OK, so this myth about black boys don’t read because literacy skills are considered “white,” it just has to go away…
And yet, you see it here and elsewhere. Black boys don’t read, in many instances, because elementary school teachers don’t know how to teach them to read. It’s not all due to “The Wire” hood stuff. And when teachers can’t teach them, they end up referring them to special education — couldn’t be our teaching competence, right?
OK, it might help if Arne and Barack moved away from the bb metaphors…I get the point…but bottom line, that’s not really the point.
When boys don’t read, they act out to avoid the classroom embarrassment. And then they get suspended. And then they get expelled. And then they end up in jail … all of which leads to those bogus figures about states being able to predict their prison populations by third grade reading scores.
Allow me to summarize: That kind of of reverse engineering of data may seem perfectly logical, but there’s no ‘there there’. This whole thing about “acting white” reminds me of the video games theory: Boys don’t learn to read because the power of World of Warcraft sucks away their academic interests. Parents, your boys got lost in school because teachers failed to engage them. Then they turned to World of Warcraft.
Your black boys aren’t reading because of the “acting white” conventional wisdom; they’re not reading because your neighborhood educators — and you — never engaged them.
Tags: black boys
August 3rd, 2009 at 7:19 am
Virtually all of the elementary teachers are women. That they are not succeeding at teaching young black boys (and boys in general) to read at satisfactory levels reminds me of Captain Renault’s line from Casablanca, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” (He is then asked by the croupier if he wants his winnings.)
August 12th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Go ahead and blame the teachers. Reading, for the vast majority of people is a natural organic process that comes easily if it is modeled. Very few people have actual “reading disabilities.”
The reason why so many poor kids these days(it has little to do with race, and more with socioeconomic/cultural factors) now have trouble learning to read is because they spend the first 5 years of their life rotting in front of a television. Reading is a process where a person must actively construct meaning and imagery. This is strongly attached to a person’s ability to verbalize something, which is practiced in communication with other people. Children need to spend their formative years interacting with adults and children, and engaging in imaginative play.
I challenge you to find one kid who can’t read whose parent read to them as a child. Aside from kids with severe disabilities, you won’t find one.
Talk to any Kindergarten teacher someday about the range of students they get into the classroom the very first day. Some of those kids are already reading and writing because their parents taught them. Others are still in diapers and can barely speak because their parents never got around to potty training or teaching them to talk. Have teachers screwed up perfectly gifted kids and failed to properly help kids with disabilities. Absolutely. But the bulk of failure in learning to read falls on the shoulders of parents who don’t model literacy to their children, and on a bigger level, American culture itself which is increasingly abandoning the print based roots of civilization.
September 18th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
This is a completely inaccurate statement. If more students were taught to read at home, regardless of race, they would fair better in school. The teachers sex does not determine the childs level of learning, understanding or comprehension, which most boys would know because they typically adore their female teachers over the male ones.