overlooked, a history project recalling the lives of those who, for whatever reason, were left out of The Times’s obit pages.
Before you read about Bolden and the movement she started, watch this four-minute Op-Ed video, about what it’s like to be a domestic worker in the United States today.
Then answer the following questions:
• What are some of the duties of a domestic worker?
• Why are domestic and care workers more vulnerable to workplace abuses, like long hours, low wages, sexual harassment and discrimination?
• How are these injustices rooted in the legacy of slavery?
1. In 1968, Bolden helped start the National Domestic Workers Union of America. What did this organization do?
2. How did Bolden prepare to lead this struggle?
3. What do domestic workers do? According to Bolden, why are they so important to society?
4. What role did the city buses play in this movement?
5. The author writes that “Bolden was not the first to advocate for domestic workers, but she helped legitimize and organize them on a scale the country had never seen before.” How so? Give three examples from the article.
6. The last few paragraphs of the article describe Bolden’s early life. How might these experiences have motivated her to become an advocate for domestic workers?
7. What is Bolden’s legacy in the movement for domestic workers? Where does the movement stand today?
Finally, tell us more about what you think:
How much has changed since Bolden’s time?
Recently, the National Domestic Workers Alliance wrote an open letter dedicated to the women of the Oscar-nominated film “Roma,” which portrays the life of a domestic worker. Read the letter, then tell us:
• Do you agree that domestic work “is valuable, but it is not valued” in our society? What examples from what you have read and watched today, popular culture or your own life support your opinion?
• Do you think there should be a federal law to protect domestic workers? Why or why not?
Imagine the scenario pictured above: You find a cellphone and return it to the owner. The owner then tries to give you some money to express his thanks. What do you do? Should you accept the cash reward for doing the right thing? Or does that cheapen the good deed?
Have you ever been in a situation similar to this one? If so, what did you do and why?
Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to find out what the Times Ethicist columnist says you should do.
Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan.
