Enthusiastic Reader > Recent Status Updates

p 79 - "The audacity to stand up and be heard in the face of fierce patriarchy and racial oppression is not always celebrated; instead, adults with authority have misinterpreted it as being angry and combative." Note that anger, as an emotion, is a perfectly legitimate response to oppression anyway!

p 78 - "Her mention of feeling 'low-key... halfway protected' by security in school because of the threat of physical violence was part of her inability to envision an alternative. For her, surveillance was a typical strategy used to provide safety in school, as opposed to building a collective culture that elevates safety through equity and respect."

p 65 - "Some [students] may have parents who taught them the mantra of having to work 'twice as hard to get half as far,' but for others, that burden is so fundamentally unequal that they refuse to play along. Instead, they find other ways to assert their dignity and to gain respect. Even if those ways get them in trouble."

p 63 - "Black children, who tend to display fewer 'conforming' behaviors in the classroom than their White counterparts, are often subjected to less support and more criticism by their teachers. Black girls feel this and intuit the differential treatment." But isn't the different treatment based on different actions? It seems unreasonable to respond the same way to different behaviors.

p 60 - "Because children co-create their learning environments – they either choose to abide by stated rules or work in ways to circumvent them, discreetly or overtly – they are active players in their own socialization, and in the socialization of teachers. Toss that dynamic in with interpretation and effective communication, and it means teaching is hard work. So is learning."

p 59 - "The suggestion that girls' tones must be mediated and their questions made less incisive in order to be tolerated in the classroom is both problematic and sexist." Mmm... the premise that boys' tones are NOT mediated and their questions are allowed to be abrasive is not supported in this text.

p 48 - "Structural inequalities (underfunded schools, fewer resources to support positive educational outcomes, less access to quality early education), past negative experiences, and their children's current experiences may negatively impact their confidence in their child's ability to be a high performer."

p 38 - "A Seattle study found that even a Black student who 'tries to please her teacher, tries to get good grades, and is willing to put up with things she doesn't like about school may not be rewarded (in terms of higher GPA in the same way her [white] classmate would be rewarded."

p 31 - "It should be no surprise that low-performing schools are also high-poverty schools that produce higher rates of dropout (as it is traditionally understood) and underperformance among its students, and high-performing schools are often low-poverty ones."

p 26 - "many schools are dominant structures, sustaining our society's racial and gender hierarchy."

p 22 - "Take, for example, Claudette Colvin. Nine months before Rosa Parks made a similar decision that would launch the Montgomery bus boycott, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin protested the segregation of Montgomery buses by refusing to give up her seat to a White passenger... she didn't fit the profile of a 'perfect' protester... She resisted with her body. And she was arrested."

p 19 - "As children are routinely told to 'speak only when spoken to' in many cultures, so too were those who occupied the STATUS of minors. To be a 'minority,' a colored person or a woman in this context was to bear the mark of subjugation and relative insignificance."

p 7 - "while de jure segregation may have ended in many ways with the Brown decision... it did not address the ways in which enduring xenophobia, tribalism, and the intersections between race and poverty would sustain de facto segregation – expanded residential racial isolation that by extension kept schools highly segregated."

p 2 - "One of the most persistent and salient traits among girls who have been labeled 'delinquent' is that they have failed to establish a meaningful and sustainable connection with schools."

Jason is amazingly dense.

Tara's mother did not want to be a midwife, but people are depending on her. She seems to gain confidence as she gains expertise.

He had seen honesty and good intent in Bob's face, but what he had felt was loneliness, distance, a great whistling emptiness between himself and the other boy."

1986. Great depiction of the privilege of ignorance.

(continued) his daddy said, "That man works like a n--r." "And my daddy is just as much a Christian as your daddy," Bob had finished. Mike remembered that, looking at Bob Gautier's white earnest pinched face, surrounded by the mangy fur of his handmedown snowsuit-hood, he had felt not anger but a terrible sadness that made him feel like crying. (continued)

"Bob had tried to explain to Mike that n--r could not be a bad word, because his father used it all the time. In fact, Bob told Mike earnestly, it was a good word. When a fighter on the Friday Night Fights took a bad beating and managed to stay on his feet, his daddy said, "His head is as hard as a n--r's," and when someone was really putting out at his work (which, for Mr. Gautier, was Star Beef in town)(continued)