Just to let our American contributers know, Canadian school curriculum is vastly different than American curriculums, especially in regards to History.
Canadians schools seem to teach 1 History course every 2 years, and alot of it is repeat and rehash. So by the time a Canadian has graduated high school, they have had maybe 2 credits worth of History taught to them.
Ask any Canadian to name the first Prime Minister, when the first colony/city was founded in Canada, or even the name of the first city/colony, and you will get blank stares. Ask them to name 5 Canadian heroes, and they might be able to name 2.
All they really need to do is add a course on African Leaders in History and give it equivalent credits/weighting to any other Social Studies/History course.
This isnt an Africentric school, its a Povicentric school. As long as its actually run like they realize its for poverty stricken youths and have free school lunches & breakfasts or whatever I would support it.
Learning the actual history should be the secondary goal of any history class, behind teaching effective reading, research, and writing skills.
Wouldn't that be a far more compatible fit within an English class?
Yeah, I swear that those were the skills I was supposed to be learning while being forced to listen to idiots mangle Shakespeare.
shryke on
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
edited February 2008
What's a bloack?
Also, When you're in high school history, you really are supposed to learn about world history, and your nation's history.
History is apparently only taught in an extremely sporadic way in Canada.
How is it then, that euro-centric history is to blame for alienating ethnic minorities so that they perform poorly not only in history classes, but across the board? It doesn't sound like history is an important part of the curriculum at all.
Just to let our American contributers know, Canadian school curriculum is vastly different than American curriculums, especially in regards to History.
Canadians schools seem to teach 1 History course every 2 years, and alot of it is repeat and rehash. So by the time a Canadian has graduated high school, they have had maybe 2 credits worth of History taught to them.
Ask any Canadian to name the first Prime Minister, when the first colony/city was founded in Canada, or even the name of the first city/colony, and you will get blank stares. Ask them to name 5 Canadian heroes, and they might be able to name 2.
Uh, speak for yourself there bud. Through grade school I was taught the history of Canada and Western Civilization, beginning with the Mesopotamians and ending with the aftermath of the second world war.
It all depends on how old you are and where you went to school.
In Ontario, before the education "reforms", History was a fucking joke. Not so much in High School, but Elementary School was pathetic. It was Jaques Cartier every fucking year. We learned jack shit.
I'm 20 and I don't think things have changed very much since I finished. I have complaints, we spent way too much time studying 19th century Quebec rebellions, and I was in French immersion so I had to learn all of it in French, but overall I'm pretty satisfied with my free history education.
Just to let our American contributers know, Canadian school curriculum is vastly different than American curriculums, especially in regards to History.
Canadians schools seem to teach 1 History course every 2 years, and alot of it is repeat and rehash. So by the time a Canadian has graduated high school, they have had maybe 2 credits worth of History taught to them.
Ask any Canadian to name the first Prime Minister, when the first colony/city was founded in Canada, or even the name of the first city/colony, and you will get blank stares. Ask them to name 5 Canadian heroes, and they might be able to name 2.
Uh, speak for yourself there bud. Through grade school I was taught the history of Canada and Western Civilization, beginning with the Mesopotamians and ending with the aftermath of the second world war.
It all depends on how old you are and where you went to school.
In Ontario, before the education "reforms", History was a fucking joke. Not so much in High School, but Elementary School was pathetic. It was Jaques Cartier every fucking year. We learned jack shit.
I'm 20 and I don't think things have changed very much since I finished. I have complaints, we spent way too much time studying 19th century Quebec rebellions, and I was in French immersion so I had to learn all of it in French, but overall I'm pretty satisfied with my free history education.
If your from Ontario, you learned under the new system then. Good work.
History is apparently only taught in an extremely sporadic way in Canada.
How is it then, that euro-centric history is to blame for alienating ethnic minorities so that they perform poorly not only in history classes, but across the board? It doesn't sound like history is an important part of the curriculum at all.
Come on Shinto, the problems with education in poor mostly black neighborhoods is obviously them not being told enough about awesome Black people from the past.
History is apparently only taught in an extremely sporadic way in Canada.
How is it then, that euro-centric history is to blame for alienating ethnic minorities so that they perform poorly not only in history classes, but across the board? It doesn't sound like history is an important part of the curriculum at all.
Come on Shinto, the problems with education in poor mostly black neighborhoods is obviously them not being told enough about awesome Black people from the past.
Just to let our American contributers know, Canadian school curriculum is vastly different than American curriculums, especially in regards to History.
Canadians schools seem to teach 1 History course every 2 years, and alot of it is repeat and rehash. So by the time a Canadian has graduated high school, they have had maybe 2 credits worth of History taught to them.
Ask any Canadian to name the first Prime Minister, when the first colony/city was founded in Canada, or even the name of the first city/colony, and you will get blank stares. Ask them to name 5 Canadian heroes, and they might be able to name 2.
Uh, speak for yourself there bud. Through grade school I was taught the history of Canada and Western Civilization, beginning with the Mesopotamians and ending with the aftermath of the second world war.
It all depends on how old you are and where you went to school.
In Ontario, before the education "reforms", History was a fucking joke. Not so much in High School, but Elementary School was pathetic. It was Jaques Cartier every fucking year. We learned jack shit.
I'm 20 and I don't think things have changed very much since I finished. I have complaints, we spent way too much time studying 19th century Quebec rebellions, and I was in French immersion so I had to learn all of it in French, but overall I'm pretty satisfied with my free history education.
That's quite surprising to hear. I graduated from high school 5 years ago. I was the last class on the old curriculum. I've taken history courses from Ancient Civ all the way up to 20th Century western history.
I think it really depends what you choose to do as an elective. I think something went really wrong with your education if you can't name the first PM of Canada... I mean that kind of stuff was drilled into my head since grade school.
It all depends on how old you are and where you went to school.
In Ontario, before the education "reforms", History was a fucking joke. Not so much in High School, but Elementary School was pathetic. It was Jaques Cartier every fucking year. We learned jack shit.
I'm 20 and I don't think things have changed very much since I finished. I have complaints, we spent way too much time studying 19th century Quebec rebellions, and I was in French immersion so I had to learn all of it in French, but overall I'm pretty satisfied with my free history education.
If your from Ontario, you learned under the new system then. Good work.
You got fucked on the maths though.
I'm in BC. I got fucked on math but that was my own doing, because instead of paying attention and actually learning the material I would just figure out how to use the TI-83 to do everything. Then I took two years off and forgot it all. So now I'm in university, paying $1000 to re-learn grade 11 and 12 math without a graphing calculator.
It all depends on how old you are and where you went to school.
In Ontario, before the education "reforms", History was a fucking joke. Not so much in High School, but Elementary School was pathetic. It was Jaques Cartier every fucking year. We learned jack shit.
I'm 20 and I don't think things have changed very much since I finished. I have complaints, we spent way too much time studying 19th century Quebec rebellions, and I was in French immersion so I had to learn all of it in French, but overall I'm pretty satisfied with my free history education.
If your from Ontario, you learned under the new system then. Good work.
You got fucked on the maths though.
I'm in BC. I got fucked on math but that was my own doing, because instead of paying attention and actually learning the material I would just figure out how to use the TI-83 to do everything. Then I took two years off and forgot it all. So now I'm in university, paying $1000 to re-learn grade 11 and 12 math without a graphing calculator.
Well, education is handled provincially so ... I'm not sure your testaments to the quality of history classes in Ontario are useful at all.
The mandatory history classes in high school basically covered John Cabot to modern days. Anything else was your choice. Elementary school was much looser in it's regulations, so if your teacher was feeling lazy, you wouldn't learn much.
I graduduated in '97 from a pretty rural High School in BC. From elementery and up we had social studies. That was world history to canadian history. In grade 12 you could do History 12, geography 12 or Law 12 for your social studies credits. In my High School History and Geography were offered in alternating years.
I found that Socials was a great course. When we were younger we learned our provinces and facts about them. We larned basic Canadian geography and some world geography. As we moved up it became more history entered and in grade 8-9 we did alot of world religions and cultures. I was very suprised after high school how many americans that I worked with had no general idea of the shape even of thier country or where different states were. We learned about the formation of cnada and often touched on american history since it was so closley tied to each other. Sometimes we even did the american revolution and stuff. Yet I was still amazed when The same american co-workers didn't seem to even know about the shared history parts.
Pretty much what we need are dedcated teachers and non retarded politicians. The second will never happen and the former are driven out of the schools that need them.
Just to let our American contributers know, Canadian school curriculum is vastly different than American curriculums, especially in regards to History.
Canadians schools seem to teach 1 History course every 2 years, and alot of it is repeat and rehash. So by the time a Canadian has graduated high school, they have had maybe 2 credits worth of History taught to them.
Ask any Canadian to name the first Prime Minister, when the first colony/city was founded in Canada, or even the name of the first city/colony, and you will get blank stares. Ask them to name 5 Canadian heroes, and they might be able to name 2.
Uh, speak for yourself there bud. Through grade school I was taught the history of Canada and Western Civilization, beginning with the Mesopotamians and ending with the aftermath of the second world war.
Then you were lucky, as my experience with history is about as Gnome describes.
It's odd that everyone is focusing on history, here. Why aren't we talking about teaching afrocentric math? Afrocentric physics? Afrocentric French? I mean, black kids aren't just failing at history, they're failing at everything.
I mean, why don't we see questions about what you get when you add three black people to four black people? Or the distance a black man will fly if you fire him from a cannon at a 30 degree angle at 17m/s?
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
With the exception of the obvious (don't stereotype races and students!), I'm not really sure why it exists.
Seems like in large part it's aimed towards correcting the test/stat results that place certain ethnic groups below others, results which seem to scale along economic lines. I had a similarly reaction to it at first sight though. Seems like it's not the theories themselves but rather the context and methods by which those theories are passed on to the students that are the focus.
I'd love to know how they plan to make the sciences and math Afri-centric.
Probably waste time talking about how some random African American Scientist/Mathematician was such a great person and screwing over the students more by not actually teaching Math and Science.
I'd love to know how they plan to make the sciences and math Afri-centric.
'Brother Huey Newton is blasting at a fascist pig cop, a 5 gram bullet leaves his gat at 796 meters per second. How much kinetic energy is the bullet going to split his wig with?'
Actually I think it would be more like that south park episode with the breakdancing group about not smoking.
Just to let our American contributers know, Canadian school curriculum is vastly different than American curriculums, especially in regards to History.
Canadians schools seem to teach 1 History course every 2 years, and alot of it is repeat and rehash. So by the time a Canadian has graduated high school, they have had maybe 2 credits worth of History taught to them.
Ask any Canadian to name the first Prime Minister, when the first colony/city was founded in Canada, or even the name of the first city/colony, and you will get blank stares. Ask them to name 5 Canadian heroes, and they might be able to name 2.
Uh, speak for yourself there bud. Through grade school I was taught the history of Canada and Western Civilization, beginning with the Mesopotamians and ending with the aftermath of the second world war.
Then you were lucky, as my experience with history is about as Gnome describes.
As was mine.
Shit, sounds like the quality of Ontario education is quite lame, at least history. I'm with Azio, I graduated a couple of years ago too, and I did the same thing as him. Elementary school we did stuff on Egypt and Mesopotamia, then I remember we did some stuff on our provincial history (Amor de Cosmos, bitches!). When I got to highschool the focus was on general Canadian history since Cabot (starting gr. 9) to Canada at the end of WW2. In grade 8 we did general world history, mostly stuff from the Middle Ages and Renaissance (including T'ang dynasty China, as well as Mongol Asia), while in grade 12 I took History 12, which was basically 20th century history 1917-1991. Heavy emphasis on the major happenings of the century, starting with a tiny bit of WW1 (although that was mostly covered in the Canada-centric Social Studies 11) and the Russian revolution, and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Gulf War.
What they did do recently was to change the graduation requirements, so that an exit interview and a "portfolio" to be assessed by a panel of teachers, principles, and outside citizens from within the community would be necessary to graduate. I was the last year that was under the old rules, so we only needed x number of credits + English 12/French 12.
It's odd that everyone is focusing on history, here. Why aren't we talking about teaching afrocentric math? Afrocentric physics? Afrocentric French? I mean, black kids aren't just failing at history, they're failing at everything.
There's no difference between "regular" mathematics and physics and black math and physics. I mean, 1 + 1 equals 2 no matter what. History is different, though, since it's largely a recounting of major cultural happenings over time. I can understand the concern, especially if the current way history is taught is seen as being detrimental to a cultural identity. But I find it this case the concern is both misplaced and absurd - misplaced since "white history" is not the cause for underachievement by black Torontonians, and absurd since the notion of "black history" is a terrible, batshit idea that has no basis in reality, and which ignores the real historical identities of ethnic and cultural groups that happen to be black.
Also, Afrocentric French would be like teaching French as it is spoken in Senegal or Algeria or some place. I'm not sure what the Academie Francaise thinks about that, but we already have our own crazy joual.
saggio on
3DS: 0232-9436-6893
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited February 2008
So, I'm not sure that this particular school is making with the best ideas. However, I do think it's generally a good idea to consult with the scientists who study race and racism when determining curricula and school practices. For instance, I have one at my school, Claude Steele, who was responsible for getting the race question removed from the SAT, because he demonstrated that the act of asking about their race caused minority students to do worse on the subsequent test.
He studies the phenomenon of stereotype threat, where calling attention to someone's race in and of itself can affect that person's performance. The same thing happens to white students, actually, if you mention before a test that Asian students happen to perform better on that particular assessment. I'm not up to recalling too many of the details, since I mostly heard about it second hand from someone who actually took the class, but in general that's the sort of valuable empirical research which has clear and important applications and which we should most definitely understand and make use of.
It's odd that everyone is focusing on history, here. Why aren't we talking about teaching afrocentric math? Afrocentric physics? Afrocentric French? I mean, black kids aren't just failing at history, they're failing at everything.
Be fair now, it's not odd at all.
Most people, assuming they're not retarded, are aware that changing the curriculum will only solve part of the problem, and that there are only a few areas there you can improve on - history and literature.
The link about anti-racist math is kind of funny. The beauty of math is that we were never taught who invented what or when - there's no need to and math needs no context. There might have been a little mention in the margins of the text book, but in class it was all numbers, all the time.
I'm a fan of schools respecting research about how local factors affect their students' learning. I wish schools could be more flexible with it, actually.
Just to let our American contributers know, Canadian school curriculum is vastly different than American curriculums, especially in regards to History.
Canadians schools seem to teach 1 History course every 2 years, and alot of it is repeat and rehash. So by the time a Canadian has graduated high school, they have had maybe 2 credits worth of History taught to them.
Ask any Canadian to name the first Prime Minister, when the first colony/city was founded in Canada, or even the name of the first city/colony, and you will get blank stares. Ask them to name 5 Canadian heroes, and they might be able to name 2.
Uh, speak for yourself there bud. Through grade school I was taught the history of Canada and Western Civilization, beginning with the Mesopotamians and ending with the aftermath of the second world war.
Then you were lucky, as my experience with history is about as Gnome describes.
As was mine.
Shit, sounds like the quality of Ontario education is quite lame, at least history. I'm with Azio, I graduated a couple of years ago too, and I did the same thing as him. Elementary school we did stuff on Egypt and Mesopotamia, then I remember we did some stuff on our provincial history (Amor de Cosmos, bitches!). When I got to highschool the focus was on general Canadian history since Cabot (starting gr. 9) to Canada at the end of WW2. In grade 8 we did general world history, mostly stuff from the Middle Ages and Renaissance (including T'ang dynasty China, as well as Mongol Asia), while in grade 12 I took History 12, which was basically 20th century history 1917-1991. Heavy emphasis on the major happenings of the century, starting with a tiny bit of WW1 (although that was mostly covered in the Canada-centric Social Studies 11) and the Russian revolution, and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Gulf War.
How much of that was mandatory?
Under the old system, there was only 1 required History class in high school. It covered Canadian History from John Cabot to the present and a few extra bits on how our political system actually works.
Elementary School was a complete crap shoot that depended on your teachers. There wasn't much of a system in place to make them stick to the curriculum. At least, not tightly. I lucked out with a few teachers who knew there math down pat. Never got one interested in history much though.
The idea of some sort of mandatory Black History Class is dumb though. If they wanna offer an elective focusing on black people throughout history, what the hell. But that doesn't require an entire school.
It's odd that everyone is focusing on history, here. Why aren't we talking about teaching afrocentric math? Afrocentric physics? Afrocentric French? I mean, black kids aren't just failing at history, they're failing at everything.
I mean, why don't we see questions about what you get when you add three black people to four black people? Or the distance a black man will fly if you fire him from a cannon at a 30 degree angle at 17m/s?
Are we neglecting wind resistance? Come on I need come assumptions to actually calculate the actual distance traveled.
The link about anti-racist math is kind of funny. The beauty of math is that we were never taught who invented what or when - there's no need to and math needs no context. There might have been a little mention in the margins of the text book, but in class it was all numbers, all the time.
I thought that all nationalities/races invented math at some time or another. I remember one of my algebra books mentioning that algebra (or the basis of algebra, I forgot which) was invented by Arabs. From my viewpoint it's something of a universal subject.
The link about anti-racist math is kind of funny. The beauty of math is that we were never taught who invented what or when - there's no need to and math needs no context. There might have been a little mention in the margins of the text book, but in class it was all numbers, all the time.
I thought that all nationalities/races invented math at some time or another. I remember one of my algebra books mentioning that algebra (or the basis of algebra, I forgot which) was invented by Arabs. From my viewpoint it's something of a universal subject.
Yeah, you can tell because you do math right to left, which is the arabic (style?) of writing.
Anyways, one effect that this school might help with is the accusations of "acting white."
I also find that acting white is unique to those schools where black students comprise less than 80 percent of the student population. In predominantly black schools, I find no evidence at all that getting good grades adversely affects students’ popularity.
But perhaps this changes when school desegregation leads to cross-ethnic friendships within the school. To see how the degree of internal integration within a school affects acting-white patterns, I calculated the difference from what I would expect in the total number of cross-ethnic friends in a school based on the ethnic make-up of the student body. Schools with a greater percentage of cross-ethnic friendships than expected are considered to be internally integrated. I divide schools into two groups of equal size: those with higher and lower degrees of internal integration.
Unfortunately, internal integration only aggravates the problem. Blacks in less-integrated schools (places with fewer than expected cross-ethnic friendships) encounter less of a trade-off between popularity and achievement. In fact, the effect of acting white on popularity appears to be twice as large in the more-integrated (racially mixed) schools as in the less-integrated ones. Among the highest achievers (3.5 GPA or higher), the differences are even more stark, with the effect of acting white almost five times as great in settings with more cross-ethnic friendships than expected. Black males in such schools fare the worst, penalized seven times as harshly as my estimate of the average effect of acting white on all black students!
This finding, along with the fact that I find no evidence of acting white in predominantly black schools, adds to the evidence of a “Shaker Heights” syndrome, in which racially integrated settings only reinforce pressures to toe the ethnic line.
Just to let our American contributers know, Canadian school curriculum is vastly different than American curriculums, especially in regards to History.
Canadians schools seem to teach 1 History course every 2 years, and alot of it is repeat and rehash. So by the time a Canadian has graduated high school, they have had maybe 2 credits worth of History taught to them.
Ask any Canadian to name the first Prime Minister, when the first colony/city was founded in Canada, or even the name of the first city/colony, and you will get blank stares. Ask them to name 5 Canadian heroes, and they might be able to name 2.
Uh, speak for yourself there bud. Through grade school I was taught the history of Canada and Western Civilization, beginning with the Mesopotamians and ending with the aftermath of the second world war.
Then you were lucky, as my experience with history is about as Gnome describes.
As was mine.
Shit, sounds like the quality of Ontario education is quite lame, at least history. I'm with Azio, I graduated a couple of years ago too, and I did the same thing as him. Elementary school we did stuff on Egypt and Mesopotamia, then I remember we did some stuff on our provincial history (Amor de Cosmos, bitches!). When I got to highschool the focus was on general Canadian history since Cabot (starting gr. 9) to Canada at the end of WW2. In grade 8 we did general world history, mostly stuff from the Middle Ages and Renaissance (including T'ang dynasty China, as well as Mongol Asia), while in grade 12 I took History 12, which was basically 20th century history 1917-1991. Heavy emphasis on the major happenings of the century, starting with a tiny bit of WW1 (although that was mostly covered in the Canada-centric Social Studies 11) and the Russian revolution, and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Gulf War.
How much of that was mandatory?
Under the old system, there was only 1 required History class in high school. It covered Canadian History from John Cabot to the present and a few extra bits on how our political system actually works.
Elementary School was a complete crap shoot that depended on your teachers. There wasn't much of a system in place to make them stick to the curriculum. At least, not tightly. I lucked out with a few teachers who knew there math down pat. Never got one interested in history much though.
The idea of some sort of mandatory Black History Class is dumb though. If they wanna offer an elective focusing on black people throughout history, what the hell. But that doesn't require an entire school.
Humanities/Social Studies grades 8-11 were and continue to be mandatory. Everyone takes them, so everyone will cover basically the Middle Ages - Canada at the end of the Second World War. Except for the stuff in grade 8, which dealt mostly with world religions and general European history, the stuff that is taught is mostly Canada-focused. Or, at least, important stuff is presented in terms of it's relationship to Canada. The French Revolution, for instance, was presented in terms of how it affected New France, while the American Revolution focused on the invasion of Canada and the influx of the United Empire Loyalists.
I also find that acting white is unique to those schools where black students comprise less than 80 percent of the student population. In predominantly black schools, I find no evidence at all that getting good grades adversely affects students’ popularity.
But perhaps this changes when school desegregation leads to cross-ethnic friendships within the school. To see how the degree of internal integration within a school affects acting-white patterns, I calculated the difference from what I would expect in the total number of cross-ethnic friends in a school based on the ethnic make-up of the student body. Schools with a greater percentage of cross-ethnic friendships than expected are considered to be internally integrated. I divide schools into two groups of equal size: those with higher and lower degrees of internal integration.
Unfortunately, internal integration only aggravates the problem. Blacks in less-integrated schools (places with fewer than expected cross-ethnic friendships) encounter less of a trade-off between popularity and achievement. In fact, the effect of acting white on popularity appears to be twice as large in the more-integrated (racially mixed) schools as in the less-integrated ones. Among the highest achievers (3.5 GPA or higher), the differences are even more stark, with the effect of acting white almost five times as great in settings with more cross-ethnic friendships than expected. Black males in such schools fare the worst, penalized seven times as harshly as my estimate of the average effect of acting white on all black students!
This finding, along with the fact that I find no evidence of acting white in predominantly black schools, adds to the evidence of a “Shaker Heights” syndrome, in which racially integrated settings only reinforce pressures to toe the ethnic line.
If you're a black student and you fail, it's because you're being screwed over by white people and their overly Euro-centric curricula. If only the government had taken all that money they spent buying new books for your school library, and instead pumped it into special schools designed for people with dark skin, you might have had a chance.
If you're a black student and you succeed, or read, or use proper fucking English instead of pretending you just escaped from an 18th-century Alabama plantation, you're ostracized by your peers for "acting white", whatever the fuck that means.
I don't think the schools are the problem here. I think the people are the problem. I think a lot of black kids in racially integrated communities are being taught by their parents and role models to fear and exclude intellectuals and to associate intellectualism with white people. And God forbid you "act white", someone might forget what colour your skin is and actually give you a fair shake.
One wonders if this will be just an 'Afrocentric' school or if it will be a school that is better equipped to deal with the problems plaguing inner-city black youth
Jinnigan on
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
One wonders if this will be just an 'Afrocentric' school or if it will be a school that is better equipped to deal with the problems plaguing inner-city black youth
Considering our country's track record with Aboriginal schools I'm going to be incredibly shocked if the latter comes true.
If you're a black student and you fail, it's because you're being screwed over by white people and their overly Euro-centric curricula. If only the government had taken all that money they spent buying new books for your school library, and instead pumped it into special schools designed for people with dark skin, you might have had a chance.
Firstly, let me say that I've spent most of my life in the Shaker Heights School system. Second, it is pretty common for young black students(mostly males) to be put into LD classes and taught at a slower rate behind the rest of their class and once you get in those classes its hard to get out. They don't always put these kids in these dumb classes because they actually need it either, they put my brother into these classes in like the 3rd or 4th grade(when we got to Shaker) because of "Behavioral problems" (He was a hot-headed kid, not stupid) and he never got out of the classes and just now finishing up his GED. So yeah, as a guy who has seen how black students can be teated in some upper-class school systems, they often do set some up for failure. Similarly, they encourage white kids challenge themselves with AP courses and blacks with CP if they haven't thrown them in LD classes.
Also, I remember in middle school they would have assemblies boasting how Shaker used to have the best school system in the country, but now that can't make the same boast and it always seemed like they were blaming the students, or at least the black ones.
I don't think the schools are the problem here. I think the people are the problem.
People are taught to think that blacks shouldn't be smart, that they should be in the lower class. Not associating intellectualism with blackness isn't something new at all, it's something that has been ingrained in are society since before any of us where here so it has had time to effect the way people think at large, I think.
But if the big issue here is afro-centric literature and history, wouldn't it be easier (and cost efficient) to just offer more alternatives in the current school system and let the students decide if they want to take a Canada specific history course in 11th grade, or a course on Black History?
If the issue is that black students will perform better because they will be around people of their own race and won't receive the negative connotation that suceeding="acting white", then that is goddamn stupid. Guess what, you're going to (most likely) be working with people of all races, including white people. If you're blaming failure on the white people around you now, wait till you get into the real world.
I think this is a really good idea and will allow them to learn things that they normally wouldn't at a regular school. this is a very good idea and i am excited to see this implemented as soon as possible, and hopefully in the US soon as well
Insulating yourself is never the right idea. Integrating schools and society is a tough process. It's not like you just do it and then BAM! no more racism. These things take time and patience, and creating a segregated school is a sign of impatience feeding ignorance.
Also, I don't like the idea of an "black" curriculum because I would rather have African-American history actually integrated into American history rather than shoehorned into a month that just talks about random inventors.
What are all you guy's racial/ethnic heritage? Please answer with how you identify racially and don't say Swiss, Irish, Russian, "Euro mix", or 1/16th clusterfuck of ethnicities if you're not actively involved, invested and engaged in those cultures.
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Yeah, I swear that those were the skills I was supposed to be learning while being forced to listen to idiots mangle Shakespeare.
Also, When you're in high school history, you really are supposed to learn about world history, and your nation's history.
History is apparently only taught in an extremely sporadic way in Canada.
How is it then, that euro-centric history is to blame for alienating ethnic minorities so that they perform poorly not only in history classes, but across the board? It doesn't sound like history is an important part of the curriculum at all.
If your from Ontario, you learned under the new system then. Good work.
You got fucked on the maths though.
Come on Shinto, the problems with education in poor mostly black neighborhoods is obviously them not being told enough about awesome Black people from the past.
I'm sure thats part of the problem
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That's quite surprising to hear. I graduated from high school 5 years ago. I was the last class on the old curriculum. I've taken history courses from Ancient Civ all the way up to 20th Century western history.
I think it really depends what you choose to do as an elective. I think something went really wrong with your education if you can't name the first PM of Canada... I mean that kind of stuff was drilled into my head since grade school.
Well, education is handled provincially so ... I'm not sure your testaments to the quality of history classes in Ontario are useful at all.
The mandatory history classes in high school basically covered John Cabot to modern days. Anything else was your choice. Elementary school was much looser in it's regulations, so if your teacher was feeling lazy, you wouldn't learn much.
I found that Socials was a great course. When we were younger we learned our provinces and facts about them. We larned basic Canadian geography and some world geography. As we moved up it became more history entered and in grade 8-9 we did alot of world religions and cultures. I was very suprised after high school how many americans that I worked with had no general idea of the shape even of thier country or where different states were. We learned about the formation of cnada and often touched on american history since it was so closley tied to each other. Sometimes we even did the american revolution and stuff. Yet I was still amazed when The same american co-workers didn't seem to even know about the shared history parts.
Pretty much what we need are dedcated teachers and non retarded politicians. The second will never happen and the former are driven out of the schools that need them.
As was mine.
Yeah. The way this whole argument is being phrased it seems like the problem with black kids doing poorly in school is due to crappy history classes.
With the exception of the obvious (don't stereotype races and students!), I'm not really sure why it exists.
I mean, why don't we see questions about what you get when you add three black people to four black people? Or the distance a black man will fly if you fire him from a cannon at a 30 degree angle at 17m/s?
Seems like in large part it's aimed towards correcting the test/stat results that place certain ethnic groups below others, results which seem to scale along economic lines. I had a similarly
Probably waste time talking about how some random African American Scientist/Mathematician was such a great person and screwing over the students more by not actually teaching Math and Science.
'Brother Huey Newton is blasting at a fascist pig cop, a 5 gram bullet leaves his gat at 796 meters per second. How much kinetic energy is the bullet going to split his wig with?'
Actually I think it would be more like that south park episode with the breakdancing group about not smoking.
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Shit, sounds like the quality of Ontario education is quite lame, at least history. I'm with Azio, I graduated a couple of years ago too, and I did the same thing as him. Elementary school we did stuff on Egypt and Mesopotamia, then I remember we did some stuff on our provincial history (Amor de Cosmos, bitches!). When I got to highschool the focus was on general Canadian history since Cabot (starting gr. 9) to Canada at the end of WW2. In grade 8 we did general world history, mostly stuff from the Middle Ages and Renaissance (including T'ang dynasty China, as well as Mongol Asia), while in grade 12 I took History 12, which was basically 20th century history 1917-1991. Heavy emphasis on the major happenings of the century, starting with a tiny bit of WW1 (although that was mostly covered in the Canada-centric Social Studies 11) and the Russian revolution, and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Gulf War.
What they did do recently was to change the graduation requirements, so that an exit interview and a "portfolio" to be assessed by a panel of teachers, principles, and outside citizens from within the community would be necessary to graduate. I was the last year that was under the old rules, so we only needed x number of credits + English 12/French 12.
There's no difference between "regular" mathematics and physics and black math and physics. I mean, 1 + 1 equals 2 no matter what. History is different, though, since it's largely a recounting of major cultural happenings over time. I can understand the concern, especially if the current way history is taught is seen as being detrimental to a cultural identity. But I find it this case the concern is both misplaced and absurd - misplaced since "white history" is not the cause for underachievement by black Torontonians, and absurd since the notion of "black history" is a terrible, batshit idea that has no basis in reality, and which ignores the real historical identities of ethnic and cultural groups that happen to be black.
Also, Afrocentric French would be like teaching French as it is spoken in Senegal or Algeria or some place. I'm not sure what the Academie Francaise thinks about that, but we already have our own crazy joual.
He studies the phenomenon of stereotype threat, where calling attention to someone's race in and of itself can affect that person's performance. The same thing happens to white students, actually, if you mention before a test that Asian students happen to perform better on that particular assessment. I'm not up to recalling too many of the details, since I mostly heard about it second hand from someone who actually took the class, but in general that's the sort of valuable empirical research which has clear and important applications and which we should most definitely understand and make use of.
Most people, assuming they're not retarded, are aware that changing the curriculum will only solve part of the problem, and that there are only a few areas there you can improve on - history and literature.
The link about anti-racist math is kind of funny. The beauty of math is that we were never taught who invented what or when - there's no need to and math needs no context. There might have been a little mention in the margins of the text book, but in class it was all numbers, all the time.
How much of that was mandatory?
Under the old system, there was only 1 required History class in high school. It covered Canadian History from John Cabot to the present and a few extra bits on how our political system actually works.
Elementary School was a complete crap shoot that depended on your teachers. There wasn't much of a system in place to make them stick to the curriculum. At least, not tightly. I lucked out with a few teachers who knew there math down pat. Never got one interested in history much though.
The idea of some sort of mandatory Black History Class is dumb though. If they wanna offer an elective focusing on black people throughout history, what the hell. But that doesn't require an entire school.
Are we neglecting wind resistance? Come on I need come assumptions to actually calculate the actual distance traveled.
I thought that all nationalities/races invented math at some time or another. I remember one of my algebra books mentioning that algebra (or the basis of algebra, I forgot which) was invented by Arabs. From my viewpoint it's something of a universal subject.
Yeah, you can tell because you do math right to left, which is the arabic (style?) of writing.
Anyways, one effect that this school might help with is the accusations of "acting white."
On "Acting White"
Humanities/Social Studies grades 8-11 were and continue to be mandatory. Everyone takes them, so everyone will cover basically the Middle Ages - Canada at the end of the Second World War. Except for the stuff in grade 8, which dealt mostly with world religions and general European history, the stuff that is taught is mostly Canada-focused. Or, at least, important stuff is presented in terms of it's relationship to Canada. The French Revolution, for instance, was presented in terms of how it affected New France, while the American Revolution focused on the invasion of Canada and the influx of the United Empire Loyalists.
If you're a black student and you succeed, or read, or use proper fucking English instead of pretending you just escaped from an 18th-century Alabama plantation, you're ostracized by your peers for "acting white", whatever the fuck that means.
I don't think the schools are the problem here. I think the people are the problem. I think a lot of black kids in racially integrated communities are being taught by their parents and role models to fear and exclude intellectuals and to associate intellectualism with white people. And God forbid you "act white", someone might forget what colour your skin is and actually give you a fair shake.
Considering our country's track record with Aboriginal schools I'm going to be incredibly shocked if the latter comes true.
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Firstly, let me say that I've spent most of my life in the Shaker Heights School system. Second, it is pretty common for young black students(mostly males) to be put into LD classes and taught at a slower rate behind the rest of their class and once you get in those classes its hard to get out. They don't always put these kids in these dumb classes because they actually need it either, they put my brother into these classes in like the 3rd or 4th grade(when we got to Shaker) because of "Behavioral problems" (He was a hot-headed kid, not stupid) and he never got out of the classes and just now finishing up his GED. So yeah, as a guy who has seen how black students can be teated in some upper-class school systems, they often do set some up for failure. Similarly, they encourage white kids challenge themselves with AP courses and blacks with CP if they haven't thrown them in LD classes.
Also, I remember in middle school they would have assemblies boasting how Shaker used to have the best school system in the country, but now that can't make the same boast and it always seemed like they were blaming the students, or at least the black ones.
People are taught to think that blacks shouldn't be smart, that they should be in the lower class. Not associating intellectualism with blackness isn't something new at all, it's something that has been ingrained in are society since before any of us where here so it has had time to effect the way people think at large, I think.
But if the big issue here is afro-centric literature and history, wouldn't it be easier (and cost efficient) to just offer more alternatives in the current school system and let the students decide if they want to take a Canada specific history course in 11th grade, or a course on Black History?
If the issue is that black students will perform better because they will be around people of their own race and won't receive the negative connotation that suceeding="acting white", then that is goddamn stupid. Guess what, you're going to (most likely) be working with people of all races, including white people. If you're blaming failure on the white people around you now, wait till you get into the real world.
Also, I don't like the idea of an "black" curriculum because I would rather have African-American history actually integrated into American history rather than shoehorned into a month that just talks about random inventors.
What are all you guy's racial/ethnic heritage? Please answer with how you identify racially and don't say Swiss, Irish, Russian, "Euro mix", or 1/16th clusterfuck of ethnicities if you're not actively involved, invested and engaged in those cultures.