The New Trail of Tears by Naomi Schaefer Riley

Author:Naomi Schaefer Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781594038549
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2016-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

But why don’t more parents take advantage of math camp the way Gibbs is doing? Many of the kids at camp have siblings who don’t come, for example. When I inquire about these absent brothers and sisters, I’m told they just didn’t want to come. For the most part, the kids themselves make the decision.

Gibbs tells me that the problem in the community is the parents. “They are lazy and indigent. They’re not going to get up in the morning to bring their children here.” Greg Bell, a superior court judge in Robeson County, agrees that “parents don’t care.” Bell’s son teaches at Lumberton High School and says that on parent-teacher conference night, almost no one shows up. Bell’s niece and nephew stay with him and his wife during the week so they can attend math camp. Their mother works on the assembly line at the Campbell Soup plant and is divorced from their father. She has had difficulty getting well-paying jobs as a result of not having a college degree.

This year, because school got out so late, math camp has only about half as many students as last year. Only about a third of each classroom is filled. Which annoys Chavis to no end.

Chavis is not a diplomatic man. He regularly uses four-letter words in the company of the kids and employs the phrase “lazy-ass Indians” when a tape recorder is running. The local school administrators are not fans of his. He has been called a racist by members of his own community. And there are many who question his teaching methods. Even if supporters like Ronald Hammonds carry the day, it’ll take a long time to change the downward trajectory of this community.

But Chavis wants nothing more than for his community to succeed. He has spent years trying to figure out what makes other ethnic groups rise in this country and why his seems to have ended up at the bottom. A few years ago, he tells me, one of his sisters mocked his focus on education and economic success and accused him of “acting white.” “Honey,” Chavis told her, “you’ve got to be more specific. ‘Acting white’ is not enough. I’m acting Jewish. Or maybe Chinese.”

When you ask him why the intense focus on math, Chavis says, “Math is objective. You can trust the numbers.” He cites the extraordinary percentage of PhDs in this country that are awarded to foreign students. You don’t need to speak good English to succeed. So if Native Americans know math, they can get jobs no matter what. It’s a strange inversion – Chavis sees American Indians as immigrants to the dominant American culture. They’re poor, just like immigrants, and starting from behind, so he’s proposing strategies that have helped immigrants succeed.

In looking at the success of other countries in teaching math, he notes that they’re more likely to have longer blocks of time devoted to the subject. While it’s often claimed that kids today don’t have the patience to spend, say, an hour and a half on math, Chavis says the problem is that “teachers don’t want to teach.

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