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♪ [music playing-- no dialogue] ♪♪.
It was discovered at a university that about 60%
of the African Americans who took calculus made a D
or an F or withdrew.
The faculty member who discovered this was troubled
by it.
As you know, we're often not troubled by students doing
poorly in our classes.
So he applied to a foundation for a grant to study it.
The foundation said, that's an interesting problem but you
didn't offer us any hypothesis.
He said, if I had the foggiest idea what was going on
I'd fix it.
And they said, well yes, of course, but no hypothesis,
no dinero.
So he surveyed the entire faculty, not just the Math
Department faculty, for a hypothesis as to why the D-F-W
rate for African-Americans would be substantially greater than
the D-F-W rate for the other students in the course.
Now I know you all are very enlightened or you
wouldn't be here.
You've probably been to a diversity workshop, too,
so I don't want your hypotheses, but I'd like you to answer
for the ones, for the other people in your department
who don't go to teaching workshops.
What hypothesis would they have suggested as to why the D-F-W
rate for African-Americans would be substantially higher?
What two or three, four hypotheses would your colleagues
who don't go to teaching workshops have suggested?
Now Dr. Pearson's not here to defend herself, so I feel free
to tell you that she let slip that there are students here
at Eastern who don't triumph academically.
How do your colleagues explain that?
What goes wrong so that students don't triumph academically?
What are the major causes of students not triumphing
academically, according to your colleagues who don't
go to teaching workshops?
[no dialogue].
Now remembering that we're here for three hours, and you may not
get that much of a break all the time, let me suggest you stand
up and compare your hypotheses for your colleagues,
with your neighbors in groups of two or three.
But if you want to stay sitting, go ahead.
I found that I can't make people stand up, but I'd
recommend standing up.
[general audience chatter].
And as you're ready, take a seat and let me have
your attention again.
[no dialogue].
This was Yuri Traisman working at UC Berkeley in what is
probably one of the top ten studies done of college
and university learning.
With a single exception of a graduate professor of education,
every colleague at Berkeley said, the trouble is
the students are broken.
There's something wrong with those students, they're not
as smart as the other students.
We know because we admitted them under affirmative action.
They're not as well prepared as the other students,
they went to terrible high schools.
They're in social shock, they used to be stars and now
they're just another student.
Their families are dysfunctional, they've got
to spend more time putting their family back together.
They're poor, they've got to work more.
Something's wrong with the students.
So Traisman listed all of these.
You might find it interesting to compare what Berkeley faculty
think of the problems where their students are with
what you do.
And notice that having pretty high admission standards doesn't
change the views of faculty as to what's wrong.
So he submitted them to the foundation.
The foundation said, whoopie, hypotheses, and gave him
some money.
He'd agreed to check the hypotheses.
He found they didn't hold.
You don't get into Berkeley accidentally.
Their parents had decided they were going to go to
a major university before they were born.
Their parents were middle class civil servants and teachers.
Great families, great social support, dedicated.
Perhaps most impressively for African-Americans taking
calculus at Berkeley, the higher the math entry score, the higher
the probability of flunking calculus.
The better prepared they were, the worse they did.
Now I grew up in rural Kansas, and that's what we called
getting yourself into deep doo-doo.
[audience laughter].
I see that translates alright into Illinois.
[audience laughter].
Traisman was driven to desperate measure.
He started talking to his students.
He started talking systematically and shadowing
them and paying graduate students to shadow them from
when they got out of bed in the morning to when he tucked them
into bed at night to find out how they studied calculus.
He found that the groups who were doing especially well in
calculus formed study squads to get through calculus,
spontaneously formed study squads, and they had a lot
of social advantages.
They got tutoring from other students in their social group.
They got old homework from other students in their social group.
They got old exams from other students in their social group.
Whereas those of us from under-powered backgrounds,
us rural whites, us African-Americans,
and the rest of us, didn't have these advantages
and didn't spontaneously form study squads.
I, myself, went to a high school with a big class of 25 seniors.
They had not, in living memory, taught calculus.
The only foreign language that had been taught within
living memory, that is, since they stopped teaching Latin,
was English.
They discontinued trig my senior year...so the math teacher
taught it to the three of us who were going to college
after school.
He didn't get paid, but we got credit.
And he taught us that checking your homework with another
student is cheating, and you'll get an F if you're caught.
No good student would ever do that.
Exactly the opposite of what was required to do well in calculus.