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Originally Posted by shesus
Mixed, I’m touched that my entry made your daughter want to do the same thing. However, she needs to realize that it is depressing and the burn-out rate is about 5 years or less. I don’t do my job to get pats on the back or to be put on a cross as a martyr. I do it in the hopes that I can make a difference in a child’s life. However, what I am finding is that sometimes that isn’t enough. The daily struggle of fighting against the anti-education values is tough without aid from positive, black role models. The fact that the racial comment ambulance chasers were out this week just brought up all the frustration that I feel.
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Both of my older daughters want to teach and they want to teach high school. Both being either in or recently out of high school themselves (with heavily diverse student bodies), they have a pretty good idea of what they are up against. And believe me, we have had long conversations about the behavior of black kids in their schools. This is not something that is completely foreign to our everyday experience. And we have been able to come to a mutual understanding that what we are seeing is the result of something much deeper than clothing or words or music.
My oldest daughter, the one I referred to in my previous post, has two goals in life:
To do something worthwhile with her talent for art.
And to help people who really need it.
She's been through quite a lot in her short life, as well, which may or may not make her more well-suited to try and teach art to kids who aren't finding life to be a bed of roses, as well. Not to mention her exceptional capacity to find compassion and understanding in her heart. She's not a martyr, but she's special.
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You make very honest observations. For people to place everyone who lives in these areas and listens to rap in the ‘ghetto fabulous’ living category is where the word prejudice gets its negative connotation.
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Where the word prejudice gets its negative connotation? As in it has a positive connotation? I think something went over my head here, lol.
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However, when having a discussion, it’s easier to lump people together based on the majority of what one sees. I do have some students who want to succeed, as I said in the OP about 10. They want to be lawyers, doctors, or teachers. They are over-achievers strive for A’s and are the gems of my day in the rather bleak times. However, the value system for the majority is that education is unvalued. Whether that is coming from rap, the ghetto, race, or socio-economic status I can’t say for sure. I know that they hear it on the radio and on television and that they don’t have many positive role models to rebut those thoughts. Yet, I know from my research that the different socio-economic classes have completely different value systems. We all have the same needs, but they are ranked differently based on your background.
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Well, I just have one thing to offer to this, that might lend a little more depth to your observation - which I think is largely true. My sister spent three years teaching high school English and Creative Writing. Two years at a private Jewish school in Ft. Lauderdale and a year at the "best" public high school in Orlando. The latter position included teaching an Honors English class. She quit after three years expressing extreme dismay at the attitude of the, mostly white, mostly upper middle to upper class, students about the value of education and their ability to interpret and critique even the most basic literary allegory. They were disrespectful and unmoved by her passion for writing and literature. Like you, there were only a handful of students that she felt like she touched. What were most of them concerned with? Clothing, music, images, lifestyles, material possessions, being cool, being tough. What did most of them want to be when they "grew up"? In anything that made them a lot of money. So what are the differences really, between the kids that you see everyday, shesus, and these kids that my sister saw everyday? Environment and opportunity, as far as I can tell. The white kids want to get MBAs or MDs. The black kids want to deal drugs or be rappers.
This is not a phenomena distinct to poor black students. It is an American phenomena that is, yes, most pronounced in our poorest neighborhoods but is also affecting even the most advantaged of our kids.
I think we need to be really careful when we're talking about this issue because, really, it comes down to whether you think the ghettos are that way because of socio-economic imbalances or because the people living in them are black.
I want to address the rest of your post when I can, but I don't have the time right now.
I want to thank you again for starting this thread. I've had these ideas rolling around in my head for some time now and it's good to get them out and try to make sense of them.