Read
Settlers: The Mythology Of The White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern - J. Sakai 
A uniquely important book in the canon of the North American revolutionary left and anticolonial movements, Settlers was first published in the 1980s. Written by activists with decades of experience organizing in grassroots anticapitalist struggles against white supremacy, the book established itself as an essential reference point for revolutionary nationalists and dissident currents within the Marxist-Leninist and anarchist movements. Always controversial within the establishment left, Settlers uncovers centuries of collaboration between capitalism and white workers and their organizations, as well as their neocolonial allies, showing how the United States was designed from the ground up as a parasitic and genocidal entity. As recounted in painful detail by J. Sakai, the United States has been built on the theft of Indigenous lands and of Afrikan labor, on the robbery of the northern third of Mexico, the colonization of Puerto Rico, and the expropriation of the Asian working class, with each of these crimes being accompanied by violence.
The counter-revolution of 1776: slave resistance and the origins of the United States of America - Gerald Horne 
In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne complements his earlier celebrated Negro Comrades of the Crown, by showing that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. In the prelude to 1776, more and more Africans were joining the British military, and anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain. And in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were chasing Europeans to the mainland. Unlike their counterparts in London, the European colonists overwhelmingly associated enslaved Africans with subversion and hostility to the status quo. For European colonists, the major threat to security in North America was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. And as 1776 approached, London-imposed abolition throughout the colonies was a very real and threatening possibility--a possibility the founding fathers feared could bring the slave rebellions of Jamaica and Antigua to the thirteen colonies. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in large part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their liberty to enslave others--and which today takes the form of a racialized conservatism and a persistent racism targeting the descendants of the enslaved. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 drives us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.
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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
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Theory:
- β€οΈFoundations of Leninism
- β€οΈAnarchism and Other Essays
Teacher here. Sometimes we put a lot of planning into a unit and resist trashing it when it needs to happen. Possibly she perfected it in 2003 when it was very topical.
Also grade 9 is far too old to spend a unit on 9/11 and not like some skill the students will need in their life. But then again, grade 9 English teachers to this day do a unit on Animal Farm, which arguably is equally pointless.
For some reason, in my case they brought out a different teacher who was a combat veteran to explain Animal Farm one day. That's all he did, he straight up gave a presentation explaining the evils of communism and how the Stalin Pig corrupted the message of the Marx Pig (which was wrong too, but it was at least a nice message).
I think I understand why the kids in my school were simply not reading the books we were assigned after that. Sparknotes.com robbed them of reading Night. It saved them from Mitch Albom and the Outsiders (ok I actually liked the Outsiders, but I think I would hate reading it again).
I'm not an English teacher, but one thing I never get about education in general and English specifically is the need to push kids to read books that they will absolutely find uninteresting. I really feel like kids are expected to give a lot of unpaid labour, cuz someone said so in some office somewhere.
Not deep, but I'm tired
IDK, I'm not a teacher at all, but I think if it was possible to get kids to actually read a lot more that would be awesome. I was a "gifted kid" that would read the textbooks my parents had to buy me for school (something weird from my Catholic school, we had to buy books for each kid instead of having a collection of some kind). I think the whole reason I did really well in school was that I was taking initiative to read a ton. It seems that there's a lot of people that had a similar experience to me but then they dropped off or burnt out in college, but IME I just kept doing something similar in college; I never got through entire textbooks but I would usually actually read the first few chapters of any tougher classes' textbook. Never had a major burnout as a result.
I guess this is where it's obviously time to check my privilege: the reason all of this was possible was a stable home life and not having to work to fund my education. Realistically, taking on the maximalist position of "we need kids to read 5x more" would require that schools provide the kind of environment where students can spend time reading and absorbing education, especially for ones whose home lives are simply not gonna allow that. But that starts to sound a lot like a residential school, which has a lot of problems, too. How do you balance providing a safe environment for learning 24/7 with still letting kids be raised by their families and have plenty of time to grow up in their own communities?