In an interview, Angel Harris, author of Kids Don’t Want to Fail: Oppositional Culture and the Black-White Achievement Gap, who’d been in the bottom tenth of the students in high school, describes the moment in college when a professor talked about listing a child’s behaviors and letting a listener draw their own conclusions, rather than just calling the child bad—this level of empiricism was a revelation to Harris and permanently changed the way he thought. This starts about 3 minutes into the recording and only runs for about five minutes.
His general point is that a lot of the gap between black and white students can be explained by teachers giving up on the black students—he’s got studies—and that a lot of what looks like oppositional behavior is actually frustration from students who are being expected to learn things that they weren’t given the prior education to understand.
I’d say his more general point is to have more respect for the idea that people are showing ordinary human reactions to their situations rather than there being something weird about them explaining what they’re doing.
A Rationality Click Moment
In an interview, Angel Harris, author of Kids Don’t Want to Fail: Oppositional Culture and the Black-White Achievement Gap, who’d been in the bottom tenth of the students in high school, describes the moment in college when a professor talked about listing a child’s behaviors and letting a listener draw their own conclusions, rather than just calling the child bad—this level of empiricism was a revelation to Harris and permanently changed the way he thought. This starts about 3 minutes into the recording and only runs for about five minutes.
His general point is that a lot of the gap between black and white students can be explained by teachers giving up on the black students—he’s got studies—and that a lot of what looks like oppositional behavior is actually frustration from students who are being expected to learn things that they weren’t given the prior education to understand.
I’d say his more general point is to have more respect for the idea that people are showing ordinary human reactions to their situations rather than there being something weird about them explaining what they’re doing.