Home > Work > "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children
21 " The consensus of researchers and practitioners is that spending time reading, discussing, and writing about text in class allows students to become crucially literate. Too often teachers assign readings for homework, while at the same time complaining that low-performing students don’t do homework! "
― , "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children
22 " Others burn out quickly from carrying the weight of salvation that has been piled upon their young shoulders. Several young Teach for America recruits have told me that their colleagues frequently run back home or off to graduate school with the belief that the children they went to save are unsalvageable—not because of poor teaching but because of their students’ parents, families, or communities. "
23 " It is the quality of relationship that allows a teacher’s push for excellence. As I have previously written, many of our children of color don’t learn from a teacher, as much as for a teacher. They don’t want to disappoint a teacher who they feel believes in them. They may, especially if they are older, resist the teacher’s pushing initially, but they are disappointed if the teacher gives up, stops pushing. "
24 " Someone’s opinion of you does not have to become your reality. "
25 " Goethe said, ‘Look at a man the way that he is and he only becomes worse, but look at him as if he were what he could be, then he becomes what he should be. "
26 " When a teacher expresses genuine emotion and a belief in a child’s ability to do better, that is a message that many children are eager to hear, regardless of the medium. "
27 " Why do we punish our children with our inability to teach them? How can we live with the fact that in Miami—and I am certain in many other cities—ten-year-olds facing failure on the state-mandated FCAT test and being "left back" in third grade for the third time, have had to be restrained from committing suicide? "
28 " It is critical that we figure out the difference between culture and a response to oppression. Beating your wife is no one's culture. It is a response to a situation—in this case possibly the racism prevalent in Alaska against Native Alaskans and the minimal opportunities for Native Alaskan men to either maintain their traditional subsistence lifestyles or to find a place within the more recent cash economy. It is no more acceptable to condone such behavior than to blame poor academic performance on a "culture of poverty. "
29 " Successful teachers of children marginalized either by income-level or ethnicity—or both—have long understood that their charges not only need strong instruction in skills, but they need to know that it is skills, and not intelligence, that they lack. "
30 " To expend so much of a teacher’s energy on keeping track of "points" related to noninstructional tasks, and to prevent any kind of deep instruction about what is being studied, can lead only to the lowest level of academic development. This is the reason we never see these prepackaged "teacher-proofed" programs in affluent schools, only in schools serving low-income children and children of color. "