She’s very hard-working. She tutors math students after school each day (yes, Monday through Friday) from 3 to 5 or even 6 o’clock, which is well, well, beyond what is expected and lightyears beyond what other math teachers do. Hell, other math teachers even send their students to her for tutoring. She meticulously makes tests for her students and even spends hours formatting her own personal study guides for her math students.
But when she talks to me … she complains that her students are “stupid.” They just can’t understand math. And since all her students are either white or black, they’re not hardworking at home (and stupid to boot). Asians are clearly superior to the two lesser races. :smack:.
Basically, she’s book-smart and hardworking, but also extremely ignorant of science (in general) and very stubborn. She will cling tenaciously to beliefs proven false by science to suit her point. She will cling tenaciously to racist beliefs. Just the other week, when she was discussing possible tenants for her rental property, she described how she disliked one black family. She told me about how she tried to get extra credit checks and so forth.
So … I guess the larger question is:
Is it good to be book-smart (as in able to memorize facts) rather than open-minded and willing to change ingrained beliefs?
I believe so … and I believe this is where western culture clearly trumps eastern culture. Sure, a lot of Asian countries score highly on standardized exams while the US scores very poorly. But if you’re black, and in somewhere like Korea … good luck on assimilating.
It’s impossible to say without talking to her. All teachers complain about students being stupid. Teaching–especially when you are doing intensive, one-on-one tutoring–is like coaching t-ball. It’s RIGHT FUCKING THERE and they can’t hit it. They swing and swing and swing, and you cheer and you give suggestions and correct their stance and model and you do it all with a smile, but deep down inside you are thinking “It’s right fucking there. I am god damn pointing at the answer. It’s the exact same problem we did together yesterday. It’s right fucking there. Jesus Christ”. The more closely you work with students, the more feedback you get about where they really are (instead of what you hoped) and the worse it gets. It’s just part of the gig. You vent to other people so as to survive.
The “black and white people are stupid” kind of surprises me: generally math teachers are angry at kids for being lazy. Math is all about effort and the really good math teachers I’ve known tend to assume that if it takes 4 hours a day to master pre-cal or calc, then you should put in 4 hours a day, and anything else is inexplicable laziness.
If kids are coming to her for all that after school tutoring, it means she’s effective. She may be scary and impatient, but they have faith that if they work with her it will lead to learning: they wouldn’t come, otherwise. Frankly, if I saw a teacher with a room full of kids voluntarily coming for tutoring 10-15 hours a week, I would be very prone to give them the benefit of the doubt about whatever they said: kids wouldn’t work like that for a teacher that was contemptuous to them in any meaningful way, and kids are sensitive to that stuff.
You had me until this paragraph. I may be mistaken, but it seems that your friend’s thinking (or lack thereof) is rubbing off on you. Please tell me I’m wrong.
Right, because judging the social tendencies of two entirely different cultures in two entirely different countries is the same as saying one race is genetically inferior. We couldn’t possibly say that, for example, the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia is poorer than in the west. That’s like saying all blacks are genetically predisposed to crime!
I can’t really vote in the poll as there is not enough info, and it does seem somewhat contradictory. I mean, if she is a racist, why is she spending hours and hours preparing tutoring materials for both black and white kids?
We have a math (Algebra) teacher at our college who is similarly frustrated. He consistently fails the vast majority of his students and has started to become quite the bitter teacher. (I think they might be thinking of firing him.)
However, when you listen to him, you can sort of get his frustrations. He goes over and over the same basic material and students still don’t get it. Most get hopelessly lost in the first few weeks and then stop coming.
Is he a bad teacher? Perhaps - and it doesn’t bode well that most of his students simply stop coming to class. But he also sticks around after class and offers TWO HOURS of tutoring, which few students take advantage of and simply leave.
But he also has a point with the lack of interest, no study skills, no preparation and truly horrible basic math skills. He wonders aloud how they ever got out of high school.
And yes, the Asian students usually do far better than most of the non-Asian students. There is a reason for that - most of the Asian students come from countries/families where math is considered an important field of study and they insist those students buckle down and do the work.
I taught English for many years and saw that some students had no clue on the very basics of grammar and spelling. Imagine having them show up in your advanced composition classes! Thus I can see teaching something like Algebra to students who have serious problems dividing 144 by 12 is no easy feat.
There are some math teachers who can inspire and make math fun - but I think it is safe to say that is not the norm. For those more rigid instructors, who cannot fathom why someone cannot understand the logic of math, I can imagine that frustration and teacher-burn out can happen rather quickly.
This section of your original post makes me think you might have something wrong with you. As for your teacher friend, I can’t be sure without direct communication.
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I believe so … and I believe this is where western culture clearly trumps eastern culture. Sure, a lot of Asian countries score highly on standardized exams while the US scores very poorly. But if you’re black, and in somewhere like Korea … good luck on assimilating.
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I don’t think Korea has a lot of black people - probably not enough to make a difference in their standardized test results.
I’m not sure what you are getting at.
On average, in the US black students do worse at math (as well as other subjects) than either whites or Asians. That has not been discredited by science; it is an established fact. I can dig up a cite if you need it, but I don’t think that is necessary. And one of the reasons why (for instance) Japan does better than the US in standardized tests is because the US has a more heterogeneous population - we have a lot more people taking the tests who are bad at math (for whatever reason). And if you compare states in the USA with more homogeneous populations, like North Dakota, you find that they score as well, or in some cases better, than Japan.
So if your teacher is concluding “black students are bad at math because of their genes”, that has not been conclusively proven (or disproven). If she is just concluding “black students are worse at math than whites or Asians”, that is much more likely to be a reflection of her experience.
We’ve had a million threads in GD about the possibility of a genetic component to partially explain the differing performance of blacks vs. other groups in the US on standardized tests. This is the ultimate politically-incorrect statement, and it’s going to be denied by many no matter what the evidence. But based on your OP, I doubt that this is the issue for your teacher.
Sorry, I can’t vote in your poll. As mentioned, not enough information.
Interesting how the OP states that the teacher said that both black and white students are dumb, yet Shodan goes on about how only black students don’t do well in math.
That’s screwed up as hell. That teacher is a racist asshole. Sorry, she made a good impression on me at first, but then when she started making racist comments, my impression of her plummeted.
I voted Plain fucked up because it takes a lot more than that to be fucked up as Hitler.
There’s a great chapter in Freakanomics (or The Tipping Point?) that points out that the Asianlanguage number system is much easier to master and therefore more Asian excel at math at earlier stages than that of counterparts. For the Asians here in U.S., who were the Asian immigrants? The majority of those in the past decades were professionals of science and highly educated, so more emphasis was placed on education.
What your friend is going thru I think of my boss and how she said her daughter was going into education for her degree and she was shocked at how poorly learned the students she saw as a student teacher. You aren’t always going to see the best and the brightest.
Just because she works hard doesn’t mean she’s a good (effective) teacher. It could be that she focuses only on the teaching, rather than the learning–in which case, it doesn’t matter how hard she tries, and her beliefs about who can learn math are just rationalizations.
Wait is she Asian, because that seems to be the impression I’m getting here, and in that case was she born here or is she an immigrant? Also from your observations, does she ever display her racist attitudes in front of her students or allow it to affect the way she treats them?
Knowing the material is certainly significant but I give her credit for the extra effort in tutoring. I think that trumps her bigoted comments directed at the students. If we are going to measure her worth as a teacher, i find that to be far more important, and the comments trivial by comparison.
It seems kind of odd though, because I don’t think her beliefs match up with her actions. I mean, if she really thinks they’re that stupid and hopeless, why bother helping?
What? That teaching is frustrating? That kids seem amazingly stupid? That teachers vent? Did you think your fifth grade teacher was genuinely amazed that you could find the predicate?
You know how teachers talk about how wonderful the “lightbulb” moment is, when a kid gets it? That’s because of all the tremendously frustrating hours that go into getting there.
Teacher/student is a complicated relationship. You do understand where they are coming from, you do respect the work they do, you are amazingly proud of them when they make incremental progress, and there is no doubt that at times you marvel at their brilliance. At the same time, however, it’s really, really frustrating. You conceal that frustration, because that’s part of the job, but I don’t know a teacher who is genuinely endlessly patient. If you care about a student, if you care about their learning and their progress, then you care when it doesn’t happen. You can’t be emotionally invested in their progress and then be unaffected when it stalls.
Math teacher, 15 years, NBCT and all that
I suspect your friend is confusing work ethic with stupidity. I have many students that can get 50-60% of the points (and they are not gimmes) with doing minimal work. No notebooks, refusal to work on problems they “don’t understand”, etc. If you can almost pass by not exerting yourself you are certainly not dumb.
Few observations:
Students do not see work for works sake as a value. This is the #1 issue I’m dealing with this generation. It is the cultural differences that your friend may be seeing.
Students have been trained by elementary teachers that in math, work means waiting there doing nothing, claim you can’t do it and have your teacher do you work for you. A lot of secondary teachers do this to so why should they do work if they’ve been taught the teacher will do it for you.
It is acceptable to fail math. How many times have you heard adults including parents and non-math teachers say “math is hard” or “I was never good in math”? I hear it all the fucking time. So student feel no shame in failing math or looking like a dumbass because SOCIETY says it’s ok to do poorly and why so why make an effort?
In another thread I argued the point that teaching is not respected because non-teachers have no clue what we do. Here’s an example:
No teacher anywhere ever taught (a/b) + (c/d) = (a+c)/(b+d). The closest is with common denominators (a/z) + (b/z) = (a+b)/z but NEVER (a+b)/(2z). I criticize a lot of elementary math instruction but I am positive elementary teachers don’t fuck this up (PEMDAS on the other hand …)
So go into any secondary (middle or high school) and put 2/3 + 5/7 on the board and see how many 7/10 you get as answers and tell me you don’t stare in disbelief as yet for the 4-8th year in a row the students need to be taught fractions.
that all teachers complain about students being amazingly stupid. that teaching these stupid children is such a chore for teachers that they need to vent just to keep their sanity. you may be all smiles while teaching, but if you’re thinking it, chances are your body language is showing it too. i agree with Saint Cad, your post would be more palatable if you replaced “stupid” with “lack of work ethic”.
that is not true. students who cannot even add fractions would get a PSLE score well below national average. like you said, these students would more likely have a terrible work ethic as opposed to being stupid. if they knew what the fractional notations meant and had bothered to try, they would know two parts greater than half would be more than one whole. it shouldn’t be a big step from there to explain that you’ll need to cut them all to equal parts to calculate the total.
ignorance is not stupidity. if you don’t know something, you could be taught. if you don’t care to learn, you might be inspired. if you’re plain stupid, you’d better be hardworking.
I have a neighbor who has a PhD in Math. She has taught at many of the local colleges and often isn’t asked to come back after a few classes. She once had an entire class walk out on her and the students were themselves math teachers at the High School level. In one other class only 1 student passed the course. From what I’ve gathered, she can’t bring herself down to the level where she can reach her students.
What I’ll say here is that it’s really, really hard to not be racist when racial stereotypes seem to keep presenting themselves over and over. It takes a real quality of hard rationality to detach yourself from your own situation, recognize cognitive biases like false sorting, and reaffirm core values. I wish everyone could do this. Some cannot.