How "Bird" helped me find my wings

I was watching the movie "Bird" yesterday, supposedly for my son...but he never came into the living room to watch with me. I'm not mad...he played the melody to blue monk yesterday and put a hurting on it. So, he practiced and he secretly loves the music. How can he help himself? I was pondering my current situation and how smothered I was feeling as a science educator. I am exactly where I need to be, and I would love to take a crack at the other two schools, especially the detention enter. But I am so constrained in what I can do. I am forcing myself how to learn to COEXIST. I have to try to touch the spirits of the other teachers and aids. I have to let them in to my mind and spirit if we are going to truly be of any good use to these young people. And it is amazingly difficult. So many boundaries have to be crossed, so many egos have to be put aside, but I am so much more prepared than ever before for this work, and it shows. The problem is that the detention-center style of running our school is hard for me to swallow, and since this is a blog, I can't say anything else about that. I am not crazy, I am not getting too close to my students, I am historically, culturally, and socially aware. I think I am going to have to find a way to be outside and inside at the same time to be useful. Enter Charlie "Yardbird" Parker. Thankfully, I will not have to take any legal or illegal depressants to survive this phase of my life. But he said something that got me thinking. Something about figuring out how to extend the harmony and play outside and inside of it simultaneously. Something about it happening before Christmas and changing his life. There was this scene where he was experimenting with it and the drummer threw a cymbal at him and gonged him off the stage. I can see clearly what needs to be done. Our system of education was designed to function like a machine, where youth proceed from one place to the next in an orderly fashion. In the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing. But what happens when the world outside of that institution does not function that way at all? What foolishness propels us to believe that we can undo a lifetime of disorder by simply setting up an orderly structure. And even if we condition our youth to function within this system while they are with us, without addressing any of the chaos outside of the school building, what has been accomplished? Why do we replicate detention centers and prison structure instead of creating something else. Why can we signify on everything else and not this? Take the harmony, take the form, and play something entirely different. This is what we do so well that others can only learn from us or try to emulate. The classroom is too small, but the university is too far removed. Got to create a different space. And expect somebody to throw a cymbal at me and laugh in my face. I've already been asked if I'm feeling ok...chuckle. No, sir, I am not feeling ok. Not at all.

More thoughts on hostility

I have been considering doing some recordings of TB and I teaching a lesson together. I want to ask Gary and Dan if they see any displays of anger at BHS. In my current environment I often see students exhibiting outbursts of anger during teaching. I am thinking of AM and JP who simply do not want to be guided in any way - no, that is not true. I am trying to capture this clearly. AM does not take a liking to one on one instruction and becomes hostile if it is imposed upon him. Anything beyond copying things down seems to anger and frustrate him. He seems to demand freedom to roam about and experiment as he pleases. A very interesting case, indeed. I think I will use my live scribe to record some interactions with this student. The anger seems to be at the resistance toward having things explained. These are people that have apparently been in charge of most aspects of their lives and are resisting being guided or led. There is a need for tactile lessons. It would be interesting to see if a physics bases approach in which the student roams around performing experiments and asking questions as they arise would lead to a discursive exchange. And the question that interests me most is would there be a hostility towards being made to memorize and utilize certain unfamiliar vocabulary.

Anyhow, this hostility seems to stem from identity conflict. These new words , but more importantly the practice of insisting that they are used, seem to take on a very negative meaning for some. Now, in the case of KW, there is no hostility against whites or whiteness as he seems to be very attracted and curious about dating a white girl. He talk about his often. And yet in spite of his very high degree of mathematical and logical abilities, he resists using scientific terminology. He often became hostile, but that was not a reaction to talking about science. His anger stemmed from any number of outside forces, mostly gang affiliated issues, and other social problems with other students. And the resistance to using the scientific terms most likely would have been overcome with time, because KW seemed to embrace the science. What I have learned more clearly than ever before is that race and cultural sensitivity matter a great deal to many students. They have an internal radar that immediately seems to search for recognition of what is familiar to them, upon finding it, they slowly - even if enshrouded in a cacophony of swear words and hostile sentiments - will come around and start talking science with you, and can be persuaded over time to use scientific terminology.

Genocide and my new teaching assignment

It is most important for me now to flesh out how everything comes together with my "new lens." I have been given the task of developing a power point in which I describe the necessity of using cultural genocide as a lens and how it connects with my research. Why is this lens even necessary. I wanted to get these ideas out before I lost them. I would not have seen this clearly had I not began working at ECA.

Mr. Botch (math) and I (science) experience a great deal of hostility. I find that overall the students like being active in science, but they become hostile at times when forced to adapt their language. I experience less hostility because I am an Afro-American female, of this I can be certain. Botch sees this. Although I suspect that the kids resentment toward his whiteness is a smaller issue than his cultural disconnect from them. But that must be handled at a later date. Right now my challenge is to put in writing the anger and how it plays out in the classroom. I'll speak of KW who was more mathematically talented than the rest although much more psychologically and emotionally challenged. KW would often use curse words to replace the science vocabulary. This was a passive aggressive way of rejecting the cultural aspect of chemistry that did not match his and that he saw as unnecessary. I saw this with other students as well. Yesterday was a wonderful example. My freshman students were outraged because I refused to finish playing a movie that I had begun. After establishing that I was choosing the curriculum and lesson plans, and sometimes they would just have to accept my decisions although I am often open to their suggestions. They retaliated by saying they would refuse to learn that day. I of course ignored them and began by discussion about evolution and sought to present two new words to them - genotype and phenotype. Again, there was some buy-in from students who were willing to explain the meaning of the terms to me, but extreme resistance to actually speaking the terms with two exceptions. HJ who said he was too high from the night before to really concentrate, but was still trying to hang in there. Also another new student DA who said he had heard these terms before, but was still resistant towards attempting to describe their meanings.

So I have to think about why words alone would create resistance and hostility. Why did FM storm out of the room when I said that birds struggle to survive in their environment, and have a harder time making it than he does? Why replace vocabulary with curse words? The most important question for me is why is it important to look at this through the lens of cultural genocide? How does it help us to view things differently?

I realize that this environment draws things out that other would not. Here, students have been cast out of their regular schools. Rejected because they didn't have what it takes or were so out of control behaviorally that they needed a special environment to get through school. Like a prison, or detention center, which many of them rotate into and out of, they seek to establish pecking order of toughness. Even within the classroom, using big scientific words for many of them is completely unnecessary and does not represent who they see themselves as. No amount of posters and discussions about Afro-American scientists and mathematicians seems to be able to change that. Those people are not from "my hood" and do not understand "my reality" is the common sentiment. So, it really does boil down to presenting enough examples of people from the reality that they are most familiar with who do embrace these strange new words and most importantly - seem to be economically prosperous as a result.

So back to the subject at hand, being cultural genocide. These very intelligent young people know that they have not been exposed to scientific thinking and language that is being imposed upon them. They also know that they can communicate the information without using those words, although not in such a way that other studying the same thing might be open to or can even understand, unless they wanted to really work at understanding. Which gets at the crux of the necessity for the cultural genocide lens. Victims of genocide, when deprived and cut off from the majority, create their own language and cultural norms. And in the words of Lemkin, what is lost (in terms of their ancestral language and norms) is lost forever. From my perception the hostility arises from being failed over and over because of the refusal to engage in certain cultural aspects of science, although the propensity to do science and understand science and even communicate science is fully intact. With the lens of cultural genocide, we can at least begin to look towards viewing the rejection and hostility and part of an age-old process. Since we know and accept genocide as an unfortunate and timeless occurrence, and we can see the same sorts of anger, hostility, and resentment in other victims of genocide, we can look towards Afro-American male students in a completely different way. Not as a social ill, or some sort of stigma to be erased, or unidentifiable problem to be solved. But as victims as a process that has been well charted throughout history, and the very same reactions we see amongst Afro-American males can be seen amongst other groups who have been victims of genocide. Now on to explaining how cultural genocide acts to create this deep anger and resentment. In a nutshell, the victims are cut off from society and their ancestral ties. As they become more and more disenfranchised they find it increasingly difficult to acquire the language and cultural norms necessary to support themselves economically. Over time, when the understanding that they will not be permitted to participate in the larger society because they are ill equipped to so do, genocidal victims turn to illegal activities and substance abuse. There is a historical basis to the use of ensuring that drugs and alcohol are readily available to the victims of genocide, and gambling, etc. are prominent. So according to genocide scholarship, there is a pattern amongst victims of genocide in which they essentially lose the will to live. As a matter of fact, they lose respect and reverence for life in general. All that matters is the immediate survival and struggle to attain as much materially as possible for the present.

Now with his lens, the replacement of science terms with curse words means something different. On a personal note, it does not mean that the teacher does not encourage the use of the proper terms. However, it does mean that in the absence of connecting those terms with something that is immediately meaningful for disenfranchised students, they cannot be expected to embrace them. Which is why the project based learning model is exciting when tied with community activism, jobs, and internships. But the practical message is - teach the science first and let students experience the success and exhilaration of achievement first - curse words, inappropriate behavior and all. If they can predict the products of a reaction and balance the chemical equations - but they are using curse words to explain what is going on, who cares? After they've nailed it - they will come around to using the proper terms.