An entire class asks: Where are we wearing?

A while back a mother contacted me about her son’s class project where each student was supposed to trace an item of clothing all the way back to the field. Her son Caiman chose his shorts, which were made in Jordan.

She wrote about his research on her blog, Pretty Good Day:

We determined a plausible birth story for his shorts, and it wasn’t pretty:

1. Cotton grown in India, likely harvested by child laborers exposed to deadly pesticides

2. Buttons and zippers from factories in China

3. Stitched in a factory in Jordan by guest workers who’d their passports confiscated upon arrival and been cheated out of promised pay, forced to work 15 hours a day and routinely beaten for slowing down

That’s a pretty cool class project. We could use more teachers and moms like Caimans.