Greeting’s Everyone! I first have to say that the post Rant from a BlackYo Da! is a good article. Education is the key. America is already behind in Math and Science. We need to be competitive and it starts with parent’s getting involved. The story hit home for me because I don’t know where I would be without my parent’s involvement.
I barely made it out of high school and my undergraduate degree, but because I had parent’s involved in my life, I learned not to give up.
On another note, I need to thank Cedric McCay again. I discovered an education program going on in Johannesburg, South Africa. They are building future leaders. Please not that there is a donate button on the website. I am not recommending to donate or not. I simply saw that it appeared the school is doing positive things with a purpose.
Check out a preview by clicking the logo below:
In the event that you want to learn more, please check out the website by clicking here!
The success of the student isn’t predicated on whether or not the teacher believes in the student. That’s horse shit. Student success depends on parental involvement. I know the blue birds understand this. Now let me break it down for the buzzards: No child fails K – 3. It’s the parents who fail and must repeat the grade along with their children.
Let me break it down one mo’ again. Find any school. Find any parent who has a child in that school and volunteers at least 10 hours a month. Fuck it. 5 hours. That’s a little more than an hour a week. Maybe you come in twice a month and read to the kids, restock library books, patrol the hallways, whatever. From that list find the children who are failing. I’ll wait. Are you starting to get it? That’s it. That’s all you got to do. Be involved. And until that is our focus you can expect crop after crop of crap.
Ben Carson talked about his mother putting checks next to good points on his papers. She was functionally ILLITERATE! Do you see what she was doing for him? This cheating scandal and the subsequent commentary has me on a rant again. All this talk about the kids being hapless pawns, not getting the education they deserved, etc. I’m sure the lawsuits are in the works. These kids, for the most part, are getting the exact education they deserve. They are getting out of it what they and their parents put in to it. Check this out: I don’t even know half of you on my friend list, but I can tell from the things some of you post that you’re not the brightest bulbs. I can see this without even meeting you. But you have a kid that lives with you and you had no idea that your kid CAN’T READ! You have no idea your kid is in a gang. You have no idea your kid is an asshole at school. But I can talk to your kid for five minutes and have a good idea where they are in terms of grade level and, more importantly, in terms of attitude. And I know…yousa too stupid to undastand what dey is learning. ARE YOU READING THIS??!! Then you can do what was done for Ben Carson.
Maybe you can’t understand your son’s biology homework, but you can see if he’s bringing the work home, right? How about this? “Hey son, what are you studying right now? Chapter 11? Well then, tell me about it.” You don’t have to be an expert on mitosis just go to the chapter and ask him to define some key words. “Hey son, define prophase for me. I don’t think that’s right. I think you’re talking about a prophylactic. I was asking about the first phase of cell division.”
Do that periodically. If your kid shows himself to be a dumbass throughout the year, then how in the fuck do you think he passed a standardized test? Maybe he’s really a genius who smokes weed, gets suspended and got straight F’s because he wasn’t being challenged. That’s a possibility. Or maybe they just wanted to get rid of his ass without getting caught up in his vortex of failure you as a parent created for him since the day he or she was born. Maybe they were just hoping to make him someone else’s problem until s/he is old enough to become state property.
The educational system is like triage during the Civil War. Instead of gangrene, it has been shortened to gangs. Once they see the signs, they’re trying to saw that shit out and save the patient (the rest of the class). I get it. Teachers don’t want their livelihood to be dependent on some knucklehead (or several of them), who should be at the psych ward instead of their classroom. Teachers want to teach the content of their course, not their course and the two others that preceded it. No one is being honest about the problem and the root cause of it. Well, no one but me and a few other brave souls. For fuck’s sake, get a clue, people. I don’t even want to continue this anymore.
My name is Adrian. I will hopefully be sharing information on a weekly basis. I look forward to the positive discussion’s with each of you.
I am an African-American from Chicago. I have lived in several countries and I currently live in Cape Town, South Africa.
I want to briefly talk about an education resource that could be beneficial to everyone that I discovered on my trip to Kenya this past week.
First, in my opinion, education is a business. The goal is to find as many paying “students” as possible. This is done both in a structured environment and online. It can be expensive to go to school and find the resources for payment in some cases. This doesn’t include any other circumstances in everyday life. I have a love / hate relationship with the higher education structure system. I love to learn, but the tuition fees, books, and miscellaneous can be a challenge in regards to payments.
In the event that anyone is seeking to further education themselves without a tuition invoice or fee, then please check out Coursera.
“At Coursera, you can take courses from the top universities, for free”. In addition, the website has several courses in which you can receive a certificate. The only certificate that I have seen is a certification of completion that is given through the university of the course. Please remember that not all courses will provide a certificate of completion. I do not know at this moment if some of the courses provide a grade. You will have to check that out for yourself.
This documentary by Tony Harris takes an indepth look at the failure of the educational system, particularly for Black males and uses Baltimore’s inner city as the backdrop to address cartain issues. I found it rather fascinating that some of the issues he discusses are similar to the ones my wife and I contend with in Ottawa, Canada in regards to our 5 year old son. Although we reside in what could be describes as an upper middle class neighbourhood and our son attends a “good” school with dedicated teachers and abundant resources, we are forever cognizant and vigilant to the lower academic expectations and negative behaviour labeling that our “little Black boy” may be subconsciously or subtly subjected to by members of the school community.
However our son is excelling academically in school. He is enrolled in the senior kindergarden french immersion program. His success is due in large part to three factors. First, my wife and I take an active interest in his educational and athletic endeavours. We have made the commitment to take full responsibility for his education and not shift this responsibility to his teachers. We see them as a valuable resource in assisting us in his education and development. We have also enrolled him in piano lessons, which we find is a great tool not only in the development of his musical abilities, but also in his emotional progression as well as his logic and mathematical comprehension. Athletically, he takes swimming and ice skating lessons, plays organized soccer and T-ball.
Second, “we’re are constantly on his azz!” lol! He is fully aware and constantly reminded of our high expectations of his academic performance as well as his behaviour. He goes to school half day, so we have purchased academically based activity workbooks (math, science, phonics, vocabulary, reading comprehension and logic), as well as writing exercises which we do with him when he gets home. He has lunch, then has to do at least an hour of this work before he is allowed to watch televison or play with his toys. He reads to one of us every night (we don’t read to him) before bedtime. He is only allowed to play his Wii on the weekends, i.e. Friday and Saturday evenings, if he has performed and behaved to our expectations! Therefore playing video games for him is a privilege and not a right.
Third and most importantly, his parents are married to each other and we all live in the same household. We are both Black and professionally employed. Neither my wife nor I have children from previous marriages or relationships, so we can focus all our time, energy and resources on him and his sister. He is also expected to do his chores, which includes assisting us in taking care of his baby sister.
Is all this the formula for success for Black boys? We don’t know, we’re just doing the best we can with what God has blessed us with. So far it is working for us. It literally punched me in my gut and broke my heart when a mother in the documentary discusses what her realistic expectations are for her son: click 31:48 – 32:45. It really brings home the point that by the grace of God go we all!
“The difference that I’m noticing more now and it’s a perception which I’m sure can be debated but there is this extreme animus towards the various countries on the continent of Africa and their historical role in promoting the triangularity of the slave trade that culminated in a diaspora seriously adrift. We’ve encountered at times, a dismissive or condescending attitude towards American blacks by those who were born and reared in the various countries on the continent. This became painfully apparent when the dialogue about describing ourselves as ‘African-Americans’ became the topic on various blogs and if that is truly an accurate description. There seems to be a grace and forgiveness for those who provided a market (Europeans & western whites) for the selling and purchasing of human beings and also promoting one of the most virulent and devastating forms of slavery that the world has ever witnessed.”
Powerful commentary by Nigerian writer, poet, playwright and 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Wole Soyinka, on Africa’s role in the slave trade and it’s consequences. These are 2 must read articles posted in the online magazine theRoot:
When Liberia was my home, they called it sweet. Sweet was the word I remembered the most during the war. I was five and my father, two sisters and I fled Monrovia and headed north on foot amidst panicked masses of criers–a journey that ended in a small coastal village where we hid from flying bullets and remains of dead families left on the roads. Every dawn while in hiding, my sisters and I joined my father on a cement floor and covered the pages of his small journal with words, using the lead of pencils he carefully shaved down with stones. My favorite word to write was ‘sweet,’ one that had the power to numb the reality of our 6-month abandonment by peace and civilization.
Eventually, we were considered the lucky ones: part of the wave of refugees who left Liberia in 1990 to settle in America in northeastern states like Maryland, Rhode Island and New York. My mother was a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University Teachers College at the time, and we made our new home in her dorm room while awaiting her graduation. It was not the size of the space or the irremovable stains that swathed the old floor that took adjusting to; it was the realization that a mother we had not seen in almost a year stood over a stove every night holding books with titles like Principles of Education in the Age of Humanism, as three little girls wrestled with the happiness of her presence and the fear that a ghost of her paced before them. It was having a father who left early in the mornings to look for work or news of a possible return to Liberia, only to return home with nothing to give us but new words to write in spiral notebooks.
He quickly found, like most new immigrants to America from third-world countries, that the education that afforded him maids and private schooling for his daughters in Liberia was not good enough for an engineering job in the United States. Instead of succumbing to self-pity or alcohol to deaden the pain of his sudden riches to rags crisis, he took whatever job he could find to make sure we always had food on the table in the evening — and books.
We are the story of the black immigrant family in America. Those shop owners and nannies and security men and taxi drivers and hair braiders and cleaners and doormen–many of these are my father–many were intellectuals, businessmen, teachers and even doctors in their native homes, only to come here to struggle since their “African” degrees were deemed unaccredited by a strict international academic hierarchy. The result is an aggressive pursuit of an American education for their children, something many, like my father, would give anything to see accomplished. As the years passed and I noticed in his sunken eyes that he had lost hope in ever returning home, as the words in my notebooks grew in number from the days my father sat with us and offered all he could give–his mind and stories about men like Steve Biko, Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther King Jr. and Marcus Garvey and what their educations had afforded them and their people–I made a promise that I would continue in this legacy of sharing words as a means of empowerment, strength and coping.
This January I launched a children’s book publishing company: One Moore Book. One Moore Book provides children’s literature for the children of countries with low literacy rates. Each cycle of books caters to the children of one country, and our first cycle, dedicated to my father, is for the children of Liberia. My four siblings and I research, write and illustrate all books to match the culture, foods and cities of the featured country. My hope is to give children the peace I was granted by the words my father gave me, by allowing them to see themselves in literature. I also think it is important to provide books about foreign countries to children in the United States, to increase the overall awareness of the world outside to those who may never have an opportunity to leave. After this cycle I hope to offer words to the children of places like Haiti, Bolivia and Afghanistan, words similar to those that helped me and my sisters mute the sounds of the war outside.
I will never be able to give my father back the twenty years he spent working to educate us, or the home and life in Liberia he lost. I repay his sacrifice by honoring the education he fought for and offering my art to the world, with stories that make the histories and narratives of my people come alive, with words to live by and a legacy I promise I will not disappoint.
