November 2006

People

Unwinding With Wood

A Tennessee support professional sticks it to stress with a unique gift.

Superstitious? Knock on wood. Stressed? Rub some wood.

That’s the theory behind Stress Sticks, created by John Brazee, a carpenter and warehouse supervisor for Tennessee’s Jackson-Madison County school system. He carves each of the pocket-size wooden rectangles himself and gives them out for folks to tote in a wallet or handbag. “Keep stress in pocket or purse—not in heart,” read the accompanying instructions.

Brazee conceived the idea five years ago while working among the large stacks of wood in his warehouse. “The original idea was floating around from living stones and other little things you carry around with you,” he says. “So I made mine a Stress Stick.”

When he unveiled them at a college job fair, offering them to undergrads who came to hear him talk about carpentry, the sticks were a hit. So much so that Brazee started attaching his business card and giving them to the salespeople with whom he did business. Soon, he was handing them out at Tennessee  Education Association meetings, ESP National Committee conferences, and the NEA Representative Assembly. At one RA, NEA Vice President Dennis Van Roekel got his first
Stress Stick.

“I give them away to anybody I can get my hands on,” Brazee says, estimating that about 2,000 have passed from his hands to others’. And that’s a lot of stress relief.

Command Performance

Collecting histories that might otherwise get lost keeps this teacher on his toes.

Charles Jerome Woods, a special education teacher in Los Angeles, has a passion for dance and perhaps an even larger passion for preserving it. From dancing in the kitchen as a young man and mulling a career as a dancer or critic, he’s come to view the development of a National Black Dance Archive as his top priority outside of the classroom.

Dancers are dying or leaving the region, Woods says, and their playbills, flyers, and ephemera are getting lost or discarded. He has nearly 1,000 pieces now, but is grappling with where to house it all.

This isn’t Woods’ only foray into complex archival work. He is also amassing documents that will comprise the Western States Black, Lesbian, Gay, and Transgender Archive.
Woods says he’s not a spokesperson for the cultural communities he creates archives for, “but I want them to be preserved. And not just preserved, but seen, heard, and enjoyed.”

Going to the Dogs

A Montana retiree chases her new passion across frozen expanses—and back into the classroom.

When Lela Schlitz retired from teaching elementary school in 2002, she knew she’d need something to keep her busy, so she went barking up another tree.

Her husband had started a five-dog touring sled team with $5,000 of their savings. She began joining him on weekends, taking the dogs to a nearby ski resort and giving people rides for cash. The couple “slogged through the snow on a sled in winter and a golf cart in summer,” says Schlitz. “It was exhausting. As mushers, we push more than we ride.”

It wasn’t long before education returned to Schlitz’s life, this time as part of her new business enterprise. While giving a fellow teacher a ride one day, the woman mentioned that her class was reading a book about a boy trying to save his grandfather’s farm by winning a sled race. She asked Schlitz to bring the team to her school. “That’s when we realized we could tie this in with literature,” Schlitz says. “We use Stone Fox in the elementary classes and Call of the Wild among high schoolers.” In addition to the reading programs, she and her husband conduct school assemblies, giving children the chance to pet the dogs and learn about their work on a team. They relax on their 20-acre spread in Montana.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would have mushed a dog sled,” she says. “But I found something that I can put my heart and soul into.”

A Hobby That’s (Not) Music to His Ears

One Minnesota choral and drama teacher has spent the last 20 years in stitches.

Mike Ellingsen knows that as in the music and drama lessons he imparts to his students, artistry is in perfecting the details. For 20 years, Ellingsen has melded countless fabric swatches and delicate thread into more than 90 heirloom quilts.

It was watching his wife work on a sewing machine that first drew his interest. “I thought, ‘It’s just another power tool so it looks fun,’” he recalls. When the couple saw a quilt on a magazine cover that they liked, they considered its expense and decided to take a crack at making one themselves. Ellingsen has primarily taught himself, using books and watching instructional TV shows. While he’s certainly not the only male quilter out there, he says men practicing the art are “a pretty rare breed, maybe one in 100.”

His work has garnered the attention of not only the myriad recipients of his creations, but also the area quilting community. This year, he was the featured quilter at a quilting exposition in his hometown of Blue Earth, and he designed a special blanket for the event, featuring 150-year-old pictures from the town’s history.

The tranquility of the hobby appeals most to the man whose day is filled with a medley of sounds, sometimes cacophonous.

“I spend my whole day using my voice, but quilting is silent,” Ellingsen says.

When you look back on 2007, what’s the one thing you most want to be able to say about your year?

November 2006

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Talk Back!

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Ask the Experts

Reading about culturally responsive teaching is one thing. Actually stepping into the classroom for the first time and trying it is quite another. If you’ve got questions about the best way to get started or refine the approach you’re currently taking, our panel of advisors has answers. Our panel includes:

	Wendy Miller —Fifth-year teacher at Meany Middle School in Seattle . Miller knows what it’s like to start out fearful of the straight talk required for culturally responsive teaching. And she also knows that sticking with the work pays big dividends in the classroom.
	Jacqueline Jordan Irvine —An educational studies professor at Emory University in Atlanta , Jordan Irvine specializes in multicultural education and urban teacher education, particularly focusing on African Americans. She received two national book awards for her work, Black Students and School Failure.
	Magda Constantino —Director of the Evergreen Center for Educational Improvement, at The Evegreen State College in Olympia , Washington . In seminars, Costantino breaks culturally responsive teaching down into easily digestible parts for those who are new to the topic.
	Denny Hurtado —Director of the Washington state office of Indian Education. Hurtado, a former chairman of the Skokomish Nation, joined Costantino in developing a Native American reading curriculum that is being used across the state.

Send your questions to neaeditor@nea.org, and we’ll post the answers from our panel throughout the month.

__________________________________________________________

Question 1: Is there a common misstep that teachers make when first starting out with culturally responsive teaching?   

Jacqueline Jordan Irvine:
Some teachers believe that culturally responsive pedagogy is a “bag of tricks” that minimizes the difficulty of teaching some students of color. The reality is that culturally responsive pedagogy has its foundation in the concept of reflection and not in simplistic solutions and “quick fixes.” It is also an attitude about children and schools and an impetus for redefinition of teacher and student roles. It is a vehicle for social change, an empowering device, through which students of color gain access to knowledge previously denied them.

In addition, some teachers are unwilling to try to implement culturally responsive pedagogy because they believe that they must  master the details of all the cultures of students represented in the classroom. It is an unrealistic expectation for both experienced teachers and novice teachers striving to define personal and professional roles in reference to their school’s culture and curriculum, administrators’ and community expectations, and students’ individual learning needs. It appears that a more developmentally sound approach involves the creation of long-term and continuing internships that incorporate in- and out-of-school cultural immersion experiences where prospective teachers can acquire the necessary pedagogical and anthropological skills to make reasonable instructional decisions. These classroom decisions are based not on stereotyped cultural profiles of ethnic groups but rather on how culture may or may not contribute to an understanding of an individual student’s behavior.

Magda Constantino:
The most frequently observed misstep that I have seen is a perception by the teacher that he or she must be the “expert” on all cultures or at least on the culture they are currently “studying”. My advice would be to not be afraid to be a learner; to look for cultural informants and cultural teachers who will slowly guide the teacher and her students through the process of learning. Make your culturally responsive curriculum and inquiry curriculum and become a co-learner with your students.

Denny Hurtado:
One misstep that usually comes up when dealing with the Native American community, is that they think it is ok to invite a Native person to class to talk about Thanksgiving, and then they have the students dress like Indians. I know they mean well, but they are just perpetuating stereotypes of Native Americans, and think that we all wear war bonnets and ride horses. This is not ok. It is very disrespectful and teachers need to understand that the Native community takes offense to this type of behavior. (This incident just happened to a Native person in our state.)

Question 2:
What is a specific instance that you’ve observed, or had an educator share with you, about culturally responsive teaching engaging a student?

Magda Constantino:
Here is a story from a teacher who was teaching reading to Native American first grade non readers.  The children showed no interest in reading no matter what stories she brought to school.  She had heard about the Northwest Native American Reading Curriculum so she decided to bring it to class. The moment she told the children they were going to study canoes, the tribal children became very exited. A couple of months later I had the privilege to observe this class.  All of the children were fully engaged and they were all reading.  At the back of the classroom were several tribal grandmothers and parents observing and participating in the learning process. When the bell rang, the children started to walk out of the classroom when they were stopped by one of the Native boys: “Wait”, he said, “ I didn’t have a turn reading yet”.

Denny Hurtado:
Several educators have told me that once they started using our culturally responsive curriculum, their Native American students became more engaged, there was increased family involvement and less need for disciplinary actions. Too often, our students feel isolated and there is no connection between them and what they are learning, and the majority of school books and curriculum's aren't about them. Our books and curriculum are about their Native American culture and therefore, the students see themselves in the stories and have the background knowledge to read and understand these culturally responsive books.

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November 2006

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Classroom Activities

We found some examples of lessons created to bring culturally responsive teaching to life in the classroom. They can be adapted to address different cultures and different grades using the same basic framework. “Make it personal for your students,” says Native American education specialist Denny Hurtado, and “work with your local communities so it's authentic.”

 African-American History Lesson

Have students share their personal histories. This fosters verbal and writing abilities, encourages chronological thinking, and teaches about the gathering of data to create a history. The histories also allow students and teachers a chance to explore one another's racial identities and personal experiences. Have students discuss the following: What compelling differences do you find in your history and those of others? Considering the challenges others face, how might you interact with them differently in the future?

Source: How to Teach Students Who Don't Look Like You: Culturally Relevant Teaching Strategies, Bonnie M. Davis, 2006. Corwin Press.

Native American Reading Lesson

In this lesson, students learn about the role that hunting and gathering play in Native American culture, as well as family roles and relationships, while developing reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. Bring in different types of berries for students to identify (and snack on once the lesson is complete!) Have them study a map of local flora and fauna. Suggested readings could include Robert McClosky's Blueberries for Sal, or Lindsay George's Around the Pond. Distribute a printed recipe for freezer jam and have them circle the nouns and verbs. Offer extra credit if students work with a family member at home to make the jam and share details about the experience with the class.

Source: Northwest Native American Reading Curriculum , Hurtado and Costantino, 2002.

Hispanic Literature Lesson

Jumping into Shakespeare is rarely considered an easy or welcome task for students. But putting it in the context of their own culture can make a difference. Using the themes of family and cultural tension in Romeo and Juliet, students will be able to compare and contrast their own family relationships with their classmates, read for specific information, draw conclusions, and develop a vocabulary relevant to the materials. After reading passages from the play, have students discuss and write answers for the following questions that follow the play's examination of family and culture clashes: Who is the head of my household? Why? Are all family members equally responsible for the protection of the family unit? Should final decisions always be made in the same manner? Are families closer to each other on happy occasions or in crisis? How does where a family lives affect them? As an extended lesson, have students compile questions to ask their parents and grandparents comparing family life during their childhood and today.

Source: Cheryl Merritt, 2005. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.

Asian-American Business and Marketing Lesson

 Have students select a magazine and compare the number of ads featuring Asian-American models with the total number of ads, and describe the product and company that any Asian-American model is promoting. As a discussion or writing prompt, ask, Does the ad maintain or break common stereotypes about Asian Americans? Does it contain potentially derogatory images or language? If you could recreate the ad, how might you do so? The lesson helps students understand how advertising constructs or deconstructs stereotypes about Asian Americans, leads to discussion of students' culture, and promotes critical thinking and composition skills.

Source: Teaching About Asian Pacific Americans, Edith Wen-Chu and Glenn Omatsu, 2006. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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November 2006

Talk About It

Print and Online Resources

C.A.R.E.: Strategies for Closing the Achievement Gaps, NEA Human and Civil Rights, can be downloaded at http://www.nea.org/teachexperience/careguide.html. A few summers ago, NEA gathered a diverse group of researchers, practitioners, Association staff, and community advocates to identify ways to close achievement gaps. This guide is the product of that work, and readers will find it offers great insight on what works best for poor and/or culturally and linguistically diverse students. It can help you reflect, plan, and implement approaches to addressing cultural, economic, and language differences, undeveloped abilities, resilience, effort and motivation.

Cultural Competence: A Primer for Educators, Jerry V. Diller and Jean Moule, Thomson Wadsworth, $40.95 (online booksellers recently had new and used copies for sale for $27). A quick read, this short book offers a great introduction for student teachers and any other educator new to culturally responsive teaching. It focuses not so much on the students, but on the social and psychological factors that shape a teacher's ability to work with students of different backgrounds than their own. Nervous about trying the method? You're not the only one, as you'll learn in Chapter 2! This book is a favorite among Association staff who train members in culturally responsive teaching.

Culturally Responsive Teaching, Jacqueline J. Irvine and Beverly J. Armento, McGraw-Hill Publishers, $59.69 (online booksellers recently had new and used copies for sale for $35). This offering synthesizes cultural and historical knowledge of specific minority groups into examples for instructional use in various subjects. There are geometry lessons using patterns in Navajo rugs, African textiles, and Mexican pottery. A science lesson links cultural folk tales and expressions with the weather. Pre-service teachers and teachers new to the method will get a leg up on creating culturally responsive lesson plans for their classrooms

How to Teach Students Who Don't Look Like You, Bonnie M. Davis, Corwin Press, $29.95. This book has strategies and activities that address culturally responsive teaching at all grades and for myriad subjects. It also includes reflection questions, staff development activities, and a facilitator's guide. It can help you examine your own culture's impact on your teaching and examine the impact of racism on your students' lives.

What Is It About Me You Can't Teach?, Eleanor Renee Rodriguez and James Bellanca, Corwin Press, $34.95. Teachers who are successful with culturally responsive teaching say that setting high expectations for all students, regardless of race and economic status, is essential. The newly updated edition of this book discusses the challenges faced by urban students and examines research focusing on “high expectations” instruction. It includes sample lesson plans covering culturally responsive teaching.

Teaching About Asian Pacific Americans, Edith Wen-Chu Chen and Glenn Omatsu, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., $39.95. While the number of Asian American students is soaring in classrooms, classroom materials often don't include their version of the American experience. This resource guide has interactive activities, assignments, and strategies for classrooms or workshops. It also contains extensive background information on issues that concern Asian Pacific Americans, which can be especially helpful for educators who are approaching culturally responsive teaching with these students for the first time.

Kids Like Me, Judith M. Blohm and Terri Lapinsky, Intercultural Press, $22.95. Twenty-six students share their stories about coming to America, learning English, and making a home for themselves in a new community. Using their words, photos, and maps, the book offers an excellent, first-hand insight to students' cultural identities. While written to help students understand their classmates, it also includes discussion questions, self-directed activities, and research ideas for educators to use in the classroom.

Northwest Native American Reading Curriculum DVD and guide, Denny Hurtado and Magda Costantino, Indian Education Office, available for free at http:/www.evergreen.edu/ecei. The interactive DVD contains reading passages, photos, and video clips, including interviews with tribal elders. It offers an excellent overview of how a culture can be woven into state standards to make for an engaging curriculum. The authors point out that educators could easily adapt the types of lessons and activities to suit other cultures. The companion guide, Reading and the Native American Learner, focuses on sources of educational difficulties among Indian American students, their implications for teachers, and how to craft an effective reading curriculum.

Oyate This site offers information about evaluating texts, resource materials and fiction by and about Native peoples for anti-American Indian biases.

NEA: Minority Community Outreach Get news, event listings, and activity ideas for closing the achievement gaps from NEA's newly redesigned Minority Community Outreach website. The site is comprised of separate sections addressing education issues, community issues, and demographic information for Black, Hispanic, Asian Pacific Islander, American Indian, and Alaska Native communities.

Visit Teaching Tolerance for tips and strategies on culturally responsive teaching.

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November 2006

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Sounds Great, But How Do I Do It?

Reading about culturally responsive teaching is one thing, trying it in the classroom is quite another. Here’s what the experts—and the teachers and ESPs just like you who have tried the approach—think you should know. Some of this may sound familiar, but consider how intensely you’re delving into these methods.

Question Everything You Know

Start by asking yourself a few questions: Do I know the cultural background of each of my students? Do I integrate literature and resources from their cultures into my lessons? Do I consistently begin my lessons with what students already know from home, community, and school? Do I understand the differences between academic language and my students’ social language, and do I find ways to bridge the two?

Contemplate the home life of the student who is sleepy-eyed or apathetic on a particular morning. Perhaps one of his family responsibilities is caring for a younger sibling or an after-school job. The student with the incomplete homework might be hobbled by her parents’ inability to speak English. A student who doesn’t turn in an assignment describing her house might be reluctant to admit in front of classmates that she lives in a homeless shelter.

“You can’t fix most of these things,” says researcher Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, “but knowing about them can help you make adjustments and provide support.”

Consider cultural cues as well. In some cultures, making eye contact with authority figures or speaking loudly to them is considered disrespectful. “Students’ frames of reference can clash with classroom norms,” says American Indian education specialist Denny Hurtado. “Some Native Americans want to silently try to work on things before speaking,” he says. “But teachers fear that they just don’t want to participate.”

Says Meany Middle School teacher Wendy Miller, “Examine your frame of reference.” Or, as Irvine puts it, “Be curious.”

Don’t Just Guess or Fall Back on Old Assumptions

Instead, let students talk about elements of their culture, both positive and negative, removing the burden from you to speculate or ask questions that you fear might be too probing. You can start with an assignment that asks students to discuss their life outside of school. For instance, in NEA’s educator guide Culture, Abilities, Resilience, Effort: Strategies for Closing the Achievement Gaps, teachers are urged to have students describe what they enjoy doing outside of school, with whom they spend most of their time, and whom they admire. Having children elaborate on their culture provides a shortcut to learn more about them, while they practice writing skills.

In one activity, students write about their culture’s celebrations, greeting styles, beliefs about hospitality, the role of family, and attitudes about personal space and privacy. Another has them pen short descriptions of the languages they speak, the music they listen to, the foods they eat at home, what is considered polite and rude in their family, what manners they have been taught, what they wear on special occasions, and what role extended family plays in their life. Imagine how much of an icebreaker such an activity could be. 

Get Out of the Classroom

Irvine believes the first step toward cultural competency is heading out into students’ neighborhoods. “Go to their homes, go to the African-American churches, go to the Hispanic community centers.” But proceed respectfully. “You have to have cultural ambassadors,” Irvine says, pointing to fellow staff members, community leaders, or a parent with whom the teacher already has a connection as potential liaisons. “You have to be invited in. Don’t just show up to an African-American church like it’s a field trip.” Each semester, Irvine, who is Black, brings her teaching students to such gathering places in Atlanta. “Once teachers made the effort, the respect for them rose,” she says. Stepping into new environments is rarely easy, but can pay significant dividends. “We have to step outside of our comfort zones and push ourselves,” says NEA’s Denise Alston. “It will make a difference to the child.”

Parent-teacher meetings are valuable tools, but the culturally responsive teacher moves beyond the traditional framework for such get-togethers, considering, for example, the schedule of parents working more than one job. Find out if your district has translators or cultural interpreters available and invite them to attend. Or consider meeting with parents at a location in their community.

In Seattle, grant money—including a $250,000 grant from the NEA Foundation—helps pay for teachers to spend days out in the community, familiarizing themselves with the culture of the students it sends to school.

Teach Them Using What They Already Know

Consider your minority and low-income students’ experiences as valuable tools, not deficits, says Alston. It’s called an “assets-based model,” and it means taking what others might discount as problems for the child—poverty, English as a second language—and viewing them as building blocks for perseverance and resilience.

Using your newly widened frame of reference (remember the first point?), try recalibrating your lessons to match their experiences. For instance, when giving a geography lesson, use the names and patterns of students’ neighborhood streets. In social studies, do a substantial unit on South America, Africa, or Asia, inviting students to talk about what they know about the lands from which their families hail. Have your math students write a rap song to describe a principle, such as how to reduce fractions. If your elementary school students use public transportation, have them bring in bus or subway schedules and use them as the focal point for a lesson on time or map reading. “It says to a child, ‘You bring something,’” says Alston, “and it lets you build on that.”

East Haven, Connecticut, teacher Joseph Marangell’s ninth-grade history students spend the first five minutes of the period writing in journals “about issues relevant to both their own lives and the history curriculum,” he says. The East Haven High students then share their writing, “providing a springboard for each day’s lesson.”

Use the Work of Those Ahead of You

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to selecting appropriate books or lesson plans. Hurtado recalls the day he decided to talk about American Indian canoes in conjunction with a reading lesson and opened a book on the topic. The pictures misidentified American Indian tribes—something he, as a member of the Skokomish Tribe, quickly spotted, but someone else might not have realized.

With that in mind, he and partner Magda Costantino did the heavy lifting, designing their American Indian reading curriculum on a DVD that contains reading passages, photos, and video clips, including interviews with tribal elders. This fall, the pair is adapting the program for the U.S. Department of Education to use nationwide. A similar effort is in full swing in Wisconsin, where members of the state’s 11 tribes have partnered with the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) in developing a culturally responsive education package. Supported with NEA and WEAC grants, the package includes a teacher’s guide, DVDs, posters, and magazines. (Head to www. nea.org/crt for more culturally responsive teaching tools.)

Reach out to those who have come before you, too. Within the Black community, retired teachers can be tapped as a resource to share their strategies for reaching ethnic minorities. “There are people out there who know how to do it,” says Irvine. “We need to find them.

Know That You’re Supported

For NEA, promoting culturally responsive teaching is not subject to the fickle winds of education reform. It’s part of the Association’s resolutions, which state clearly that ethnic-minority teachers must be involved in selecting educational materials and those resources should contain points of view that realistically portray ethnic minorities’ lives. NEA plans to allocate $200,000 over the next two years to promote adoption of cultural competence standards for educators in five policy arenas affecting educator preparation, induction, and professional development.

Tap into Lesson Plans

Culturally responsive lessons available in books and online can often be adapted to address different cultures and different grades. “Make it personal for your students,” says Hurtado, and “work with your local communities so it’s authentic.”

For example, the book Teaching About Asian Pacific Americans offers an adaptable business and marketing lesson. Students select a magazine and compare the number of ads featuring Asian-American models with the total number of ads, and describe the product and company that these models promote. Students then discuss or write about how the ad maintains or breaks stereotypes. Does it have derogatory images or language? Students are asked how they might recreate the ad.

Visit www.nea.org/crt for additional examples of lessons geared toward American Indians, Blacks, and Hispanics.

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November 2006

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Online Resources for Culturally Responsive Teachers

Culturally Responsive Teaching isn’t about heroes and holidays. It’s about connecting the classroom to the “realities of what students know and live,” as Emory University researcher Jacqueline Jordan Irvine puts it.  Browse our online collection of resources, including:

Sounds Great, But How Do I Do It?

Here's what the experts and the teachers and ESPs just like you who have tried the approach-think you should know about culturally-responsive teaching.

Ask the Experts

You've got questions about culturally responsive teaching and our panel has answers. Read what your colleagues are wondering and send in your won questions.

Classroom Activities

We found some examples of lessons created to bring culturally responsive teaching to life in the classroom.

Print and Online Resources

If you're just starting out, go to the books and guides that your Association has published, or ones that are recommended by noted researchers. Here are a few.

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November 2006

Where We Teach

Baldwin, North Dakota

Pioneer Spirit

As small schools across the Northern Plains consolidate, a town fights to preserve its rural, two-room schoolhouse.

by Cindy Long

The spelling and grammar lesson in Steven Podoll’s classroom is a little like the changing of the guard. “Fifth-graders, please come up,” Podoll calls. Two students push back their chairs and rise to meet him at a table in the front of the room, passing two fourth-graders on their way back to their seats with their assignment. Half an hour later, two sixth-graders replace the fifth-graders. Finally, the seventh-grader is called up. And so it goes for math, science, reading, and the rest of the subjects the fourth- through eighth-graders in Podoll’s class study at this two-classroom rural school in Baldwin, North Dakota.

The Baldwin School sits on a small hill in the center of “town”—just behind the hand-printed “Welcome to Baldwin” sign and across the railroad tracks from a white clapboard post office the size of a toolshed. It overlooks the wide northern plains that roll on for miles before meeting the sky.

The town itself lies on a country road east of Highway 83, about 15 miles into the sloping grasslands of the open prairie north of Bismarck. The population hovers around 54 or 55, according to the local postmaster. A community of farmers and ranchers, the people of Baldwin have for generations worked the land through storms, drought, grassfires, and blizzards. Like fluctuating crops of grain, the town has grown and flourished, withered and shrunk. But it’s always endured, thanks in large part to the town school that first opened its doors in 1908.

For those who live in Baldwin and other small towns across the country’s Great Plains, the prairie isn’t just a place, it’s a way of life—and one that may be drawing to a close as farmers sell off land and livestock, urban areas sprawl, and small towns dwindle. With them go the country schoolhouses that once dotted the landscape. North Dakota alone had more than 4,700 one-room schools in the early 1900s. Now only a handful remain, and as is the case elsewhere in the Midwest, state laws and declining populations are prompting many small schools to either consolidate or close.

Often, a town’s school is its last foothold. When the school closes, the town dies. And that’s exactly what the people of Baldwin hope to prevent. “If the school closed, it would be as if Baldwin suffered a stroke,” says Podoll. “It might survive, but barely.”

This year, there are no eighth-graders in Podoll’s class, which has just seven students—two each in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, and one seventh-grader, a tall, blonde girl named Tori, who often helps the younger students, including her sixth-grade brother, Travis. Next door in the K–3 classroom, fellow teacher Beth Duey has eight students—a few of them with siblings in Podoll’s class.

Over the years, the population of the school has reflected the prosperity of the town. When it first opened in 1908, eight years after Baldwin was founded, teacher W.E. Yeater (gender not recorded) had 26 students and earned $50 a month. The population held steady through the teens and twenties, growing to 37 students in 1934—a class that, according to the records, included six “farm boys,” six “farm girls,” 12 “town boys,” and 13 “town girls.” Then the Dust Bowl spread northward and depression gripped the country. By 1937, just 11 students were enrolled in the Baldwin School.

Slowly, the town population rebounded. By the 1950s school enrollment was back in the 30s and 40s, but Baldwin was never the same. In its heyday, the town boomed with banks, hotels, grain elevators, a lumber yard, newspaper, train depot—even a dance hall. A series of fires razed many businesses, others simply closed their doors. Today, the center of town consists of a post office, a railroad track crossing, a handful of houses, and the Baldwin School.

That list might get shorter if North Dakota’s state legislature passes a bill that would require elementary schools with fewer than 100 students to consolidate with a district that has a high school. After the eighth grade, Baldwin students currently have a choice between high schools in Bismarck to the south or the “bigger small town” of Wilton to the north.

Although the Baldwin school wouldn’t immediately close—the town must vote whether to keep it open—residents feel the passage of S.B. 2333 would make it inevitable. “It’s taxation without representation,” says Podoll. “It would take local control of the school away from Baldwin, and it would divert property taxes to the [consolidated] district. Nobody in Baldwin wants this to happen. Everyone realizes that when you stop funding schools, towns suffer.”

According to Marty Strange, policy director at the Rural Schools and Community Trust, a national nonprofit addressing the relationship between schools and communities, consolidation is “hot in areas with depressed rural economies and where urban areas are growing fast.” Both descriptions fit Baldwin. A prolonged three-year drought has sapped local farmers, and the edge of Bismarck is creeping closer, with Baldwin sitting in the shadow of Bismarck’s new Super Wal-Mart, a short 15-minute drive down the highway.

The argument for consolidation, Strange says, is that it lowers taxes for the citizens of rural towns and provides children with access to a wider array of classes and services. “But people know their local schools work,” he says. “And rural America has paid through the nose for the privilege of having good schools in their communities. They’ve shown time and again that they’re willing to sacrifice to keep them.”

That’s been the case in Baldwin, where town residents have repeatedly voted to raise their mill levies to keep the school open, according to Gerry Ann Small, an aide at the Baldwin School. Her husband and three children attended the school, and she’s quick to point out that all of her kids remained on the honor roll in high school after graduating from Baldwin. “Our kids get a solid education here,” she says. “A Bismarck teacher once told me she could always pick out the country kids—they were ready to study, polite, and always willing to help their neighbor,” she says.

The legislation is coming up for a vote again this year, and “they’re in for another fight,” says Small. “This school is the heart and soul of our community.”

On the first day of school, the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter visits the Baldwin School for the first flag-raising of the year (the flag pole was donated by the VFW in honor of five Baldwin soldiers killed in the Vietnam War). In December, the town gathers at the school for its holiday program, and the students go caroling from farmhouse to farmhouse, where they’re greeted with warm cookies or cider. For Valentine’s Day, grandparents are invited to school for breakfast. The students even organized a Youth Citizen’s League so they could volunteer within the community. They raised money to help a newlywed couple whose home burned down, for a local firefighter badly injured on the job, and to buy clothing and winter gear for needy children.

And then there are the basketball games. Two coed teams—fourth through eighth grade, and second through third, compete against four other rural schools in Burleigh County. The first-graders are the cheerleaders, complete with uniforms and pom-poms. “When the Baldwin Bullets play, that gym is plum full with folks from town,” Small says.

One of their most loyal fans is the postmaster, Gail Gordon, who was born in Baldwin in 1942 and has lived there ever since. Gordon believes the school, like the post office, is central to Baldwin’s small-town character. “When a small town loses its school or its post office, it loses its identity,” she says.

Gordon’s father was the postmaster when she started out as a clerk in 1958. Before the building was converted into a post office, it was St. John’s Lutheran Church (the pulpit is still intact). Before it became a church, it was a “rolling schoolhouse” that sat perched atop timbers and was pulled by horses from field to field where farm children could take a break for their lessons. When Gordon stands at her counter, she looks out at the present-day school yard, where she can watch the kids play during recess. “I went to school there, my dad went to school there, and my daughter went to school there,” she says. “It’s always been a fine school.”

It still is. The students benefit from a low student-teacher ratio; access to technology (there’s nearly one computer for every student, all with wireless Internet connections); a built-in tutoring system with older kids helping younger students; and a sense of community that’s difficult to develop in larger schools. And because there is just one teacher for multiple grades, there’s a consistency that allows the teacher to more effectively track progress, address problems, and become a support system.

“I teach one student for five years, every day, for five or six hours,” Podoll says. “In a setting like this, these students become a member of your family. How can I not do my best to see these students succeed? How can I not care about them and their futures?”

The start of the school day is almost like a scene from Little House on the Prairie. Podoll stands on the steps and rings a bell, alerting the kids playing in the school yard that it’s time to come in for class. After the Pledge of Allegiance, the students each pull out their water bottles for a 20-second drink. “Why do we drink water each morning?” Podoll asks. “Because it goes straight to our brains,” the kids chime back.

While most of the curriculum is broken down by grade, Podoll tries to find a few lessons appropriate for all levels. One is the lesson in daily oral language, where Podoll writes “bad” sentences on the board and the students find the mistakes. He also teaches the students a new word of the day—he got the idea the year he received a “Word of the Day” calendar for Christmas. The favorite all-class activity is the daily reading period, when Podoll reads aloud. “He always stops at a cliffhanger,” says Small. “That way, the kids want to read the next chapter. He’s really turned them on to reading.”

Podoll grew up in Hazen, North Dakota, about an hour’s drive from Baldwin. Valedictorian of his high school class of 53 students, he got a full academic scholarship to the University of North Dakota, where he studied communications with hopes of becoming an ESPN announcer, until he became “somewhat disillusioned with the behavior of the modern athlete.” He decided to become a teacher, not only for the chance to work with kids, but also because he wanted to touch as many lives as possible.

“There hasn’t been a day since that I’ve regretted the decision,” he says. “Getting to know these kids and being an integral part of their lives is an experience that is at times impossible to describe.”

His students have no such trouble describing him—and funny tops their list of adjectives. Podoll cracks jokes about canceling recess (the students check each day to make sure it’s still on), he accuses the students of turning his hair gray (he’s only 29), and he uses words like “ba-bada-bingo” when the kids nail an answer. He’s also fond of practical jokes.

“He’s fun and smart,” says Chantelle, one of the two fifth-graders. She lives on a farm with 350 cattle, three horses, and “a bunch of cats and kittens.” One of her daily chores is to feed and water the horses in the barn; her horse, Cody, is sorrel with a white blaze on his forehead. She also helps with the herd, giving shots to the calves. “I’ve been kicked a few times,” she says.
She might stay in Baldwin and help her brothers with the farm when she grows up, or she might become a marine biologist. She’s still deciding.

In the meantime, her grandmother drives her the 10 miles to school each day, and Chantelle says she couldn’t imagine going anywhere else. “It’s not too big. I like little schools,” she says. “You get lots of help, the kids are nice—nobody is mean. I think it’s the best education there is.”

Slideshow Photos by Nancy Kuehn

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November 2006

Feature

Talk Back!

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Why Money Matters

Some educators live in shelters.
Others work five jobs to make ends meet.
And for all of us, a lack of professional pay shortchanges our schools.

by Mary Ellen Flannery

Do you make enough money?

Stop laughing.

Of course, you probably don’t—not for what you do, how you do it, and the years of preparation and education that went into it. New teachers in America can expect to earn about $31,408 a year, according to a recent study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Compare that with $51,162 for similarly educated new field engineers or $44,345 for registered nurses.

And it’s not getting any better. Teacher salaries have risen a scant 0.8 percent since 1996, says the Economic Policy Institute. That’s a whole lot less than the 12 percent increase other college-educated workers have enjoyed over the same period.

What those numbers mean for the six teachers and education support professionals (ESPs) on the following pages is uncertain futures, second jobs (maybe third, fourth, and fifth jobs), and sleepless nights until the first of the month. For others, it means leaving the profession. It also can mean signing onto a professional pay campaign in your local Association or joining NEA’s efforts to ensure a minimum $40,000 salary for all teachers and a living wage for education support professionals. To learn more, go to www.nea.org/pay.

Teacher by day. Locksmith by night.

Since Bob Moehlig became a father, he’s given up on the midnight runs to locked-out homes, but he still spins locks, sets pins, and opens doors on weekends and summer days. He has to—he and his wife, another teacher, need the extra cash from his second job to pay their bills.
After nine years of teaching math to the “kings of middle school” (the eighth-graders, that is) in Glenwood, Illinois, Moehlig makes just $41,000—less money than he did in his first job in accounting—“and that was 10 years ago!” he adds.

“For us, the first thing is the kids, making sure they get what they need,” he says of his 5-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter. That means Christmas savings accounts, used cars, and no vacations—not the kind involving bathing suits, anyway. He and his wife usually serve as delegates to NEA’s Representative Assembly in July, and sometimes they tack on an extra day to visit the local sites. (This year, the kids got lucky—it was Disney in Orlando!)         
In June, he gets paid for the entire summer. But, “by August, it’s peanut butter and jelly for lunch and dinner,” he says.

Can you afford hope on $804?

This is not an urban legend: There are actually NEA members who make so little money that they live in homeless shelters. Debbie Ennels is one of them.

As a classroom aide, Ennels takes home $804 a month. She’s willing to spend half of that on rent. But this past summer, when Ennels’ landlord sold her apartment building, she couldn’t find any place on Maryland’s Eastern Shore for so little. She and her 15-year-old grandson were on their way to…who knows, maybe sleeping in her car, when a co-worker suggested the Village of Hope.

Now Ennels and her teenager live with recovering addicts, recent parolees, and others who say their lives are “in transition.” It’s cheap—the charity in charge asks for 30 percent of her take-home pay. In return, she follows their rules. Curfew is at 10 p.m. In her tiny one-bedroom, there’s no phone. If she wanted to visit with a male friend, they would be required to meet in the “common room,” under the watchful eye of the front desk clerk. This fall, when her daughter gets married, she will need to get approval for an overnight pass.

“It’s sort of like being in jail,” Ennels says grimly. And yet, she’s grateful. She can stay in the Village for two years, work on finishing her college degree in education, and then try again to find a place for $402 a month.

In the meantime, working down the street at Chipman Elementary with the youngest, most needy, worst-behaved, and best-loved (at least by her) students is her passion. She’s got kids who can’t smile; she’s got kids who cuss her out.

“I look at them like they’re my children. And I think, ‘What would I want for my own kids?’ So I’m hard on them. I practice tough love….I’ve never been in it for the money,” she says. “But the way my situation is now, I could use it.”

Talk about tough jobs.

Carol Neitzel, an Idaho Falls education support professional, works with the kids who bite their teachers, kick their classmates, and pick up their desks and fling them across the room.

“[Teachers] don’t have time to deal with these problems,” explains Neitzel, a behavioral specialist. “When they send them to me, I focus on getting their behavior back in order so they can go back to the classroom.” For this work, Neitzel earns under $11 an hour. “Not very much,” she concedes.

To make ends meet, Neitzel works at the local movie theater on weekends, earning $6 an hour selling tickets to such fare as Snakes on a Plane. At times, she also works for the county’s election office, earning $8 an hour. Her husband, who is disabled, is unable to work.

“I’ve had children who have been wards of the state, taken away from their parents and considered ‘unadoptable,’ but because of the work that I did, and others, too, they’ve been able to leave the state hospital and be placed with foster families,” she says. “But the state doesn’t value what we do—and until they do, they won’t put a proper price tag on it.”

An empty cupboard, A full slate of bills.

If Allison Wegg had more money, she wouldn’t eat quesadillas every night. “I’d probably buy better groceries,” she says—like strawberries. Oh, the life of a new teacher, earning $30,000 and living in one of the nation’s most expensive cities. She lives in a $500-a-month, one-room apartment in the center of Seattle. To make space for her couch, her bed sits on a loft. “I don’t think I’ll ever have a house in Seattle, unless I marry a millionaire,” she says.

For now, Wegg relies on the generosity of her parents. Her mother, who is a bookkeeper, has tallied the cost of their loans at more than $10,000. “I want to show them that I can make it,” Wegg says. “But every month, I end up overdrawing my checking account or taking a cash advance on my credit card.”

This will be Wegg’s second year as a full-time special education teacher in Kent, Washington. And, even though her job means she drives an unreliable car, can’t afford graduate school, and eats too many nachos, she loves it.

“I see myself teaching forever,” she says. “I knew I wasn’t going to make a lot of money…although now that I’m actually doing it, it’s like, wow, it’s really not very much money!”

Top of the scale, but still undervalued.

A 27-year veteran, Yolanda Gutierrez probably makes more money than most teachers. But even in places where teachers are better compensated than peers in other states, it’s still tough to pay the bills. Every summer, the elementary school teacher must borrow against her pension to stay afloat.

 “I get by. I pay my mortgage. But it’s barely enough to make ends meet,” says Gutierrez of her $73,000 top-of-the-scale annual salary. While New Jersey ranks among the top states for pay, consider its average new home price ($488,917), sales tax (6 percent), and state income tax (6.5 percent).

The single mother relies on salary supplements from at least three extracurricular clubs, including drama and chorus, to pay the bills. Then, in what little time is left in her day, instead of another paid job, she takes on leadership positions with her local and state Association. “In other words, I have to sacrifice to do what’s best for me as an Association member.”

Her daughter, who is 20, flirts with the idea of teaching—but with tepid enthusiasm from mom. “It’s a noble profession, but we don’t make enough money, and we don’t get the respect given to any other professional.... Frankly, I want something better for my child.”

One man, five jobs:
He drives, ministers, mentors, and more.

At 6 a.m., Jerry Parham starts his school bus, checks the tires and other safety features, and warms it up for the kids. By 8:15, Parham is in his Virginia classroom, preparing his lessons as an instructional aide for special education students. At 3:15, he’s a bus driver again. A few hours later, he’s a paid mentor for local teens. Then, as the sun disappears, he puts on his ministerial robes and tends to his flock.

 What’s that—four jobs? Well, there’s a fifth, too. He also works as a private driver for a tour bus company. And Parham is also a full-time college student, using community grants to help pay for his education degree. And did we mention that he’s a leader in his local Association’s campaign for a living wage? (For more information—or inspiration—see www.sussexlivingwage.org.)

“There’s a lot going on in the typical day,” he laughs. “I try to sleep three or four hours.” When he’s lucky, he pulls an extra driving shift, taking Sussex County’s athletes to a game, and earns a little more cash. “I’ll be sitting in the bleachers, attempting to do my homework.”

After 10 years as a school bus driver, Parham earns $10,627 a year. After eight years as a classroom aide (a job that he “loves, loves, loves!”), he earns $16,128. It’s not always easy to pay the bills for the tidy, red-shuttered house that he inherited from his mother. His monthly mortgage is $863; a recent electric bill added up to $226. (It’s a good thing he grows his own apples in the backyard!)

And yet, he says, “Not everybody is as lucky as me.” Another county bus driver relies on food stamps and forgos health insurance to pay the mortgage. One skipped a medical test to pay for groceries. He knows a guy who has been driving the bus for 47 years—and earns $13,000.

 

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November 2006

Talk About It

Talk Back!

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Resources for Educators

Culturally Responsive Teaching isn’t about heroes and holidays. It’s about connecting the classroom to the “realities of what students know and live,” as Emory University researcher Jacqueline Jordan Irvine puts it.  Browse our online collection of resources, including:

Sounds Great But How Do I Do It?

 Here's what the experts-and the teachers and ESPs just like you who have tried the approach-think you should know about culturally-responsive teaching.

Print and Online Resources

If you're just starting out, go to the books and guides that your Association has published, or ones that are recommended by noted researchers. Here are a few.

Classroom Activities

We found some examples of lessons created to bring culturally responsive teaching to life in the classroom.

Ask the Experts

If you've got questions about the best way to get started or refine the approach you're currently taking, our panel of advisors has answers.

Return to It's There: Talk About It

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November 2006

 Culturally Responsive Teaching

Talk Back!

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Race and poverty don’t need to be the elephants in the classroom. As culturally responsive teaching takes root, these issues can actually help your students learn.

By Cynthia Kopkowski

There is no such thing as an elephant in the room in Mona Mendoza’s classroom.

“How many consider this ghetto?” she asks her middle school students in response to the reading passage they’re working through, which focuses on a girl being slighted at a party because she is Latina and low-income. More than three-quarters of Mendoza’s students at Meany Middle School in Seattle are ethnic minorities. She follows her initial question with, “Give me some examples of behavior that seems ghetto.” Her students, who had been following along with the assignment quietly, snap to attention. Suddenly, almost everyone has something to say. Discussion quickly turns to stereotypes and how many of them had experienced racism or been slighted for being poor.

Talking with students about sometimes painful personal experiences connected to their race or economic standing did not come easy. But as the head of the school’s diversity committee, a veteran teacher, and a minority, Mendoza’s more comfortable than most treading this potentially rocky path. She believes connecting with students’ personal backgrounds—a method known as culturally responsive teaching—is the key to closing achievement gaps at a school where the student body is 84 percent Black, Asian American, Hispanic, or American Indian, and 65 percent are poor.

Down the hall though, what is math teacher Wendy Miller to do? Can a White, middle-class teacher raised in a White, middle-class suburb, talk about race without being labeled a racist? Can she talk about the realities of the poverty in which many of her students live without being accused of being elitist? More to the point, why would she even want to risk it?

Born and raised in Orange County, California, and the San Francisco Bay area, the 35-year-old teacher grew up attending schools with students who lived and looked like her. Like nearly half of the teachers at Meany, she came to the school fresh from college, and has around five years of teaching experience. Like 65 percent of the staff, she is Caucasian. Her preservice training didn’t delve into culturally responsive teaching.

In her earliest days at Meany, the rookie stood before her math class and told them that minorities, especially those who are poor, face significant obstacles when it comes to academic success and college admissions. “I was really nervous about bringing up anything about race or socioeconomics,” Miller says, adding that one thought always nagged: “Why would they listen to me?”

Miller isn’t an anomaly. Eighty percent of preservice teachers are White females, setting up an unavoidable disparity between teacher and taught. While increasing the number of minority teachers nationwide is crucial, “the challenge is not to match the color of the kids they teach,” says Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, an Emory University researcher and advocate for culturally responsive teaching. “The challenge is to find better ways to connect to the realities of what students know and live.”

One unavoidable reality is the continuing achievement gaps. According to the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, 13 percent of Black and 19 percent of Hispanic fourth-graders performed at or above proficiency in math, compared with 47 percent of their White counterparts; similar gaps existed among eighth-graders tested. When poverty is factored into NAEP math performance, there is a 22- to 27-point gap between poor and non-poor fourth- and eighth-graders, respectively. And given that minority groups now account for 12.4 percent of the population—and growing—it’s an issue no longer relegated to select schools or states. “Because of the changing demographics of our schools, ignoring it is no longer an option,” says Sheila Simmons, director of NEA Human and Civil Rights.

Nor is giving it lip service. Culturally responsive teaching is not about one lesson on Martin Luther King Jr. during Black History Month. It is not serving tacos in the cafeteria on Cinco de Mayo. Beyond heroes and holidays, it is about understanding students’ home life, their language, music, dress, behavior, jokes, ideas about success, the role of religion and community in their lives, and more. It is bringing the experiences of their 24-hour day into the seven-hour school day to give them information in a familiar context. Like the teacher in Atlanta who conducts a geometry lesson by talking about geometric patterns in Mexican pottery and African kente cloth and has students bring in examples from home. Or the veteran Chicago teacher who uses “your mama” jokes (clean ones only, of course) to teach students about wordplay and advises fellow teachers that it’s a viable way to help disadvantaged Black students decipher complex literary pieces they are exposed to in the classroom.

“We are teaching the whole child, not teaching in a vacuum,” says Magda Costantino, a Washington researcher and academic who designed a reading curriculum that incorporates American Indian culture. “If we are serious about closing the achievement gap, we have to address the child within the context of his or her community.” Costantino, along with Denny Hurtado, an American Indian education specialist, created their curriculum after searching for culturally appropriate lessons and discovering none existed.

In states like Washington, Oregon, and Wisconsin, there’s been a move away from what Simmons calls “a more touchy-feely type of multicultural education that didn’t have a strong framework” to more concrete policies and plans. In Seattle, work began in earnest four years ago and now reaches across the entire district. But none of this comes easily. “Some teachers don’t feel there is a connection to make,” Irvine says. Meany Middle School faculty member Robert Bernstein voices the opposition he sometimes hears: “‘I’m spending a lot of time talking about race and not solving math problems.’”

More often, though, educators fear that they’ll say or do something wrong. “They feel that to bring up race makes them a racist,” Irvine says. “Race has become a four-letter word in schools.”

In the late 1990s, however, Meany Middle School’s reputation was dismal and race could no longer be ignored. Test scores were low. Discipline problems were high. Although the neighborhoods surrounding it are now seeing more middle-class growth, they were then largely poor. Race and poverty are the most significant factors in Meany’s students’ performance, says principal Princess Shareef, so when Seattle Public Schools decided to start implementing culturally responsive teaching district-wide four years ago, her school was a ripe target for the improvement it could bring.

A series of corrosively uncomfortable meetings about race kicked off the staff’s work. Called “Courageous Conversations,” the sessions brought everyone from teachers to education support professionals (ESPs) to administrators into a room to share their ideas about personal and institutional racism and their own life experiences. One of the first questions posed by the mediator—”Does racism exist at Meany?”—had people shifting in their chairs and staring at the floor, Bernstein recalls. When they finally started talking, “people’s different ranges of acceptance became evident,” he says. Shareef remembers thinking that there wasn’t much trust in the room. “Our feelings were pretty divided along racial lines,” she says. The long-dormant feeling that a staff member from a different race couldn’t possibly understand one’s own experiences was now out and hanging in the air.

“I don’t think you can move forward with effective culturally responsive teaching if you’re not uncomfortable,” Miller says. “It meant acknowledging that I don’t know everything about other cultures, and that we aren’t all the same. If you don’t have a staff that’s willing to go there, it won’t work.”

Unlike quick-hit diversity training seminars that merely skim the surface of race and economic status, these sessions marked the start of a lengthy journey. “It’s a process over time,” Miller says. “There’s no way I would have shared things two years ago that I now feel comfortable discussing.” Facilitators say the key is to not go too far too fast, or to accuse White, female teachers of being out of touch with their students. It’s unfair, and “people will shut down then,” Bernstein says.

Facilitators led similar conversations across the Seattle district as part of a systematic effort to bring issues of race and cultural identity out from under the rug. Faced with significant achievement gaps, administrators decided “we had to change because what we were doing was not working,” recalls Caprice Hollins, director of the district’s office of equity and race relations. That meant institutionalizing culturally responsive teaching, as well as considering all new policies, curriculum, and family outreach programs in the context of students’ cultures.
“We’re taking a customer service approach—how do we better understand our families?” says Hollins. Putting what’s learned into practice runs the gamut from academics to parent-teacher conference times and locations, including meeting with parents in their homes and at community centers, to food service options. At Meany, “our cafeteria personnel focus on things as simple as acknowledging that Muslim students don’t do pork, or that we may need more rice offerings,” Shareef says. “They know these things.”

Four years later, it’s clear that approach has become deeply ingrained at Meany Middle School. As Mendoza continues working with her students on the birthday party reading passage, she stops to not only have students discuss the misconceptions about race and money its character