5.2.4 Assorted Problems

Another issue facing designing a curriculum to take in the forgotten half is the issue of frills versus basics.

A high school in the upper-class suburb not only has the "basics" mastered but they also have all the frills and the sophistication of music, language and. They're sophisticated kids. Now, assuming momentarily we have an ideal, racist free society and two students end up competing for the same job. They both have good basic skills, but one is really sophisticated and the other isn't. Who's going to get hired? Obviously the sophisticated one will.

The real world works with sophistication, doesn't it? And art and music and literature are not "frills," they are part of the sophistication of the society. Neurology learning shows a synergism between the arts and the sciences. If you teach people a lot of sciences without the arts, you get a technician and not a scientist. Incidentally, teaching someone only the arts doesn't end in good results either. So we need both frills and basics if we are going to reach the forgotten half. Serving the forgotten half by just giving them good basics is just another kind of institutionalized racism.

Another problem is that often times the same requirements in school for different kids will produce different results. If you are in a family where you are using your sophistication all the time and you are engaging in philosophical discussions with your mother while studying such things in school, you will inevitably be a stronger person. That is why we need to make sure that the forgotten half at least gets this type of discussion in school. Think of it the other way around. How many academic kids would really like to have to study automobile mechanics as part of the frills
for their education? Perhaps not many, but common sense would dictate that they would benefit immeasurably if they did. (Society just needs a higher degree of appreciation for vocational skills.)

Role Models and Counter-productive Incentives Another problem facing the forgotten half is the problem of .Too often times the ghetto kid has as a role model the successful drug dealer who's strutting around with fancy clothes and a car. Even if the ghetto kid decides to play it straight, the only real option to follow is to sling hamburgers at McDonalds for minimum wage. What would you choose in their exact same circumstances?

We also have the problem of counter-productive incentives. We sometimes give people the incentives for the wrong things, and if we don't understand the incentives systems that kids are working from, we are likely to not make very good decisions as teachers. For example, you may think you are giving a kid an unsatisfactory grade when the kid is very delighted with it, and these create all sorts of counter-productive incentives.

"Real Time" Remediation There are some easy steps a teacher can take in the classroom to help kids caught up in the forgotten half. One thing
is "real time" remediation. When someone starts falling behind, that is the time to provide remediation and to really pile on the remediation until the kid has either mastered the material or until you know that there is nothing more you can do. The problem is that we don't have the resources right now in junior high or in elementary school to really provide the real time remediation necessary to support kids when they are having trouble. Instead of reteaching skills to students until they get them, those students who are slow are advanced through the curriculum at the same pace as their faster-learning peers. This means that their baggage of unlearned concepts amasses rapidly until it reaches a critical mass and the student is so far behind they are beyond conventional help.

Cooperative Learning
Another step teachers can try is cooperative learning. Cooperative learning is tough. The default position is simply to say "cooperative learning is too tough to pull off." Unfortunately that is the wrong answer because cooperative learning and learning from each other turns out to be one of the most powerful ways for people to learn. The problem is that cooperative learning has not become embedded in the instructional expectation of the society. We need to start looking at ways to develop powerful cooperative learning early on. Most of you have had some group experience, but some of you have never worked in groups before in terms of any large assignment. Because group work is not used regularly or effectively, it becomes something people worry about or they feel is somehow unfair.

Personal Support and Social Infrastructures Another teacher tactic is personal support. I think teachers need to do a whole lot more to provide special personal support for the students and to get personally involved in the lives of their students. That is one of our jobs. As I start to get to know students, I can find what special needs they have and try to address those needs.

Analyzing the social infrastructures students are involved in also helps in dealing with your students, especially the forgotten half. For the forgotten half these infrastructures are crucial and each situation has unique dimensions, problems and opportunities. Take, for example, school and community relations. Schools often times don't have very good relations with their community because they don't give a very high priority to working with their community. They just kind of do their own thing. When the school gets to crunch time, it is deprived of a lot of potential support
that the community could provide if the community knew what was going on in the school and if the school took the time to keep the community informed.

Schedules
Another problem is the problem of schedules. Scheduling is a problem because there are different forms of schedule that achieve very different things. Schools can not seem to decide on one set schedule (this is one reason I argue for a national curriculum, do create compatible scheduling). There are two basic scheduling types; block scheduling (small intense classes that cover a years material in half a year) and standard scheduling (big slow moving classes that cover their material is a full year). In Virginia there is a strong emphasis on block scheduling.

The evidence is very strong that you learn more in a block schedule system than you do in the standard schedule. The reason for this is that in a block schedule the typical teacher will deal with 75 kids in a semester rather than 150. Teachers can really keep track of, and give a lot more personal attention to, 75 kids instead of 150.

However, block scheduling creates horrendous problems because right now in some school districts there are schools on block scheduling and other schools on standard scheduling. This means that if a student who is planning to take Algebra in the spring happens to change schools at Christmas, and the new school only teaches Algebra in the fall, then the student is suddenly a semester behind. The obvious solution is to standardize scheduling, but arguments for local control of schools prevent this from being done effectively.

	What are three steps teachers can take to help the "forgotten half"?	Answer Here
	Mrs. Carter teaches a special-education class in an inner-city school in which all of the students have been diagnosed with a specific emotional or behavioral disorder that adversely affects their academic performance. Her students come from mainly lower-class socio-economical backgrounds and are extremely difficult to motivate because they all feel part of the "forgotten half". What can Mrs. Carter offer to them as incentives for their grades and goals?	Answer Here