Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies





	[quote name="Horrible Gelatinous Blob"]So here's where I'm coming from: Ten schools in twelve years. Poor majority-black public schools, poor majority-white public schools, upper middle-class majority-white public schools, upper class majority-white private schools. Most of these were in the Southeast as well. The thing about this that pissed me off the most wasn't the article itself, but rather the reaction where people accepted it as gospel truth because it confirmed everything they secretly believed but were too scared to investigate for themselves. So then all of these debates and arguments were touched off over this where people on both sides are acting like this is a carefully researched, peer reviewed data set. And it is most certainly not. As much as I would like to spend hours and hours breaking the article down, I have my sanity to think about, so I'm just going to hit some of the things that immediately jumped out at me as either patently false or misrepresented. I'm going to try to avoid some of the more inflammatory and clearly stereotypical passages, although I'm sure I'll fail. [quote name="Christopher Jackson"] One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary decorum. It was not unusual for five students to be screaming at me at once. It did no good to try to quiet them and white women were particularly inept at trying. I sat in on one woman’s class as she begged the children to pipe down. They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers. [/quote] The implication here is that non-black high schoolers sit quietly in the classroom, calmed by the sheer purity of their white flesh. Here's how it works, generally: black people are louder, on average, than other ethnicities. People in the South are louder, on average, than people from other regions. High school kids, on average, are louder than full-grown adults -- especially when around other high school kids. If five students are screaming at you at once, no matter what color they are, you have completely lost control of the classroom and therefore are performing poorly at your job. You are the adult, you are the teacher, and it is your job to be in control of the classroom at all times. If your students disrespect you to the point where you "beg" them for anything, YOU HAVE FAILED. Put a pin in that. We'll come back to it. [quote name="Christopher Jackson"] My students loved to leave the classroom and slack off, even if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I picked a light-skinned boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: “You pick da half-breed.” And immediately other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming, “He half-breed.” [/quote] First of, LOL at "the eye of white authority." It's hard to express just how contrived and false this sounds. I guess a close analogue would be describing someone talking smack in CS, only with circa-1800 Amish-style speech patterns. "Thou art most base in your usage of the AWP, and I daresay your behavior resembles that of a lady of the illest repute." Light-skint? Yes. High yellow? Doubtful in front of a white teacher, but a possibility. Mulatto? I'm more inclined to believe that than "half-breed." It's just wrong: black kids don't talk like that. So either he doesn't really pay attention to these kids and remember what they said, despite his use of quotes, or he's making it up whole cloth. [quote name="Christopher Jackson"] Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, “Where is the bathroom?” he may actually say “Whar da badroom be?” Grammatically, this is the equivalent of “Where the bathroom is?” And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments. [/quote] Like Hawaiian Pidgin, French Creole in Louisiana, and pretty much every dialect ever, Black English has its own internally consistent rules and structure. This is why it sounds wrong and white when people who aren't familiar with it try to imitate it. They haven't grown up around it, they haven't heard it used frequently, and so they have no clue what the rules and structure are. If the author had spent all this time around young black kids, he'd at least recognize this, even if he couldn't replicate it. Students don't write the way they speak, however. No one writes the way they speak, except maybe didcot. But even if they did, these would be the only black people on Earth to completely lack the ability to code-switch. Even if they grew up around people who only spoke Black English, Standard American English is the de facto standard and suffuses every element of society. Television, movies, music -- even rap music. I'd wager that it's functionally impossible to grow up in the US speaking any dialect of English without also knowing the basic rules of Standard American English. [quote name="Christopher Jackson"] Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career day, one girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of children and get fat checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any objection to this career choice. [/quote] Aside from perpetuating <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/reviews/970504.jacoby.html">the myth of the welfare queen</a>, I thought Career Day is when adults come to the class to discuss their occupations, not when kids talk about their plans. Oh, and not only did I never have anything resembling a Career Day in high school, neither did anyone I know. As far as I can tell, it's one of those tropes that exists mainly in TV and movies, like edible school lunches. Speaking of school lunches... [quote name="Christopher Jackson"] One of my students was a notorious drug dealer. Everyone knew it. He was 19 years old and in eleventh grade. Once he got a score of three out of 100 on a test. He had been locked up four times since he was 13.... A very fat student interrupted from across the room: “We get dat lunch,” Mr. Jackson. “We gotta get dat lunch and brickfuss.” He means the free breakfast and lunch poor students get every day. “Nigga, we know’d you be lovin’ brickfuss!” shouts another student. Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of them graduate. It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with barely a C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their diplomas because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It saves money to move them along, the school looks good and the teachers look good. [/quote] This is where it became quite obvious that the author, whoever it is, not only wasn't a teacher in the South, but didn't even do the most basic research before writing up a bunch of stereotypes and caricatures and calling it truth. The thing is, school districts everywhere -- but especially in the South -- are severely underfunded. Underfunded to the point where schools simply cannot afford to serve students that they absolutely do not have to serve. They can't afford to have 19 year olds in the eleventh grade; despite what some would have you believe, there's no money in overenrolling your school. So the districts have a policy. It varies slightly in detail from district to district, but the core is the same regionwide: you have a free ride until you turn 18. If you do not graduate from high school in the twelve months after your 18th birthday, you're given what's called a "Certificate of Attendance" that says that you WENT to high school and you're kicked out. Bye bye. There's no option to stay, no "come for the free breakfast and lunch." From then on, your only option is a GED. I won't deny that there is pressure to move students along, or that "social promotion" results in graduates incapable of tasks they should find trivial. But the only teachers I encountered who would move students up regardless of ability were the ones who had checked out and were only showing up to steal a paycheck and babysit a class. Coming back to the original point, it was the realization that this piece makes the author out to be a complete failure of a teacher, incapable of maintaining control of his class or caring about his students in any way that closed the door on its inauthenticity. He's willing to dismiss an entire category of kids based on their skin color, but the problem isn't with him -- it's with them. The racial achievement gap is real, and poor majority-black schools do have systemic problems. There are issues with regards to the value of education in black culture, but the roots run far deeper than "blacks do not respond to traditional white instruction." That's a conservative cop-out, a way to say "it's your fault, not ours." I appreciate that people want to discuss the subject that this piece raises, but in doing so, they've wrongly legitimized something so crass and nakedly offensive that if it were posted to 4chan, it'd be derided as a poor attempt at trolling. PS: [quote name="Christopher Jackson"] In our modern, atomized world children often have very little communication with adults—especially, or even, with their parents—so there is potential for a real transaction between pupil and teacher, <b>disciple and master.</b> A rewarding relationship can grow up between an exceptional, interested student and his teacher. I have stayed in my classroom with a group of students discussing ideas and playing chess until the janitor kicked us out. I was the old gentleman, imparting my history, culture, personal loves and triumphs, defeats and failures to young kinsman. Sometimes I fancied myself Tyrtaeus, the Spartan poet, who counseled the youth to honor and loyalty. [/quote] That sounds like some pedophile shit to me.[/quote]