This is totally unrelated to viewing kids in school but I found this special on PBS facinating and think about it often. Just a thought maybe it would get the Chris Rock routine/saying out of your head and give you a different perception of your class. Maybe it would give them a different idea of themselves.
What I had in mind was an indefinite stay in the room (for weeks if neccessary)until the pupil agreed to behave.
Like prison, excellent. As long as each child gets his own room this sounds like a solution.
You’re experiencing empirical evidence and it’s causing you to reach logical conclusions. If you kept picking up a certain type of snake it bit you every time, you would conclude that that snake was not friendly. Only when dealing with race will people insist that the problem is with you - it couldn’t possibly be that certain races have characteristics and that you’re completely valid in expecting certain races to behave certain ways. That would be unthinkable! :rolleyes:
I can’t believe I’m reading this thread today as I just came back from taking the teaching certification exam. I am worried that I’m not going to be able to put aside a developing prejudice towards black students.
But then I wondered today is it really that I’m prejudiced or is it that I’ve been indoctrinated to believe that race doesn’t make a difference?
I know that Socio Economic Standards are supposed to be the calling card for success but for me I’m dirt poor and I don’t act the way I see these kids act sometimes. For me I have a tendancy to see the hero in every child I meet. However when I meet girls especially that are totally ghetto I get angry that they are “acting the stereotype” but then I wonder who am I to decide that these people should act white?
Maybe they enjoy and like this lifestyle. Maybe to them norms are boring. There’s a Steve Harvey routine about the difference between a black mother and a white mother and he points out that you hardly ever see black kids tatooed up the wazooo with piercings everywhere. Only white kids.
So maybe the big lie isn’t that black kids aren’t going to act different, but rather that black kids have a different standard of what is respect and what is cool. Perhaps we need to accept the reality and not stress it so much that they are not living up to the white standards.
No, not prison. A playroom. While they are wasting their time, they’ll soon get the idea that being there makes them losers while their peers are moving forward.
These disruptive types are out to drag everyone else down to their comfortable work and stress avoidance level. They need to be motivated and understand that education is critical, important and every moment counts.
Not to hijack the thread too much, but did anyone see the 20/20 yesterday?
They did an interesting experiment. They had four white teenagers go to a park and vandalize a car in the parking lot. Bystanders noticed them doing it, a couple asked them what they were up to (one guy got really riled up), and one guy called 911.
Later, the producers sent in four black teenagers and had them do the exact same thing. Immediately, people came up to them and demanded that they stop. Ten people called 911.
Interestingly, while the white teens were openly committing a crime, people called 911 to report two black guys that were merely sleeping in a nearby car. They were called “potential car thieves”. But the white kids actually breaking into a car were ignored.
I don’t doubt the veracity of the OP. I know how it can be to be young, black, and gifted with the sass-mouth :). But the results of the experiment do make you wonder just how much of what we see is reality and how much of it is perception.
I saw it (actually I think I saw a few years ago too - pretty sure last night was a repeat.) I wonder if they would disclose their full process for peer review. If it was indeed on the up and up it’s very disturbing but to me it had a feel that they reached their conclusions “creatively” if you know what I mean.
Oh god, not you and your “black people do this why?” bulllshit again?
:rolleyes:
No, I don’t.
I doubt they would have aired the show if there hadn’t been a disparity, but I also don’t think what they discovered to be all that surprising.
Two And A Half Inches Of Fun, I know exactly what you mean. Racism is insidious and nearly impossible to flush out of your system, and then you get these jerks who reinforce it…
I’m more fortunate than most whites, in that I grew up with schools >80% black; consequently, I’ve had a lot more intimate contact with blacks than is common. There is a nasty anti-intellectual and violent feedback loop going on with a lot of young black guys, and it can be really frustrating trying to get through to them (I, too, have done the sub teacher thing, and my nephews went through a phase where they were pulling stunts like you describe). I don’t know of any foolproof techniques for breaking this cycle, but I recall that the more effective teachers had higherexpectations for the kids, and treated it as unusual and unacceptable for them to do anything but excel. What I’m getting at is that an approach that can work is to apply your own social pressure to counter that of the negative achievement stereotype.
And hey- you’ve recognized a developing problem and are working to put a stop to it before it sets in as a habit. 
No, these were not nitpicky things. We are talking about the basic communication skills of someone who is questioning the ability of some of the students that she or he is teaching. To her or his credit, two and a half proof read the material before posting it. This wasn’t something just flung up without much thought as I usually do.
I’m not referring to misspelled words, typographical errors, comma splices or homophones. I am talking about basic skills that should have been mastered in sixth grade. We are allegedly talking about a teacher. That “teacher” is in no position to judge the capability of others.
In Tennessee one of the things that is drilled into the teachers’ heads is that every teacher is a teacher of reading. You don’t get very far in math, science or industrial arts if you can’t read and write. And I’m not talking about “high proficiency.” I never was.
And there are some skills that every teacher is expected to do reasonably well. Maintaining classroom discipline and inspiring students are two which are required of a good teacher. You should not be given tenure if you don’t get both of those managed.
Let’s face the issue of the OP. If two and a half can so easily have his impressions of two decades influenced by only two weeks experience in the classroom, I suspect that his chosen name reflects the number of years he has spent thus far in sixth grade.
I’ve noticed his fondness for the Chris Rock word. That doesn’t come overnight. I can hardly wait until he is introduced to the concept of “race” as a social construct only. DNA will mess with his pea pod.
I have no more time for the trolls in this thread. I know better. Been there. Done that.
I’m looking purely at the writing, the expression of thought. You may disagree with the thought being expressed…I’m looking for at grammar. Your response said something to the effect that you had difficulty understanding what you read, which I interpreted to mean that in your opinion, it was bad writing.
If you have issues with the writing beyond what I’ve cited, you’ll have to explain them to me. If you have issues with the thoughts expressed by that writing, that’s a different thing.
Many things are drilled into every teacher’s head…I would know, being one.
I’m not sure how reading entered the discussion, except possibly as a function of writing. The OP was discussing misbehavior and how it developed into feelings of racism, which he/she knew were inappopriate and for which he/she sought input.
We do the best we can. But if the classes are overcrowded or there’s no funding or parents don’t care, what chance do we have?
Oh, come on! Do you think the OP went into the teaching profession for the money? Glamor? Presige? Do you have any idea how little substitutes earn? Any idea how difficult it is?"
I don’t think the OP wants to believe how the students are behaving…the OP didn’t come in bashing minorities. The OP wants feedback, hopeful that he/she is wrong, to me.
The Chris Rock word? Chris didn’t invent it. But no, it didn’t come overnight, nor did the term “white trash,” or “modem.” JMO, but I suspect the OP used it because it came from a person of that group who noticed a distinction within the group—right or wrong (and observed the term to make a joke).
Someone once said that the problem with comedians is that nobody takes them seriously enough. IMO Chris is pointing out a distinction that people may already draw—otherwise, nobody would identify with it and they wouldn’t know what he is joking about. But there’s a serious issue here. So okay, let’s explore that and figure out what’s driving that.
I don’t know what you mean in the first part…I thought the point would be that he sees it abstractly, as a “social construct only.” Second part: we all came from Africa? OK, I got that.
“Trolls,” as I understand it, are those who state an inflammatory post and then leave without defending what they wrote because their posts are indefensible. Here I am…bring it on.
Another problem I see among new teachers goes back to the horrible “they all look the same” problem. The fact of the matter is that whenever you are not used to being around many individuals of a given race, it’s harder to tell them apart. When I first started teaching, I learned the black kids’ names much more slowly than the white kids, because they all looked the same to me, and I think this is a pretty common situation. With white kids I also much more quickly understood the social dynamics–I knew who was in what group because the clothing signals and such were all pretty much the same as when I was in school. Also, since I recognized them sooner, when I saw them in different combinations out in the hall I knew who they were friends with and understood the wider social network. The black kids, for a long time, were like one super-group.
This means that all bad behavior by any individual gets attributed to the whole group, whereas the bad behaviors of the snotty white soccer players in first period, the sullen goth kid in third, and the insecure trashy girl in 5th are each distinct memories of individual behavior and at the most one generalizes to all goth kids or all soccer players. If one or two different groups give you a problem on any given day, it seems pretty reasonable, none of them are bad all the time, they all just need a little minding. When any black kid misbehaves, people generalize to a much larger group, so if one black kid each day misbehaves, you had problems with black kids every day of the week. So people develop low expectations and when some black girl is acting up for the first time all week on Friday, they give her holy hell because “those kids” have been awful all week. When Suzie Cheerleader does the same thing a minute later it doesn’t seem like such a big deal because the cheerleaders haven’t been a problem until today.
Good teachers get past this, but they do it by spending quite a bit of time in painful self-reflection. I was a LOT more bigoted than I realized when I started teaching school.
A surprisingly high percentage of what we see is perception. I was riding in a car one day, and thought I saw a funny sign on the van next to me. As I looked more closely at it, the letters re-arranged themselves in front of my eyes and became what was actually printed on the van. We see what we expect to see an astonishing amount of the time.
Manda Jo really awesome post. Thanks for sharing it.
Looking back over this thread, my bad habit struck again. I do not ever really try to write properly or proofread.
However, from this point forward I going to start proofreading and being more careful.
There are those who believe what and how you write on a message board means nothing in the real world, and then there are people like me who have always tried to write properly even here, and as a result my writing skills have never been stronger. What you practice will get better; if writing properly is something you care about, practicing here will help you.
Heh. Presumably you meant after that last post, I take it?
Slight hijack: BTW, there’s nothing wrong with using contractions. You don’t need to sound like Jane Austen or Data in ST:TNG to write correctly. Words such as don’t, can’t, wouldn’t help express yourself in a much more natural and easier-to-read way.
Anyway if you’re really concerned about thinking of these kids in such a perjorative, offensive way, it might help to stop repetitively referring to them with that particular term. I mean, you claim to be filled with guilt and horror over thinking this way, but frankly to me you suuuuuure seem to be having a good ol’ time saying “nigger” over and over again.
But then I’m just a cynical kinda gal.
This playroom for the disruptive kids thing is intriguing. I bet the parents would fuck it up, though.