Week 4 Quotes

"In some schools, the principals and teachers tell me that the tests themselves and preparation for the tests control more than a quarter of the year." (Kozol 113)

Kozol went on to describe the afterschool test preparations, weekend test preparation sessions, and other huge time investments in preparing students to test. Having been in schools when testing takes place, I am sad to say I'm not surprised by the sheer amount of time Kozol described as having been dedicated to these tests. I can only speak to the testing in a suburban school system (Meriden has an odd population dynamic, but I'd ultimately say it leans toward a more suburban school as Kozol would define them). Even there, testing takes place over six times in one school year: five iterations of the Meriden District Assessment with the CAPT fit in there as well. This is not counting the prep time and lessons directed toward testing. What testing like this does ultimately is create a very stressful environment for teachers, students, and administration. There's a general unease and tension that is always present, but it builds during actual testing. Ultimately, teachers end up treating testing days as wasted time in terms of lessons. Though students do have regular schedules after testing sessions, they are often too burned out to focus on any serious content, and who can blame them?

"A fundamental aspect of multicultural education is that different students have different ways of knowing and seeing the world." (Spring 118, 14th ed.)

I had to seize on this quote, despite being one of the first sentences of the chapter, because it links so directly to a point I was making last week. Previously, I had mentioned that I thought a more integrated approach to bilingual education would be beneficial. What I failed to elaborate on is the cultural component that is touched upon here by Spring. Anyone who has studied a second language knows that direct translation word-for-word is not always possible. This is because language has a strong cultural component linked to it that reflects how members of that culture see the world. In ESL programs, the focus is too often on learning words. The cultural component and the understanding of ideas is what really matters. As an example, I took German in college and would often answer "Nicht schlect" when asked how I was doing. That translates to "Not bad," a phrase used often by Americans to describe when things are going fine. On a trip to Germany, a woman kindly explained to me that in German it has a negative connotation - in other words, "Not bad, but not good." Good multicultural education would pick up on cultural connotations and get students to understand different cultural viewpoints. I was very pleased to see that Spring went on to touch upon this key component of multicultural education.

"Leaders of the multicultural education movement... are concerned with empowering oppressed people by integrating the history and culture of dominated groups into public school curricula and textbooks." (Spring 125, 14th ed.)

I think it's important to note that empowering other cultures is an excellent tool, but it can easily be implemented the wrong way. It is particularly counterproductive when it becomes clear that the dominant culture (White) is the culture attempting to spearhead the empowerment of other cultures, as it shows a clear lack of understanding. Two cases come to mind. When I grew up, I noticed very early that many American history books, in talking about the Boston Massacre, mention that one of those killed was Crispus Attucks, a black man. The mention ended with that. This point was made in every teaching of the Boston Massacre. I always wondered, aside from being black, what made this man's story important. The books never mentioned why he was singled out, but they pointed him out as if to meet some quota of mentioning African Americans. The second is the general idea of Black History Month. The notion that black history should be particularly emphasized in just one month is absurd. All too often, black history is relegated to this month alone, and the well-intentioned idea behind this month becomes counterproductive. Luckily, empowerment is changing. Assisting in several social studies classes while subbing, I got to experience units involving history of various Asian cultures. In one class, an entire unit focused on just India. By contrast, my own world history schooling always avoided Asia, as there was no time to study it. Things are changing for the better, but in a white dominated society, it still needs to progress a long way.