Race and Percents

My Classroom

Lately, I've been working on percents with my 7th graders. What is a percent, how are percents and fractions related, how can figure out what 10% of a number is, etc. The way my team has been teaching this unit has been mathematically interesting, trying to get students to make a lot of connections between pictures and symbols and different methods, but I've been looking for other ways to make it engaging for students who don't really care about math. One thing I really wanted to do was get into some demographic statistics, so I've been putting together some activities along the way to do this. One day last week, we looked at global wealth distribution: What does it mean that the richest 5th of the world's people has 83% of the world's wealth, and what percent would each 5th have if the wealth were distributed evenly? Yesterday, we looked at the student body of our school by race and calculated how many teachers out of 50 would be Latino, white, Asian, African American, Pacific Islander, and "other" if the faculty was racially the same as the student body.

Today, we moved the desks out of their usual formation (5 groups of 4 desks each) and into a big circle. My central question was: Is it important to you to have teachers of your own race? Of different races? Why?

I brought in a rain stick to be our "talking stick" ("If you don't have it, don't talk"), and we passed it around the circle. I was really happy that the mere fact of having to hold the stick to pass it seemed to get a higher percentage of students talking than the typical "raise your hand if you wanna say something." The participation was still uneven, though, and I had moments where I was like, "Oh dear, the white girls and the black kids are dominating again, and Maria is looking at me like she would rather die than be here." I have no idea how I could have brought Maria, a frequently withdrawn Latina student, in. It didn't help that her two close friends were both absent today; she must have felt really isolated. In her letter at the end of the discussion, she wrote: "Today I learned 0%," and something to the effect of, "I don't think it's important what race teachers are as long as they teach GOOD here." (I had instructed students to write one paragraph starting with "Today I learned ..." using percents, and another paragraph starting with "I think it's (un)important ...")

Anyway, most of the students participated and were really engaged in the conversation. I was somewhat surprised by the uniformity of their responses: almost everyone said that they thought it was important to have teachers from different races so that they could learn from their different backgrounds, and then when I refocused on the question of whether it would be important to have teachers from their same race, everyone said, in different ways, that they did think it was important. Reasons? -Shared languages other than English for help on academic work and communicating with family, shared holidays, and shared background experiences that might make it easier to talk about personal stuff. One girl (white) also mentioned that it would be important to have teachers of your own race because they wouldn't be racist toward you. (No one mentioned having educational role models)

So then we looked at the actual racial characteristics of the faculty. Everyone seemed to interpret the data basically correctly. We passed the stick around again, and people commented on what they thought should be different. The basic consensus was that the faculty should reflect the diversity of the student body much better than it does. A few students wanted to know why there were so many white teachers (85% of faculty vs. 36% of students), but we didn't discuss it.

To wrap up, I gave students the option of writing a letter (Maria's is described above) to me or to the assistant principal, who has a bit of power in the hiring process. Most of them seemed really into it. We didn't get to finish; hopefully, it will still be fresh enough after the long weekend for them to keep going on Tuesday. I'm thinking that it would be neat to have the assistant principal come in and talk to the class, to show his appreciation of their letters and to address the question of why there aren't more teachers of color. It would great if he would also encourage the students to become teachers so that students like themselves in the future would get to learn from a more diverse faculty. I think he would do it. I have to talk to him about the whole thing.

Anyway, it was a good activity. The class stayed calm and the atmosphere stayed pretty respectful and safe, which I was worried about and which might not always be ideal (we learn from controversy and conflict, etc.) but which was really important for this first discussion. I was really impressed by students' ideas and how they expressed them, and I'm glad they got that chance to think about this issue, say what they thought, and hear what others were thinking. Deborah (my cooperating teacher) also suggested that it might have been nice for students of color to hear white students saying that they valued diversity.

I haven't enjoyed a discussion with my class this much in a while. Getting this kind of stimulation from students is why I'm in teaching to begin with, and sometimes it happens with math ... but it's so important to me to get beyond the numbers and into the world.