Schooling and the power of perception

While in grad school, I was introduced to Ray Rist’s work on the association between children’s socioeconomic status and their educational performance. In one article, Rist (1970) described how a classroom teacher divided her pupils into three learning groups: The “quick learners,” as the teacher called them, were seated in the front row, while two groups of “slow learners” were seated in the back. When Rist examined these groupings, he discovered that the group of “quick learners” was made up of middle-class pupils, while the “slower” groups were made up of lower-class children. Economic status was a stronger predictor of student grouping than any assessment. Rist deduced from his statistics that by the eighth day of kindergarten, each child was assigned a label that set them on a path that might have long-term consequences, entirely due to the unconscious biases of the teacher. In this case, the bias was based on class, but biases having to do with race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or even language could just as easily influence the path students are placed on, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: Low expectations lead to fewer learning opportunities, which lead to poor outcomes. So, here is the million-dollar question: How many teachers allow their biases to determine students’ scholastic achievement?

I think about this a lot when it comes to my upbringing. When I share my story, most people cannot believe that I was able to work as a civil/mechanical engineer for seven years and later as an educator. During my time as a K-12 student, those careers were not presented as options for me. As a young child, I was hyperactive and had a difficult time adhering to classroom rules that encouraged conformity to Eurocentric standards of sitting still and learning quietly, versus my cultural norms of learning through movement (Kunjufu, 2010). Educators focused more on my behavior than on my academic abilities. And when they did look at my academic work, they focused on how I did it, not whether I did it well. For example, when I was given a multiplication problem like 37 × 16, I would double the 37 and half the 16 and turn it into 74 × 8, then into 148 × 4, and then 296 × 2. This was much easier to multiply, and it led to the correct answer: 592. Teachers did not like it when I did that sort of thing, however. I learned early on that autodidacts are not welcome in school. Fortunately, I believed in myself.

According to the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (1946), “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.” When a drug epidemic engulfed my community in the late 1980s, I was traumatized, watching my mother, my uncles, my brothers, and my friends’ mothers struggle with this new, merciless, and unforgiving thing called “crack.” My teachers did nothing to help me understand my suffering, but eventually, I found my way to make sense of things. As Tupac Shakur (1995) put it in his undying song, “Dear Momma,” “I hung around with the thugs, And even though they sold drugs, They showed a young brother love.” Plus, as I spent time with my homies, hanging out, and watching movies like Menace II Society, I taught myself a lot about mathematical conversions. For example, marijuana was measured in pounds, and cocaine was measured in kilos. It didn’t take me long to figure out the relationship between these two different systems of measurement. Mr. Hodgson, my science teacher, was shocked by how quickly I could convert grams into ounces into pounds. Living in a crack house had some educational benefits.