I pit my developing racism

The BBQ Pit
1

The past few weeks I have been substitute teaching which basically means babysitter for high school students. I went into this with basically no expectations of what it would be like. Over the past couple of weeks I have developed a strong reaction to watching the students come into the classroom. I basically know nothing about the class before the it starts other than the name of the class. I do not know if it is an honors class, regular level class, or below average. But I can tell as soon as the students walk in how the class will go and if they will be above or below average by the racial make-up of the class. Mostly white and Asian with few blacks and Hispanics mixed in - an above average class that will be behave. Mostly black and Hispanic with a few whites mixed in - a below average class that will misbehave. It is also been the case in everyone of these classes that worst behaved kids will be black. They are like living stereotypes. They have no respect for the class or authority of any kind. It is not just my authority that they do not respect. Between classes it is guaranteed that there will be students who late going to class and disrespecting the hall monitors. These students are always black. This is not to say that all the black students are like this. I keep hearing that Chris Rock routine about blacks and niggers which totally disturbs me. I do not want to think like that. I try to say that the problem is socio-economic issues. However, the Hispanics in this area are much more likely to be poorer than the blacks in the area, but it is like night and day. Most of the Hispanic students despite being in the below classes are respectful. It is only the black students that combine being below average and misbehavior.

And the thing that really bothers me is that they do not try at all. It is like they are in a contest to see who can be the most ignorant. These students are actually much better if you dealing with them one on one. It is like they think it cool to be an ignorant fool.

How can I break myself of this view? Is there any way I could ever have a class of mostly black and Hispanic students and not like hear we go again. Can I break my developing view that Chris Rock is right that are blacks and niggers? I do not want to think of anyone as a nigger, but that seems to be what I am doing.

And is there anything that can be done for students that are in a contest of ignorance?

2

Also, did you ever notice how white people dance like this, and black people dance like this? It’s crazy!

3

Look for the good, however small, and praise it. Take each day as it comes. Meet each person as an individual. Some of the hardest advice to follow.

4

My eyes are tired. I read the thread title as I pit my developing rectum. Interesting, I thought. This fellow’s going to flame his own rectum. You don’t see that every day.

5

[QUOTE=AskNott]
My eyes are tired. I read the thread title as I pit my developing rectum. Interesting, I thought. This fellow’s going to flame his own rectum. You don’t see that every day.
[/QUOTE]

Usually only in Autolycus’s posts, actually…

6

[QUOTE=Two and a Half Inches of Fun]
I try to say that the problem is socio-economic issues. However, the Hispanics in this area are much more likely to be poorer than the blacks in the area, but it is like night and day. Most of the Hispanic students despite being in the below classes are respectful. It is only the black students that combine being below average and misbehavior.
[/QUOTE]

I’ve noticed that recent immigrants are usually the most enjoyable students. Their parents see this as a land of opportunity and expect a lot out of their kids. So while they’re poor, they have a great attitude. They’re hungry for a piece of the American pie and willing to work for it.

[QUOTE=Two and a Half Inches of Fun]
And the thing that really bothers me is that they do not try at all. It is like they are in a contest to see who can be the most ignorant. These students are actually much better if you dealing with them one on one. It is like they think it cool to be an ignorant fool.
[/QUOTE]

You may well be right. If they’re not getting “good attention” for grades and such, they settle for “bad attention.” Bear in mind, too, that operant conditioning works by where the rewards are. If they piss off a teacher, maybe they’re sent to the office and don’t have to sit through math class. Point being, maybe there’s a reward beyond just showing off for the guys.

[QUOTE=Two and a Half Inches of Fun]
How can I break myself of this view? Is there any way I could ever have a class of mostly black and Hispanic students and not like hear we go again. Can I break my developing view that Chris Rock is right that are blacks and niggers? I do not want to think of anyone as a nigger, but that seems to be what I am doing.

And is there anything that can be done for students that are in a contest of ignorance?
[/QUOTE]

Tough to do as a sub. Kids hear “sub” and suddenly it’s “Lord of the Flies.” And of course they’ll lie to the regular teacher, tell them they did nothing wrong, etc.

I once subbed in a BIC class. I didn’t know what BIC stood for. I go in there and find a class of six, with a teacher aide. The math lesson was about adding decimals. So I write on the board and explain that the critical thing is to make sure that decimal is lined up and tell them you can add 0’s to the right, here’s how you carry, etc. I write a problem on the board, illustrate, and get them started. They looked bewildered but went ahead and did it. With a little guidance, they did fine. I praised a little here and there, “See, knew you could do it!”

Later, the aide told me that they never did math like that…they always used calculators.

BIC, it turns out, is Behavior Improvement Class. Day 1 of the school year, said the aide, one of the students got angry at a classmate and threw a (big) table at him. Wow!

Morals to the story, IMO:

  1. Students only learn as much as teachers expect. At that school, they figured they could never do it without a calculator because they have zero patience. Surprise!

  2. Teacher attitudes are quickly perceived by the students. If I had talked down to them, or telegraphed that I didn’t think they were capable, they wouldn’t have responded…I just treated them like kids of normal intelligence.
    Finally, if you’re ever in a long-term subbing position, you need to read a book by Fred Jones called “Positive Classroom Discipline.”

Good luck!

7

I may be one of the youngest people who grew up in the U.S. with segregated schools. I am 34 and my mother taught at the black school. She developed innovative techniques to deal with the poorest black kids that are to be found anywhere in the U.S. She was Louisiana’s teacher of the year in 1990 (out of 40,000) and used her experiences to later earn a doctorate, write two successful books, and become a highly sought after professional speaker on 5 continents.

You would expect someone like that to be a bit on the liberal side and she is in some ways but mostly not. She would freely empathize with the OP because she had to learn from it for years and yet still make it work. Classrooms that consist of mostly poor minorities are different and it doesn’t do anyone any good to deny it or gloss over that fact. She developed techniques to target every single student according to their strengths and who they are including race. She even spent a month every summer writing 100+ very poor minority students a completely unique, handwritten letter about what their strengths were and what they could excel at. Most students took it to heart and took pride in their new-found strengths. Others took their letter to prison as a personal possession and used our home phone number as a personal call.

She also developed techniques to accomplish behavioral control for the whole classroom like giving marbles for everyone sitting down promptly before class, listening, not interrupting, etc. When a class got 40 marbles, they got their choice of several different types of parties. The peer-pressure is unexpectedly strong with such techniques.

It can be done but unfortunately not much for a substitute teacher. Minority students do have a disproportionate amount of problems in education and, as a whole, they aren’t equal to white students or affluent students of any stripe. It is best to embrace that as a challenge rather than deny that it exists in real world terms as so many do.

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[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
I may be one of the youngest people who grew up in the U.S. with segregated schools. I am 34 and my mother taught at the black school.
[/QUOTE]

Can you elaborate? There is no way you went to a segregated school. There may have been a predominantly Black school that your mother taught at, but it was not segregated, legally. Big difference.

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[QUOTE=John Mace]
Can you elaborate? There is no way you went to a segregated school. There may have been a predominantly Black school that your mother taught at, but it was not segregated, legally. Big difference.
[/QUOTE]

You don’t know the ingenuity of Louisiana people over the letter of the law. We are notorious for it. I grew up in a very small Northern Louisiana town of about 1,300 people split roughly 50 - 50 for whites and blacks. We had the stereotypical railroad track divide down almost perfectly. You could draw a nearly straight line through the town to separate whites and blacks almost completely. All they had to say was that we needed two school districts to serve the town and these were the geographical (not racial) criteria that we will use. We had two K - 12 schools to serve each race based on this technicality. Very seldom, there would be a white family that lived just over the line or vice versa and they would make exceptions for them to still attend the appropriate school.

No, it was not predominantly black or white. It was usually 100% with the occasional dip to the 99.5% mark while a child was waiting to be moved to the appropriate school. Eventually this caught up with the town and the schools had to be desegregated into one elementary school and one middle school combined with the high school.

My grandfather was the president of the parish school board. The integration caused more than just a little stir and caused all kinds or turmoil in the town and in our family. My grandfather died a year into it in 1982 at age 55 from sudden heart failure.

This concludes this episode of Shagnasty’s Believe it or Not. Hint: Believe It

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Whatever you do, don’t announce to the class that they’re nothing but sambos and jezebels. I had a substitute teacher (black guy) who did this to my misbehaving orchestra class. It didn’t endear him to us, to say the least.

Fast forward two months later, my mother unknowingly invites the guy over for dinner and introduces him as my new math tutor. HELL TO THE NAW, was my response to her and then I explained why. We never saw him again.

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[QUOTE=Two and a Half Inches of Fun]

And is there anything that can be done for students that are in a contest of ignorance?
[/QUOTE]

My mother who taught in Indonesia in ther late forties, would relate to us that she would ignore rowdy pupils, send them to the back of the class and pretend she was no longer interested in teaching them. She said that eventually they would come around.

I sometime’s wonder if schools shouldn’t have a room available for rowdy kids who don’t listen. I would think that after a certain amount of time they’ll feel stupid or bored and want to return to the class. I know how I used to want to be sick enough to have to stay home from school, only to get bored and want to come back.

Just my 2 cents.

12

[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
It can be done but unfortunately not much for a substitute teacher. Minority students do have a disproportionate amount of problems in education and, as a whole, they aren’t equal to white students or affluent students of any stripe. It is best to embrace that as a challenge rather than deny that it exists in real world terms as so many do.
[/QUOTE]
Deny it? I don’t know anyone who would deny it. As far as i can tell, most people acknowledge it.

The main difference is between those who like to imply that the differences are somehow inherent in the children’s race or ethnicity, and those who understand that it’s a little more complex than that. It’s not quite clear from your post which group you’re in.

13

[QUOTE=mhendo]
Deny it? I don’t know anyone who would deny it. As far as i can tell, most people acknowledge it.

The main difference is between those who like to imply that the differences are somehow inherent in the children’s race or ethnicity, and those who understand that it’s a little more complex than that. It’s not quite clear from your post which group you’re in.
[/QUOTE]

As I said earlier, my mother is literally a world-wide, hands on expert on dealing with the lower part of the stratum whether it is poor whites or poor blacks in the South, neglected Middle Eastern ethnicity’s, or impoverished students in Vietnam or Korea. She specialises in the lower part of the distribution. At that end, it doesn’t matter if they are going to be Harvard educated lawyers. There is always room for improvement and the world doesn’t need everyone to earn advanced degrees and become doctors or software engineers. A solid basic education serves everyone well.

I have my own educated theories about the distribution at the top end of the Bell Curve but that doesn’t apply at all here. Properly trained and talented educators can eventually get a classroom under control and help the middling and weak students. OTOH, some evaluation systems for school district take the blank slate approach and assume that teachers should get equal results no matter the class that they are given and that is completely naive and contrary to all statistics.

14

[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
OTOH, some evaluation systems for school district take the blank slate approach and assume that teachers should get equal results no matter the class that they are given and that is completely naive and contrary to all statistics.
[/QUOTE]
I agree, but that’s not the same thing as you said in your previous post.

15

I’ve always thought that a lot of these things stem from cultural differences, a lot of what gets mistaken for racial issues is about issues of different cultures. Which isn’t to say that there’s some monolithic culture for every race, of course. But there’s a lot of overlap. People tend to group with other people they see as similar to them, especially when young. Boys tend to group with boys. Kids of the same age group tend to together. People of different races tend to group together. People of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, etc.

And as that happens, groups tend to develop some degree of their own culture.

So if in one culture holds education in high esteem, and another culture holds education in low esteem but places a value on defying authority, which culture do you think is going to produce the best students? Again, this isn’t strictly a race issue, but race is one reason that people identify with in order to spend their time with what they consider similar people. People even criticize other people who seem similar to them but they identify with a different culture - witness blacks calling out other blacks for “acting white” and such.

I rarely see this concept ever discussed because people have this comical and scary aversion to discussing any issue that involves race, treating it as a thought crime. The OP seems to be struggling to reconcile what he’s dealing with in his own experience and the idea that it’s a thought crime to acknowledge it

16

[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
I may be one of the youngest people who grew up in the U.S. with segregated schools. I am 34 and my mother taught at the black school. She developed innovative techniques to deal with the poorest black kids that are to be found anywhere in the U.S. She was Louisiana’s teacher of the year in 1990 (out of 40,000) and used her experiences to later earn a doctorate, write two successful books, and become a highly sought after professional speaker on 5 continents.
[/QUOTE]

I hope this doesn’t move into creepy stalker territory, but because I’ve got a professional interest in exactly the subjects you say your mom wrote about, I did some googling. And the name that comes up for 1990 Louisiana teacher of the year is not a name associated with any published books on Amazon. The closest that comes is a Mormon book on educating children about the Lord, and a link to a DVD called “The Fluffer”. Has she changed her name since winning the award, or is it maybe a different year that she won?

Daniel

17

First, make sure you aren’t interpreting behavior selectively: it’s like how behavior that is assertive on a man looks pushy on a woman: there are so many media images of angry black youth that I think, among new teachers, there is a certain fear factor–like they have no idea what that strange black boy is capable of, whereas they assume the white boy is not a threat because they identify with him. So undesirable behavior on the white kid’s part is viewed as empty posturing and the same behavior from black kids is seen as a credible threat, and its importance magnified. I am not saying you are doing this, just that I’ve seen it, and in my first years teaching, was guilty of it myself.

I am a white teacher teaching in an “urban” school: we are about 30% African American, 15% white, the rest Hispanic and various international groups. To make it even fun, we have almost no real middle class: the white kids tend toward ‘filthy rich’ and the minority kids, by and large, are SES disadvantaged. It makes it very difficult to separate out race and class, and there is no doubt that the two things interact, and all I can comment about are the things I’ve seen at my school.

One thing that I see at my school is that African Americans are extraordinarily underrepresented in advanced classes. Because of this, you have a lot more bright, bored African Americans in regular classes, where they can easily do well enough to make a B–all they want–and where they tend to become ringleaders and trouble makers, attracting other, less capable kids and serving as negative role-models–they fuck around and still make ok grades, so the less capable kids feel like they are entitled to fuck around, too, except they can’t, if they want to pass.

So the solution, at least as far as I can see, is to get more African Americans into the advanced classes. I have almost no African American males in my AP classes. This is the pattern across the school. The reasons for this have caused me many sleepless nights and long conversations with both my peers and my students. Possible reasons for this that people have suggested:

  1. Simple racism. There’s no doubt that people have an idea of what a “smart” kid looks like, and it’s not a thug. Now, very, very bright African American kids are still identified as smart and pushed into AP classes, and very slow rich white kids are pushed towards regular classes. It’s the middle where preconceptions come in: a middle-of-the-road white kid will often be put into the advanced classes and everyone assumes they are just kinda slackers. A middle-of-the-road African American kid is, IME, more likely to be pointed towards the regular classes.

  2. The ‘sports’ culture. It’s taken as a given that regular (not AP) 7th period classes are TERRIBLE, because that’s when kids in sports have practice, and all the regular kids that are worth a damn are in sports. There’s no doubt that among the African American boys, that’s where the glory is. It’s hard to tell if the sports are overall positive or negative for these kids: on one hand, it’s amazing to see kids that focused, that driven–those same kids that drive you crazy in class are perfectly obedient, team players on the field, pushing themselves as hard as they possibly can for coach’s approval. They want something badly enough to work on it, and that’s a heck of a thing. On the other hand, sports take so much time that it makes advanced classes problematic–when football or basketball or baseball are in season, those coaches OWN those kids from 3:00 on, and many of them miss a lot of class, too. Many kids can be a scholar OR an athlete, but fewer (of any race) can be both. The white kids tend to pick scholar: the black kids tend to pick athlete.

  3. Social issues. To some degree, it’s a self-fufilling prophesy. When you walk by an AP class and see every color but your own, you don’t feel like you belong there. If you get talked into giving the class a chance, you feel like the odd one out (in large part because the kids that have always been in these classes are total snots toward you), and the people you hang out with feel like you’ve left them behind. Our rich white kids are all in the same AP classes together, so when one has a huge project due and can’t go out, they all have a big project due and can’t go out, so you don’t feel like you are missing anything. On the other hand, if no one else even has homework and they are in fact pissed at you for turning them down because you do, it’s easy to just say “screw this”.

This also means they don’t lose face when they drop out of advanced classes. I have no doubt that many of my rich white kids would RUN from my class except that it conflicts with their self-image as one of the AP kids. The African-American kids don’t have that peer pressure working for them.

  1. Lack of understanding of the system. Every year I have a great, involved, but undereducated African American mother pull their son or daughter out of my class because they are making Cs. They are focused on high school graduation as the goal and mostly worried that their child won’t graduate. Hispanic parents, overall, are more willing to follow a teacher’s advice about keeping their kid in an advanced class.

To sum up, in my experience, there are many factors that make it difficult for African Americans–especially the “rather bright” kids–to excel academically. Because of this, the kids don’t take school seriously and act out. It’s a terrible cycle and the solutions lay in changing the system, not individuals. If you can find a way to do that, write a book and make a million dollars.

18

Hear! Hear!

And I tip my hat of respect to the one person among us who I know for certain is black and holds a doctorate. (My admiration for you has never waivered. Your own strength opens the more you choose to speak the truth of your own mind.)

Two and a Half, ditch those labels if you want to teach. The good news is that when you have your own classroom, you will have a little more control and a chance to motivate your students. It doesn’t happen in two weeks or even a semester.

Over a longer period of time you will learn that the cultural differences can be managed and utilized. The basic human quallities are alike. You will see them without labels except (ideally) for how individuals learn and what individuals need to be taught.

Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein were two poor students who were mislabelled by their teachers or performed poorly in class. Don’t make me dig up a cite. :stuck_out_tongue:

Your racism deserves pitting. At least you are aware of that. You can’t develop even a dull pencil point after only two weeks.

In all of your preparation for teaching, what has made you think that you can size things up with two weeks of experience in someone else’s classroom? You’ve probably spent more time waiting in doctors’ offices.

By the way, your post has major flaws in construction. It was difficult to read. I hope that you were kidding about having a high school diploma. That would suck big time for the students.

19

[QUOTE=Zoe]
Your racism deserves pitting. At least you are aware of that. You can’t develop even a dull pencil point after only two weeks.
[/QUOTE]

Hey, props for seeking some enlightenment before letting the attitudes solidify.

In all of your preparation for teaching, what has made you think that you can size things up with two weeks of experience in someone else’s classroom? You’ve probably spent more time waiting in doctors’ offices.

[QUOTE=Zoe]

By the way, your post has major flaws in construction. It was difficult to read. I hope that you were kidding about having a high school diploma. That would suck big time for the students.
[/QUOTE]

I didn’t find it hard to read and I’m not sure what the “major flaws” would be.

20

Try reading it aloud slowly. That’s one way to catch mistakes.