Reply to What to do if you suspect that a teacher is racist?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am a teacher and have been accused of being racist before. It is ALWAYS because the student or parent A. disagree with the grade the student earned and B. have zero evidence of any wrong-doing. It is always the last ditch effort by the kid parent "I disagree with the teacher, and I can't prove anything wrong has happened, therefore, the teacher is racist."

Careful. This is a hurtful label to put on someone.

As a teacher, I can honestly say, when I look out to my class of students, I do not see black, white, etc. I see "great kid. Hard worker. Lazy. Grade grubber. Doesn't shut-up..." etc.[/quote]

I totally believe you on this, but here is my guess.  At the Elementary level, teachers very quickly get to know who the hard workers are, etc. so by the third or fourth week in school, most teachers have this attitude.

In MS and HS, it is more difficult.  Teachers only see kids 45 minutes per day, classes are bigger, and classes often change from one semester to another.  So there is much more stereotyping going on.

I have three black kids.  In ES, they were much more likely to be called out (in my mind, inappropriately) in the first couple of weeks of school and after that, became close with their teachers.  (For instance, my third grader came home mortified last week because a teacher moved her for talking when it was the girl next to her talking.  I know that I wasn't there to witness, but I know this kid (shy and obedient) and I saw her reaction and thus believe her.  I'm sure that will take care of itself in a few weeks when the teacher comes to observe her behavior over a longer term.)

My MS and HS kids, on the other hand, report something similar with much greater frequency.  Of course, the kids have become teenagers so are likely misbehaving more than they did when younger.  But we had multiple times last year when they had very believable stories of 'mild' discrimination, corroborated by friends.  (These aren't occasions when there was a call home and they needed to come up with an excuse.  They were occasions when the felt 'wronged' and wanted to complain about it, and they didn't frame it in terms of race but just general unfairness by the teacher.)

My advice to my kids is to make sure they take actions to stand out as 'good kids' early in the school year so that teachers give them the benefit of the doubt later on.[/quote]

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