My feisty competitiveness blossomed into a love for athletics. I played for every sports team my school offered and felt more gratitude being known as the fastest kid in the class rather than the smartest. As I became obsessed with sports, my teachers gently pushed me more and more into the realm of athletics. They always had something positive to say about my demonstration of skills during a game and were quick to remind me of their expectations of me on the playing field whenever I let them down.

And I tried to never let them down. On the sports field that is.

In the classroom, it was somewhat of a different story. If I did well on something, I was splashed with words that soaked more of surprise than they did of expectation. I didn’t know what the word anomaly meant back in high school but I know that I subconsciously felt like one on occasion after occasion. You actually did really well on this math test, Matthew? I am so proud of you. I heard you talking about your goals of going to university, Matthew. That is amazing. I am glad that you are thinking about that.

Why wouldn’t I be? Shouldn’t I? Is that not what is expected of me?

The power of high expectations for black students, when verbalized, go a long way in terms of how children see themselves. Many scholars have penned literature on the phenomenon within the black community, and especially with black males, of self-fulfilling prophecies. In a nutshell, it explains how so many black students pursue and eventually excel in sports. They do so because they are pushed into sports. And when they are pushed into a sport through positive projections and high expectations, they then work long and hard at mastering the skill set of said sport. And they become good at it. It all looks like one big happy story of perseverance and saviourism done through the good grace of over-looking teachers, who, by the way, tend to all be white.

If we take our one-sided views of what success can look like and mean for black students, and hold high expectations for them, perhaps we will have fewer student-athletes and more students. When we hold high expectations, in whatever form they may come, the sociological phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecies usually rings true. When I call my students geniuses three or four times a day, every day, I am not just doing it because that moniker sounds good. I am doing it because if students really believe that their teacher believes that they are smart, then they will spend a few more minutes studying and take a little more time when working on an assignment. And when they do that, they will get better grades. When they get better grades, they will believe that they are actual geniuses and the whole chicken and egg thing cycles through again and again. There is power in fostering a culture of high expectations for your black students. Don’t read this and slip into thinking about discipline and behavior, we can talk about that another day. I am solely talking about academics. Suturing high expectations with academics creates a mindset of the next LeBron James, only outside of the sports grounds.

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All, okay not all…many teachers use encouragement to foster academic excellence. It starts early with stickers. Elementary children love getting stickers on an assignment or test. Candy and extra gym time also work in fostering student excellence at an early age, despite the psychological “detriments” said methods purportedly raise. Let’s pause for a second to throw those wrong assumptions out the window: who doesn’t feel good about being acknowledged and getting tangibly rewarded for their efforts? Every single person on earth makes every single move they make for something that results in their personal benefit. (That’s not my personal opinion, that’s 100 years of psychological and sociological analysis vetted and confirmed by other smart people). But beyond what all the experts say, the most influential strategy any teacher can use for motivation is creating an atmosphere that validates young, impressionable minds through positive affirmations about their current state and potential future.

The students that comprise my class may not be the smartest cohort of students as a collective. But they damn sure act like it. There isn’t any academic challenge that they are unwilling to attempt. That is because throughout the year I have alluringly “put them on” to the idea that academic excellence is the archetypal way to earning my congratulatory acknowledgement. No, my yacht was not pre-modeled with a savior complex. I am not saying that all these kids want to earn my validation. Rather, I am suggesting that I have provided the allusion that academic excellence is the most honorable trait one could earn in the classroom by providing this notion in a nonchalant way. When you hail upon a student who doesn’t typically answer questions and then proceed to call him a genius after his answer, he becomes unfixed from his static state. When you do this over a period of time, he starts to feel like he is actually a genius. He starts to put his hand up to answer more questions and work more diligently on his tasks. Then, when you start to call him by the nickname “Professor” or “Doctor Last Name” he starts to feel validated in his potential to be that.

The key point to positive projections inside a classroom is that there is no premium or scarcity to the positive affirmations and labels you can provide as a teacher. Everyone can become the professor. Everyone in the class can be excellent. There are many things we face in our modern times that are mere illusions, be it race, gender or class. But perception is reality. When I tell my class they are the, “smartest bunch of 7^th graders I’ve ever taught” they believe it. And they should, because positive projections always have the potential to become realities.

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One of the things we are afraid to talk about in society, and by extension, in schools, is the idea of difference. We either negate or deflate the notion of difference by politically adopting a “color-blind” ethos towards practices and pedagogy (and leadership) because we think this, in fact, is a move in the right direction. If we believe this, we are wrong.

Difference is inevitable. Maintaining a color-blind ethos, and an ethos that extends to any other stereotypical, marginalized, and privileged determination without examining and investigating the root causes for such an observation is the real problem. It is true that we are all not the same, so marginalizing that conversation for the sake of political-correctness merely silences the important resolutions and growth that may come out of embracing our difference. This is where the dialogue starts at raw debate, strategically trying to “one up” eachother and eventually evolves into understanding…understanding difference, that is.

From the observable data, we select the data that is most appropriate and also most appropriating. Due to this convergence, we make meaning, or suture our analysis and fix bodies into particular spaces and places. When we draw conclusions, we are ending the conversation by applying our biases without ever challenging the very reasons by which we (in isolation, typically, but theoretically, by extension of society. See: Stuart Hall) are making meaning out of our initial observances. For me, this particular topic strikes home. I am a Black male who grew up in a lower to middle class environment who also espouses a particular culture. I do this every day as a teacher. The way I dress is a political statement. But my reasons for (re)presenting myself in a particular fashion, pardon the pun, are well-informed and always awaiting challenge. The problem happens when bodies in the school silence their opinions, hesitate to challenge, and fail to ever have conversations that move from “polite discussion” to progressive dialogue.

The solution: challenging bias where it lays. As a leader, this can happen most appropriately and most conveniently in staff meetings. The ladder of efficiency happens in the cultural proficiency framework. It is indeed a mindset. The real underlying issue then becomes, how, as a leader, do you move your team, to conceptualize and act upon this framework? Surface answer: there are many ways to create a capacity for a cultural proficiency framework. Specific examples include the “21 steps” activity that you can facilitate with your staff, “circles of yourself”, and simply sharing personal stories. The last seems the most obvious but is often the most neglected. However, at the core, candid conversations occur when staff is committed to being candid because there is a culture of authenticity and openness amongst the dynamic. My conscious and lens has been cultivated through my Masters degree in Social Justice Education at OISE. Not every teacher has the time, money nor urge to pursue what could be termed as such a limited field of reference. But the work informs my practice and will undoubtedly inform my conversation with staff, regardless of the community I work in or dynamic makeup of staff I lead. Again, in regard to this topic, it becomes a conversation that moves from “recognizing difference” to “embracing difference” to “learning from difference”. We must understand that culturally proficient dialogue stems from the “willingness to engage in courageous conversations”.

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The challenge comes from the way the curriculum is handed down and, subsequently, the way teachers think they ought to teach. The problems arise in math class, not from explicit teaching, but from an inadvertent sense that is fostered through the idea of math and all that it entails. The most notable schism between the math class and the real world comes from the way we test and assess students.

The math test seems to have been around since the inception of school. Let me stop for a second and clarify one thing before I continue…It’s not the math test’s fault. There is nothing wrong with testing students in math. The problem is how our assessments are used to create a stigma about math as well as espouse a fixed mindset in our children.

The constant use of the math test creates immediate self-perceptions within the student. The use and importance of the test inadvertently creates a paradigm where students judge their academic standing based on a score. Teachers, despite their best interests, judge the students based on their test grades as well. It becomes a culture of fixed mentalities. No space for the idea that people’s intellectual abilities can grow, change, and develop. The math test becomes the ultimate Super Bowl, and you either win or lose. Either way, the season is over after the game.

Trouble is, this mentality doesn’t even stand in sports. Yes, there is a winner and loser, but there is always a next game or season. When a child first learns how to shoot a jump shot, he may miss more than he makes it. He may make 3 out of 20 when he first starts and maybe improve to 7 out of 20 after a few weeks. Is he consistently failing? Has he failed two straight “tests”? No, see in sports, like most other walks of life, he is practicing! What school calls failure, the real world calls practice.

Then, it becomes a challenge to shift the mentality regarding tests like the ones a student may receive a 7 out of 20 on in math class. When a kid shoots 7 out of 20 in a basketball game, he doesn’t feel anywhere close to as defeated as a kid who gets a test back that he scored 7 out of 20 on. Reason why? Because the mentality in those two environments is completely opposite. To save words, the basketball game epitomizes the idea of a growth mindset; the math class represents a fixed mentality.

What’s more, that kid who shot 7 out of 20 in the game still scored 14 points! He still did something positive, very positive actually. With traditional assessment, the only thing that kid in math class scored was an F on the top of his paper. Failure versus practice. Closed self-perceptions versus opportunities to see yourself capable of growing.

No answers here on how we change the culture. But it is evident that we do need to encourage more students to see themselves as proficient in mathematics. Perhaps one way to do this stems from the way we teach and test: more coaching the practices and less refereeing the final game may be a solution.

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