nexus of stuff in my mind

[flea]

1. I am reading Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father. Right now I'm in the section where he's learning to become a community organizer in Chicago.
2. I went to Casper's school last week.
3. The current iteration of RaceFail 2009.
4. I picked up a book called Other People's Children, by Lisa Delpit - based on a reference to it in a comment thread on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog discussing Black English (Coates' and Michael Steele's). It was first published in 1995 (there is an updated 2006 edition but our library's copy is lost) and contains essays mostly written in the late 1980s. The author is an African American woman (about my mother's age I think) who has been a teacher and a professor at teaching colleges. She won a MacArthur in 1990 and is generally hot shit, academically. Her main topic (I am only 1/3 of the way into it) is that many poor and/or minority children (she focusses on black inner city children and Native peoples in Alaska, since those are the populations she has worked with) have a fundamental cultural difference from the culture of school (which is shaped as a middle-class, largely white culture) and talks about how this results in communication gaps, well-meaning but wrong-headed application of teaching methods that assume the children are coming from white middle class cultures, and general fail. She also isn't afraid to talk about cultural power. It's a bit dated contextually (think late 80s, multiculturalism and diversity wars) but as the reviews on Amazon point out, still very relevant.

So, so, relevant to RaceFail 2009 - really basic lessons about culture clash, well-meaning and intelligent people not respecting other cultures *even when they think they are trying to*, and talking past each other.

So, so, relevant to my thoughts about Casper's school and some of the stereotyping I am doing and did in my post about her school, even though I was worrying about some of the exact same labeling *I myself was actually doing*.

It's so, so hard and complicated to deal with cultural diversity - respecting cultures that are not my own while at the same knowing that my culture is the culture of success in our society. I am 36 and have had diverse (but not diverse enough) life experiences and I am completely at sea in dealing with the issues of poor and minority families in my kids' school. I can't imagine being the 23 year old kindergarten teacher trying to suss this all out.

One thing I do know is, someone needs to get the black and latino parents involved in having ownership and a voice in the school. Right now the PTA is basically all white, and the teachers are 95% white, and they are pretty much all middle class. And that's not a great power dynamic. But how can we fix it? How could we possibly work together? Assuming one could get the minority parents to even join the PTA.

So, so hard.

Comments

[amy37.livejournal.com]

I noticed a difference in PTA dynamics when we moved up here. In PA, the meetings were daytime, with a nod to working parents in the form of an evening meeting once or twice a year. Which, you know, some people work at night, too, and don't necessarily want to jog over to school at the end of a long day. Meaning, most of the PTA was women who had the time to be at school all the time, i.e. women who didn't have to work.

Here, all of the PTA meetings are in the evening; the majority of parents work, and the PTA is still fairly active, if small. This school, for all its many and varied faults (mostly academic) manages to coordinate just as many functions for the kids as the school in PA did.

It's one of those realities. I clearly remember dealing with some push-back when I tried to explain to the PA PTA that I worked part-time in NY, but I would help when I could. Maybe push-back is the wrong word, but there was a sense that I was some exotic, not quite of-us creature -- not at home and doing the gym and the spa, but not a doctor or a lawyer or someone with a real "career" either.

[serrana.livejournal.com]

When we walked around the neighborhood elementary, the principal (after finding out that C. and I both work from home) went into her spiel about how of course they'd be seeing us in the classroom all the time.

Well no, I thought, the whole point of sending them to school is that I won't have to be standing over them all the time, isn't it?

...I don't know, I have a hard time thinking that it's reasonable to expect anyone to join a PTA, never mind people who have even bigger cultural hurdles than I do, because all the school-parents-group people I've ever met have been snooty and expected me to be able to give a lot of time to their pet projects ("You can sell wrapping paper!" "Okay, what's our margin?" "Two percent!" "What if I write you a check for $5 and spend the next month on something else?" "Oh, but we're all selling wrapping paper!" "You have fun with that, then.")

*shrug* Why we're homeschooling this year, reason number umpteen: my lifelong failure to cope with American school cultures.

[amy37.livejournal.com]

Exactly. And they get the kids all worked up with the contests to see who can sell the most candy, or the most wrapping paper, or whatever, which always drives me crazy. Like you said, why can't we just all donate $5 and be done with it?

I liked volunteering at the boys' school when it was academic stuff, and actually interacting with the kids -- reading with the kids, doing projects, going on a field trip. Sitting around with a bunch of moms who pulled up in their Escalades and tottered around on their Ferragamos, discussing the merits of a daddy/daughter dance and/or a mom/son sports night made me want to pull my hair out, strand by strand.

[serrana.livejournal.com]

Oh yes.

We have been agonizing again about whether we should put Herself in school this fall (this year she'd be in first grade, which is a full-day program and therefore might be worth the hassles), and we keep thinking, well, it would be great to get to know some more parents with kids our kids liked, but...honestly, just because people have kids the same age as mine doesn't mean we have something in common. (People with whom I have something in common who have kids the same age as mine, OTOH, I immediately feel like we have a lot to talk about!)

And if I feel this way...well, like I say, I can totally understand people who say, look, kid, you get on the bus and you go away for six hours of state-funded social time, and then you get back on the bus and come home, and that's it. Because the cultural gulf between me and most parents of small children is so broad as to feel completely daunting, and I'm a white middle-class woman who lives in the burbs.

[amy37.livejournal.com]

Because the cultural gulf between me and most parents of small children is so broad as to feel completely daunting, and I'm a white middle-class woman who lives in the burbs.

And this is why most of my friendships are online.

We've never really found parents of our kids' friends to be friendly with. Of course, coordinating the interests and schedules of four adults is a lot harder than just two. I managed to find a couple of other moms once in a while who were good for coffee or the occasional drink, but not much more.

Then again, I am historically *not* a joiner, or a group-activity type. My one week at sleepaway Girl Scout camp when I was 11 made me nearly suicidal.

[serrana.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid, I used to go, why can't my mom make friends with my friends' parents? Why don't I have people over more often?

The older I get, the more I understand. I really do. Even the people we do like, it's hard to see much of them. I've been trying to get a couple of Herself's friends together to go to the museum with us for her birthday this weekend, and...ack! Even that's completely uphill.

Yes, this thing where our friends live in the little box on the desk is really handy, isn't it? *GRIN*

But then, last month I tried to join a local homeschooling Yahoo group, thinking, oh, I can get to know people online and then I will feel more comfortable doing stuff with them IRL...and they require that you host an activity before they'll let you join the mailing list. Um. Well, I don't think that's going to happen.

[amy37.livejournal.com]

I'm grateful I've gotten to meet so many of the people in the box. Now if most of them could stop living across the country from me, I'd be all set.

I think part of my problem is I remember growing in the suburbs, in the 70s. Neighborhood schools, most moms home -- we all ran wild after school and in the summer, within this well-defined neighborhood where none of us had to cross a major, busy street. So our parents *knew* each other if they didn't socialize. And now, getting kids together for *play dates* (which is still such an alien concept to me) is a huge production.

Hosting an activity *before* they let you join is just crazy talk.

[mskat.livejournal.com]

I like that Lisa Delpit book quite a bit.I think that it made me as a teacher, really think about what it means and how I work. So I use more direct instruction, I'm more explicit about rules and how it works, I have no qualms about correction and explaining the intricacies of SAE and why people use and what people assume when one does not.

It's very thought provoking. As is a book called Con Respeto which totally helped me think differently about Latino students and expectations in the Latino community for what schools should do.

[fatoudust.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's not just PTA's, either, it's organizations like that in general. When my folks were coffee farming in Hawaii, they attended some local planning meetings. All the attendees were white first generation residents. So the voice of the aeons old Japanese coffee farms was lost. But you could hardly blame them, it was this bizarre (and ultimately ineffective) government structure being imposed on the land that had been there for generations. And yet, even those voices were ignored in favor of developers.

So there's reasons why people are rightfully wary of that type of organization. Not saying the PTA is the same thing, just that it's this external structure that may or may not make sense in the framework of the given community.