Adultified

Two representations of black masculinity are widespread in society and school today…as a criminal and as an endangered species(320). They are seen as mirror images, either way they are responsible for their fate(323). This is a harsh depiction of boys just wanting to be boys. Unfortunately for black boys, the color of their skin necessitates that their actions be seen as actions of deviant adults by a lens that is and has been altered by affluent whites for centuries.
The status quo won’t change anytime soon, what can change is the way that we treat students, regardless of their race, gender, or socio-economic status. As teachers we owe it to the children, as well as their parents and local community to be as fair as possible when dealing with discipline issues. Over the last few weeks we’ve witnessed numerous presentations that highlighted good techniques, based on a number of studies, to deal with children. We could research what psychologists and sociologists have said over the years on the topic of student-teacher relationships, but in the end I think I’ll just treat everybody as I would like to have been treated as a middle schooler.
The golden rule is more important to me than what these studies could ever recommend. I was once a student and I think I can translate that knowledge into molding the minds and attitudes of children at that very tumultuous time of their life. No two kids aren’t the same, but we do need to see them through the same unbiased lens.

The Peoples Among Who We Live

Adolescents live in a world that attempts to restrict their essence as much as possible (247), especially if they are of color. In this “social jungle” there’s no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity(253). Referring specifically to American teens, it has been argued that industrial democracy poses special restrictions in that it insists on self-made identities ready to grasp the perceived pervasive opportunity and ready to adjust to the changing necessities of life(255). Change itself can be a shock to the system of adolescents since it can break up the inner consistency of their hierarchy of expectations (257).
Minorities experience the psychosocial formation of identity(261) in a quite distinct manner than their white counterparts. For example, it has been inculcated into some African Americans that doing well in school is equated with “selling out” or becoming non-black(259). Although Janie Victoria Ward claims that African American females have two strikes to their being(268), I disagree with her. I think that minority men are the ones born with 2 strikes. Minority women can be discriminated for their color and possibly for their sexual practices, but they are not direct competitors of the elite white males. Minority male teens compete with white male teens in the academic, athletic, and social milieus.
From Enora R. Brown we gain an understanding of just how different the scholastic environments of these competitors can be. For poor minorities a JROTC and vocational curricula are the norm. Affluent white teens can expect the best in college and business-prep curricula. The militarization and privatization of the poor minorities’ schools are a way to continue the current social order, in which rich whites have the most to gain(277). Brown concludes with some suggestions to challenge the current educational inequities.

Teachers vs. Parents

Most people find it imperative that parents become involved with their child’s education, but can they go overboard at times? The short answer is yes. “Parent empowerment is deemed to introduce uncertainty into teacher’s work and to raise questions concerning their control over their professional discretion”.
“With their different concerns for the children, teachers and parents have often been described as enemies, rivaling over what is best for the children’s education”. If a parent sees something that they don’t like being taught to their children, they are apt to complain to the teacher. The teacher might then get upset because its authority in school is being challenged. Who is right, who is wrong?
I say that the teacher should be the main voice in a student’s schooling. The parent should provide moral support to the child, but maybe less involvement by parents is better. Teachers are trained in providing scholastic aid. If parents find fault in a teacher’s lesson, then they should do their best to come up with a suitable alternative. If in fact a fitting alternative is proposed, then, unless the teacher makes one hell of an argument that states why the lesson is detrimental to a student’s well-being. I may seem to be contradicting myself, having said that the teacher is in charge of the schoolroom, but a student deals with family more than teachers in a lifetime. Teachers should understand this and make a wholehearted effort to not discard parental involvement.

Hornbeck's self-esteem

I continue to be amazed by what some people will say when they are pushing a social agenda. When David W. Hornbeck, chair of the Task Force on Education of Young Adolescents, envisages the ideal 15 year old having a self-image of competence and strength. This isn’t too shocking for me. What is is his next statement: “This self-image will be based on the fact that the youth will be at least very good at something, because success is critical to a positive self-image.”
Hornbeck’s statement is one of the vilest things I have ever heard. I realize that kids should be given every opportunity to succeed, but success is not all there is to life. Teachers have the task of embedding virtues and values to students, not pushing them to be the best. Hornbeck must have a great self-image since he succeeded in producing one hell of a fallacy.
If Hornbeck’s words had any worth then almost nobody would participate in competition. Why would they? If they don’t think they’re very good, then there’s no use in even trying. If only very good people participate there will be further reduction in participation because only the truly gifted will be successful in such competitions. In terms of their future, Hornbeck is not inspiring teens, he is killing their spirit.

Warped Nation

Today, official and media distortions, particularly about teen sex and violence, are one and the same. Startling is the case of teenage mothers that more than 70% of the time are impregnated by males 20 years or older. It’s a shame that the “hyper sexed teen” image is made public while obscuring the statutory rape portion of the equation. The media has done a good job of leading the public astray, so as not to highlight a large blemish in the American façade. In this land most news consumers are adults, and kids can’t vote.

The teenage time bomb hypothesis is cast aside by Mike Males, but James Alan Fox’s view of teenagers as temporary sociopaths-impulsive and immature isn’t that far off the mark. “If teens have easy access to guns and drugs they can be extremely dangerous.” Though Columbine and other school-site shootings proved that there are killer kids, that wasn’t the entire point Fox was making. The ability of almost anybody to easily acquire guns and drugs makes them extremely dangerous. The proliferation of guns isn’t just a liberal explanation for violence, it makes common sense that if guns are easy to come by and if other serious problems, like poverty or drug addiction, inflict a person they are potential time bombs.

Man, chapter 8 was disturbing. Sure the title, Nymphet Fantasies, gets the creepy ball rolling but I never thought it was going to be some upright about a so-called subculture phenomenon. The article gives monetary figures that prove that child beauty pageants are truly an entire cultural concern. To have corporations sponsoring what a former stage mother was repulsed by is disconcerting. How parents of these kids justify their participation is perhaps the worst since it lends credence that we are a culture that want to be successful at all costs, even exploiting our children.

(P. 27)“Puberty itself is a key developmental challenge for adolescents. They must accommodate to the physical changes in a cultural milieu that, for girls, values the prepubertal over the mature female body.” I don’t know where Brooks-Gunn and O.Reiter got this tidbit but I find it quite upsetting. Just what cultural milieu are they talking about? Are middle school girls really being reproached for growing up from their “cutie pie” old selves? If this is true, I can’t see how all adolescent girls aren’t emotionally crushed after the onset of puberty. Is this the ‘Daddy’s little girl’ factor?
I am glad that the authors state, on p.28, that: “We regret that we are able to say little about the pubertal experience of groups other than middle-class white youth”. It seems that research can’t often go beyond the “norm” to appease the most socially influential class in the United States. Although the rich have more real power, American society aims to please and work towards the embetterment of the white middle-class, since this has historically been the “heart” of our nation.
It’s very interesting that although the main proponent, G. Stanley Hall, of adolescent studies was writing as far back as the early 1900s, it wouldn’t be until the 1980s that the topic came to its own. The authors cite reasons why this is so. These reasons are basically the uncomfortable and ambivalent stance adults take on the subject. Adults therefore wish to think of adolescence as a social construct and not a physiological phase so as to not have reason to do further research on the topic.

Intro. and Kumashiro

The Critical Middle School Reader’s introduction is preparation for articles or excerpts that address the questions of whose knowledge is this and whose interests does this serve? Quoting Brown, “In a search for a quick fix and maintenance of the status quo, traditional approaches avoid, ignore, or explain away the role of society and its structures of power in emergent social ills, while more comfortably placing the blame on the individual child or family as the source of educational failure or other social problems. These approaches encourage students not to question but to accommodate to the world as it is.”
It’s apparent that these collected works will attack the “normal child” (white, middle class, and preferably male) emphasis in middle school thought. Brown and Saltman aim to be comprehensive in their support of a more critical approach to middle school education, but due to space limitations there were choices made about the topical content of the book as well as reluctant omissions.
Thankfully one of those omissions was Kumashiro’s “Toward a Theory of Anti-Oppressive Education”. Although I find his definition of oppression-a situation or dynamic in which certain ways of being are privileged in society while others are marginalized- quite useful, the rest of the article I found to be a waste of time. My main objection to the article is Kumashiro’s negativity. He presents four ways to conceptualize and work against oppression only to highlight the futility of such endeavors.
Kumashiro’s words seem more foolhardy than those he attacks. He argues that “teaching involves a great deal of unknowability” merely as a way to acknowledge that he has no better idea on how to deal with “Others”. When he says that the goal is not final knowledge, but desire for more change I can’t help but imagine an anarchist hell-bent on writing articles that in essence state the obvious, no curriculum can appease all students. He seems to think that his skit about stereotypes was a grand success, even though he offended a student of his (probably one of the Others in his class). He ends the article by applauding the efforts of educators who have tried to address the Others issue, but really spent the entire article second-guessing their efforts.