#teaacher

B.B. is a rather aggressive student and shares ethnicity with many other students at Esme's inner city Chicago school, African-American. I wrote a post a few days back about mistakenly teaching stereotypes, discrimination and racism through misinformed teaching but what wasn't asked, and came up in reblogs, comments and coincidentally a few chapters later in Educating Esme is intracultural stereotyping.

B.B. called Mme Esme a bitch and a cunt because she broke up a fight he was having in the schoolyard. He was not talked to about his behaviour towards Esme and Mr. Turner seemed to be making excuses for his behaviour. "You don't understand. They're black." and "It's just the way black people are..." are things that actually came out of his mouth. Esme fought for higher expectations, hoping that Mr. Turner would begin treating these students as students and not as "black kids".

Esme fought against Mr. Turner's blanket statement by saying that "kids meet your expectations, good or bad" and the only thing that resulted was that B.B got suspended and Esme felt guilty. She asks "Why don't I feel like I won this one?" Well Esme, you don't feel like you have won because Mr. Turner didn't change and suddenly expect more from the students, he just gave consequences to one student to shut you up. Now B.B. has to stay at home, where he is also unhappy and is unable to come to school, even if he wanted to that day. In a way, Mr Turner is heeding your request, by holding B.B. accountable for his actions, as any other non-black student would have to do, but nothing changed in his mind.  Disconnected discipline disciplines the action but does not fix the issue. The issue may be that nobody believes that these kids can do good because of their ethnicity but keeping B.B. away from school is not going to teach him that you believe in him or change the fact that Mr. Turner may not.

Mr Turner also brings up the issue of stereotyping WITHIN a culture.

Stereotyping within cultures is another large issues, it really isn't other cultures stereotyping each other anymore. Some people are ignorant enough to believe that they represent the normal life for all people of their ethnicity. What makes it worse is that there are very strong similarities and people feel these few bulls-eye interpretations mean they have a person's entire existence pegged. Unfortunately, this just makes the question posed in last stereotypes post more crucial -- how do you trust any ONE person's story as a representation for a culture? You cannot. You cannot even trust many people's stories. You can only make vague generalizations if all of your stories share a similar trait --- this trait becomes a stereotype. 

This afternoon I signed for my last year at college.

I am officially a Senior!

Next year's my last one and when I graduate I'll be an English Teacher at last!

my ballet teacher dancing at the World Ballet Competition last year(: