Seriously though…
What gives? I ran into my ex-boyfriend again last night. And while this might not be strange in a town of 5,000 in a city of 8 million it’s a little different. Given, we tend to hang out in the same bar neighborhoods, so it might not be that uncommon for us to run into each other from time to time. But before last week, I’d not seen him in FIVE AND A HALF YEARS. And now twice in one week.
I am STILL waiting for my jobs to begin. And the fact that my manager at the bar does not feel the need to call me back is not encouraging. The tutoring has been delayed. They say it’s because CPS doesn’t have the student lists ready. I think it’s really because they don’t have enough tutors for all the CPS students that are behind according to No Child Left Behind.
Speaking of which, I had a real problem with the video they showed at my training session the other day. It was supposed to be a feel-good piece about how we’re helping the little kiddies and look at how thrilled they and their parents are that they can read good now. But they only showed African-American children and African-American parents. The argument for this, I would presume, is that it is a company begun by African-Americans, and they want to show how the program is having a positive impact on a number of African-American communities. But instead it kind of served to reify the false assumption that illiteracy (which I totally just spelled wrong) is a solely African-American problem. That’s just the anthropologist in me talking, but it was still bizarre and rather off-putting.
Alternatively, they showed us the “Blue Eye, Brown Eye Experiment” by Jane Elliott. I’d seen it before, but if you’ve not seen it, I highly recommend finding it on the internet and watching it. Basically, she broke her totally white, Iowan 1960s class into blue-eyed kids and brown-eyed kids. She then told the class that for the day brown-eyed kids were not as smart, asocial, etc. The dramatic change in the class - poor achievement on the part of the brown-eyes, discrimination by the blue-eyes and resulting violence on both sides - is just incredible. In one day, she managed to change a bunch of little kids that totally got along into horrible bigots on one side and a completely marginalized group on the other. Then the next day she switched it (brown-eyes on top) with the same results.
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