This year, I have found math, which has usually been one of my favorite classes, has given me more reasons to be upset than excited. After having gourmet in the basement first period, I have to walk up four flights of stairs, go find my seat in the back of the classroom, and get ready to try and listen to my teacher seemingly struggle to teach us. I constantly find myself staring too intensely at the board while my teacher proves some equations but I never question their validity. I mean, most of the time I end up teaching myself how to do trigonomic identities or divide polynomials which is not an easy feat for someone who has never even done it before. I sit there and ask myself “Am I actually going to need this” and “think they should be teaching us things we are actually going to need” more frequently than I can make a three pointer. Ta-Nehisi Ta-Nehisi Coates answers this question from his perspective as a minority.
Coates faces burden of constantly needing to use one third to help him survive the physicality of the streets. He explains the necessary knowledge needed in order to secure his body, “When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with whom I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, whom or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body”. Coates was instilled with knowledge was crucial to his survival. He had to place his concern for his life over his concern for school, deepening the divide between him and his academic education. To his point, education is education and that academic knowledge has no precedence over survival.
A recurring idea in the book is Coates’s struggle to see the need for academic achievement when, for him, the streets decide whether one lives or dies; he questions why he should pour all of focus into school when he could die in the streets. After Coates explains the need to find a balance of violence he says, “What did it mean that number 2 pencils, conjugations without context, Pythagorean theorems, handshakes, and head nods were the difference between life and death, were the curtains draw down between the world and me? I could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would not kneel before their God”. Not only is school very forgien to Coates, school furthers segregation by forcing children to subject themselves to often unnecesary riducle and repremand from teachers and administraters: seperating the smart form the dumb, the rich from the poor, and ultimately the white from the black. Jack Healy of the New York Times wrote, “Some 30 percent of this year’s three million graduating seniors will not go straight to college, a number that is ticking up as an improving economy draws more graduates directly to work. They go to Walmarts and welding shops, restaurants, salons, hospitals and construction sites, to start careers on the tougher side of the vast economic and cultural divide that is demarcated by a college”. Coates feels distant to education because nothing taught in school can secure his body on the streets. The way schools are set up fail to acknowledge this, making an education from the streets more valuable and favorable to one in a school setting. According to Coates, “Fully 60 percent of all young black men who dropout of high school will go to jail”. The inability to get a college degree increases the disparity the educated and uneducated. However, the uneducated are educated in nontraditional ways such as being street smart. The traditional education system does not value this or even people educated in this manner. When a simple head nod could save your life, Coates argues a formula in math seems irrelevant. On the Northshore, education is the main focus of discussion, many in the city quickly glance over education opportunities in need of security.
To what extent do schools have a responsibility to prepare their students for the "great divider" that is college? On one hand, this sole focus on the factual and analytical knowledge that colleges require often leaves little time for teaching students practical life skills. On the other hand, the socioeconomic benefits of college are well-proven, and a college education often equals a path to success. Why might this balance be particularly important in schools that primarily serve African-American students, low-income students, and/or other marginalized students? How might these schools have to change in order to better address the needs of their students?
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