Blog Post of Old Fashion

With my practice, I’m left not quite satisfied with where my presentation is. It’s alright, acceptable, decent, but I feel like I could be doing more to be extraordinary, captivating, enlightening. With that, I’m not sure what direction to take. Doing my presentation without slides feels too much like I’m talking at my audience, but using the slides I have makes me feel too much like a teacher. I kind of want to bulldoze what I have right now, but I don’t know what I want to build in its wake. At the same time, I feel like something I’m doing has to be going decently though. Presentation has left me feeling a little more confused and a little less confident that I had hoped. It’s probably just my fear of torturing a captive audience for ten consecutive minutes screaming at me. I feel like my slides are boring and that I’m playing it way too safe. I want to shake it up a little so my audience doesn’t drop dead on me, but right now I feel like the edgiest thing I could bring myself to do is wink mid-presentation. I need some pizzaz somewhere… now to find it…

Despite all of that, I’m pretty happy with my presentation skills. The eyes on me don’t really make me very nervous, and I’d be lying if I said I had a problem with being the center of attention.  The real issue is what’s going on in the slideshow behind me.

TED Responses

I viewed Omar’s TED talk from Michelle Obama and Haley’s from the Minimalists.

TED talks are formulaic. They start off with a relatable story, inject a little bit of humor, give a direct, powerful message, call their viewers into action, and then thank their audience for listening. These presenters are careful to use thoughtful, non-distracting hand motions, but they generally are very still. They use few filler words and speak directly to the audience in a conversational tone. The slides accompanying them contain few words and display main ideas or important points rather than the entirety of the presenter’s spiel. It is obvious that they have practiced their speeches and have carefully crafted their presentations.

I particularly enjoyed the speech from the Minimalists. I follow their blog and have started a minimalist journey of my own, so I was happy to see their work as one of my options. It was interesting to see them use humor to lighten the heavy subject of the death of a parent, and they did a great job of not becoming too emotional or appearing robotic. Their message about getting rid of clutter that we no longer need is powerful. I like Marie Kondo’s philosophy which instructs people to rid themselves of things that they own which do not “spark joy.” As I sifted through the smelly lotions and ugly hairpins on my bathroom counter, this idea of “sparking joy” allowed me to finally part with my leopard-print rhinestoned headband without guilt. Minimalism is an awesome counter culture to consumerism, and I hope that I can continue on my journey into simplicity.

So How Bad is It?

African Americans lag behind other races in educational achievement. The disturbing fact means that more black men will end up incarcerated than with a bachelor’s degree. It means that black boys will make up 18% of children in public schools but account for 2/3 of those suspended. It means that black boys will be 2.5 times more likely than others to be put in special education programs.

African American academic underachievement directly supports the school-to-prison pipeline. Students who feel that they do not do well in school will be more inclined to act out of frustration. They will then be disciplined harshly for their acting out and may fall into an endless cycle of disciplinary issues. Instead of perfecting a craft or working in an office after graduation, 33% of black men will graduate into the US prison system. This issue could be curtailed if black students are encouraged to succeed at a younger age and given the compassion that they desperately need. While there are institutional factors at play, a toxic culture of hopelessness will only serve to confirm the fate of many black youths.

Reviving the Concept of “Acting White”

This blog post is a response to this article by John McWhorter, author of Losing the Race: The Story of Self-Sabotage in Black America. In short, it states that the issue of “acting white” is still pressing and claims that it has been debunked are based off of deeply flawed studies.

There is question as to whether or not “acting white” is a real phenomenon has sparked debate between many American sociologists. The most prominent study which supports this idea, written by Drs. Fordham and Ogbu, has been endlessly criticized and debunked and supported and revived. Most of the studies claiming to debunk the idea that “acting white” is a real issue have one flaw in common: they ask students directly whether or not they value education or feel that they are popular or something of the like. The most obvious issue with this form of data collection is that students are likely to paint themselves in a positive light, skewing results considerably.

When student popularity was gauged based off of cross-references on lists of friends, Roland Freyer found a different conclusion. He discovered that after a certain point, GPA inversely correlated with popularity with both black and Hispanic students. White students’ GPAs correlated positively with their popularity. While no one study is definitive, especially in sociology, this indicates that there is work to be done to replicate or refute the results of this alternate form of popularity measurement. Meanwhile, sociologists should not completely dismiss the idea that “acting white” is an issue that negatively affects black students.

Personality Types

Connectors are people who have large numbers of casual relationships that they maintain throughout their lifetimes. They have a natural interest in keeping up with others and find  value in small relationships. This archetype seems interesting, but I don’t particularly identify with it. I wish I were better at keeping up with old friends and reconnecting with lost relationships, but I admit to not being as actively social as I would like. I could probably dust off my old notebooks and see if any of the people I knew from my old cities are still around or at least stop neglecting some of my relationships here, but I don’t think I would find much joy in doing so.

Mavens resonate with me. They spend most of their time hoarding data. I enjoy learning about things that I find interesting, and I do like to add to a wealth of knowledge. Although this suggests that I am a bit less social than I actually am, I think that this is probably a fairly accurate picture of who I am right now. Even though I enjoy my hidey holes and old books, it probably would be a good idea to reach out more often to other people and share the interesting things that I have found.

Salesmen are what I would like to be. I want to be persuasive and able to present my ideas in a way that makes people reconsider their own. While I think that I have the basics, I want to hone my skills of changing people’s minds. This skill is probably ultimately very selfish, but it would be cool to try it out. This would be an almost parasitic way to share information, manipulating data to make it support your ideas and infecting others. That’s probably an overly harsh way of putting it, but in my experience, highly persuasive and slimy are a package deal.

Small Group Teaching

Small groups allow students to learn in an environment that is catered to them. They are free of fear of falling behind and have the opportunity to receive individualized instruction. This 2001 article claims that teaching children at risk of reading difficulties in small groups can help them avoid becoming deficient in the subject. This type of tutoring would be interesting to observe in tutoring groups, taking 3-4 children at a time to focus on reading, math and other subjects. Surprisingly, the article does not find marked differences in performance between children taught individually compared to those in small groups. This suggests that small tutoring groups may be a viable option to help students at risk of falling behind.

To apply this to a tutoring session, a tutoring organization could ask schools to identify students at risk of falling behind based on certain risk factors and teacher evaluations. These children would be involved in an after-school tutoring program working with students in small groups. While this would allow a group to work with fewer staff members/volunteers, there is a concern that a student would not ask a question out of fear of embarrassment, especially as they grow older and more aware of the opinions of their peers. This idea of using small groups seems interesting, but the concern about students not asking for the help they need is a major issue.

Vision Declaration

My vision project is a Prezi that describes my goals. In the interest of avoiding redundancy, I will elaborate on my hopes and fears for this project. I want to be able to prompt people to think about a topic that is important to me. Educators, students, and people whom I share my project with will hopefully leave with some food for thought. Black students in particular who feel influenced by the anti-education shift should feel empowered and consider the idea that maybe there is another way. I want everyone to feel like we are one step closer to reducing and perhaps eliminating the problem of black underachievement.

I am worried about the reception of my thesis. I don’t want to be inflammatory, but people generally react poorly when others say that they’re doing something incorrectly, even when the message is as sugar-coated as possible. I don’t plan on calling everyone terrible people and proclaiming an affront to African American culture, but I would be foolish to think that no one will react as if I have. There will be endless revision and reworking, but somebody, somewhere is going to be really offended by what I have to say. Most people’s problem with my thesis is on principle. I am criticizing black culture in an attempt to better the lives of black Americans. I want things to get better, but to do that, we have to face the uncomfortable truth that we’re not doing everything that we can to uplift black children. This can be presented in better or worse ways, but I understand that a lot of people are going to have a problem with it no matter how sensitively make my point.

For myself, I view this as an exercise in academic writing and formal argument on controversial issues. This topic is important to me and I want things to get better, but the immediate benefits for me come from the partnership program and thesis parts of my project. The partnership program will hopefully teach me how to reach out to others and join a community to solve or at least begin to work on a problem bigger than myself. I’ll also get the warm fuzzy feeling from doing something more meaningful than converting oxygen to carbon dioxide. I want to make a difference in my community or inspire others to do so, and that will be my goal for myself.

In my community, I would like to have a practical program ready for another entity to adopt. I realize that in 8 months, I will most likely not able to have the program running. Instead, I would like to pitch it to some student tutoring groups in this area that already do work in this field. This program will emphasize sensitivity to the mixed messages that black students often receive about education and focus on providing positive reinforcement for doing well in school. My picture of success with this would be if an organization decided to adopt my program or elements of it.

Catching Up in the Race

African American boys are disproportionately affected by the racial  discrepancy in test scores. Many ideas have floated around about how to fix the 4 point difference in ACT scores between black students and students of other races (17 vs. 21). One of these initiatives offers an interesting approach to this problem. 10 Black Boys started in Boston public schools to help struggling black and Hispanic boys improve their academic success. This program asks schools to choose at least ten black or Hispanic boys with borderline proficient standardized test scores to intensively tutor.This program aims to provide boys of color with the encouragement and support they need to achieve personal and academic success,” and has been implemented in many Boston schools.

Oddly, there is not much information about this program readily available. Programs like this may be helpful, but there is a lack of information about their efficacy. Maybe providing tutoring sessions and encouragement will help black students achieve academically, maybe they will prove to be a gargantuan waste of time and resources. What is true is that what we are doing now is not working, and viable solutions are unknown. They will remain unknown until educators and communities take action and use experimental techniques to improve black test scores. Until these programs are implemented and documented thoroughly, it will be nearly impossible to identify potential solutions to the black achievement deficit.

 

Honors Presis

I am probably desperately hoping that my presentation goes seamlessly. There will be some anxiety about power points that may or may not work, potential lighting or sound issues, and whether or not my setup looks okay. I’ll hope that I don’t make any PC blunders or casually completely forget what I’m talking about and where I’m going or make any other mistakes that will have the school chattering for the rest of the day. I will also hope that I engage my audience and not torture them for about 10 minutes. The way that my topic will be received will make me nervous as always, but that’s not new, and the fear dulls over time. I’ll also be excited to be done. I think that will be my strongest emotion: excitement.

LAUNCH 2017 Preflection

Hopefully after my LAUNCH presentation, I will feel good about what I’ve presented. I will feel some relief that most of the hard work is finally over, but I think there will be some regrets about it not being perfect. I’ll wish that it was longer or more polished or shorter or better, but I am generally proud of what I present. I doubt that there will be problems that anyone other than me would consider to be a big deal.

I don’t think that I have any fundamental regrets about my topic, but there will be some anxiety about how my peers will perceive something that I have been working on for a long time. I would hope that everyone will understand what I am trying to say, but I am fairly sure that someone somewhere is going to get really angry about it. This thought doesn’t completely terrify me, but no one wants to be the reason why someone was offended. I realize that there will be practice and revision and such to remedy some of the reaction, but I think that even with all the PC in the world, there will be three camps of people: those with passing interest, a completely unaffected majority, and maybe a few who will write a Tumblr hate blog about me later that night.