There's a funny internal debate I've been having over the last few months. It goes something like this:
You know, this teaching thing seems a lot bigger than me. The challenges that my students face are one thing - but infinitely larger (seemingly) is the general disinterest in school. It often seems as though the students come from a culture that does not value knowledge and school. Because of this, it becomes nearly impossible to teach toward long-term success.
Let me explain.
My students, overall, do not seem to value school and education in the short term, and have trouble making a connection between short-term and long-term success. Certainly, they all say that they would like to be architects, atheletes, vetrinarians, etc, so their long-term goal is there. The problem lies in the connection between that eventual goal, and the work they do today.
Example: I have a student who wants to be a Vet. He is so far behind in math that as an eighth grader he still cannot add positive and negative numbers correctly (I believe this is a concept that is supposed to be introduced near the end of fourth grade). He cannot multiply two fractions together, and he certainly cannot function in math at all without a calculator. The worst part is, as soon as he hits something that he doesn't really know how to do, he shuts down. Completely. For him, the day is over. This student lacks the motivation to push on through academic challenges, yet does not understand that this inaction has an impact on his personal dreams.
Culturally, this is a common trend among my students, and it has taken me all year to try and break them of it (with scattered successes). One source of the problem, as I see it, is the popular culture that the students buy into. Watching BET and MTV, the students are not conveyed the value of hard work. Instead, they see the glamorized bling of Flavor Flave as he chooses between twelve different women to be his girl. Who cares about math?
Here's where my dilemna comes in:
I'm here, putting in every effort I can to try and help even things out (academically) for my kids - to try and give them a fair shot. Yet there's a sense that next year, they'll be back in the same boat. Very few of these students will retain all that I've worked to provide them. Very few of these students will continue on to find long-term success because of the fact that I helped push them to add -2 and 2. So what battle am I fighting?
Furthermore, the very reason I'm saying this - the very statement 'long-term success' - is rooted in my own middle-class values, values that (as I have discussed above) my students don't necessarily share.
My students (by and large) will not be the next Kenneth Lay. They will not be the next Condoleza Rice. They will not be the next Johnnie Chochran. Why? Because they don't value these positions! For the most part, my students don't care to be businessmen, congresswomen, or lawyers. They would love to be the next Lebron James, 50 Cent, or Flavor Flave. If you wanted to be these things, would you care about school?
Check out this article from the Times a while back.
Discuss.
Jack,
1) Thank you for calling last night. You were the only person who called yesterday, and it was a significant day indeed (my last day of classes, for the rest of you).
2) I have finally just read your entire comment here. Sometimes when you are inside the system you see the gross, unfair, and overwhelming underbelly of it all - you lack the perspective to see what you've done. I would like to step away and think I had an amazing impact on all my students, and that I was able to reverse their thinking and open their eyes to all those things that are working against them. I would like to think that they will at least think about the world and say, "Hey, I think I can do something with myself." The truth of the matter is that they will not. Not all of them anyway.
You summed it up so well - that I can get one or two, but the majority will be hard to sway. And it is a tiny few.
There is SO much fighting against these kids.
Your comment here Jack is from that outside perspective that I lack most of the time. I looked through our yearbook today and saw how much younger my students looked at the beginning of the year. It was shocking. I haven't noticed them grow because I have seen them each and every day. Their progress in school is the same way.
Thank you for pulling me out of myself for a moment. I forget that my kids have grown and learned and been impacted and affected.
I plan on writing a follow-up poem to that one from a year ago. Be on the lookout, Jack.
Posted by: andy at June 8, 2006 3:41 PM
I think what you're saying about the MTV culture is as much a symptom as it is a problem. All kids want to be astronauts or firemen, yet they all worship the athletes and the pop stars. This is as true now as it was when we grew up, when our parents grew up, and so on. Only the celebs were different. Replace Lebron with Jordan, 50 with Snoop, Flava with...well, with Flava. Personally I wanted to be either Wolverine or in the Beastie Boys. No child says in 8th grade, "I want to be a congressman and pass important tax cut legislation." No little girl says "gosh, I really admire that Condolezza Rice." OK, some kids may think that way, but they are a definite exception to the rule.
The point is, popular culture is shit, it always has been, and it always will be. But plenty of kids get raised up listening to music their parents hate, and dressing in awful ways, and they turn out just fine. They DO become senators and doctors and vets. You and I grew up with essentially the same MTV culture shouting at us day in and day out, and we've made it through and ended up relatively smart and adjusted. We played video games but we also did our homework. As the article says, "Young white Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book." So what's different? Is it really a simple color line, as that NY Times writer thinks?
Certainly the idea that it's cool to be a slacker and un-academic is part of it, but that too started somewhere else. And young black kids are of course more apt to relate to black superstars than white kids are. Today it seems endlessly self-perpetuating, but there was a point where anti-academia had to become popular in the first place. Which means that it can be STOPPED, too. It's hard to blame any one thing, because in the end it's the weight of the world and history that's pushing these kids down. A great, great number of kids, kids of every ethnicity, are basically born into a world that doesn't care about them and ASSUMES, from birth, that they will fail. Their parents, teachers, and friends have decided, mostly unconsciously, that this child will have no place in the world. One can keep looking for reasons, but I expect you'll end up going back into prehistory before you find the beginning. Even kids who are handed the world on a silver platter will sometimes fail.
But some kids, a tiny few, have what it takes to rise up from the world they were born into, and it's a teacher's job to ensure those kids make it. And maybe some more kids who never thought anything of themselves will suddenly catch a spark and make themselves better too. And all those kids will find and help others when it's their turn, and so on down the line. The hope is that we can change the course of our social evolution, slowly and surely, and end up as a better people because of it. It probably won't be in our lifetimes, but you can rest knowing you've done your best to stare down history and turn it around. You often hear teachers say that if one kid's life is improved by them, they've done their job. I think this is true. That doesn't mean ignore the rest--if you push hard enough you might just break through. But you have to count your successes as blessings, and understand that there is SO much fighting against you to keep these kids down. And it might get worse before it gets better. But it's not an irreversible path, it just might be that we can't see the reversal yet.
Maybe someone should buy 50 Cent a copy of "Gatsby" or something.
Posted by: jack at May 31, 2006 10:01 PM