Aftermath - Episode 16

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Aftermath: a club after math class that focuses on the aftermath of black boys pursing after math.  Yeah, it's a pun and it's intentional.

My school is made up of 60% Black students.  Out of that 60%, 50% are males.  In 8th grade, Math 1-2 is the highest math class offered at my school.  It is split into semesters.  The first semester is Math 1 and the second semester is Math 2.  Given our demographics, it would be expected to have Black male representation in the class.  Every other demographic had been represented in the class with an enormous amount of female, Asian, and White representation.  Yet there were none between the 2016-2017 school year and just one in the 2017-2018 school year. 

I took these statistics personal because of how I identify and I started a club to support Black males transitioning into Math 1-2.  The club is designed to pick top performing 20-25 Black males entering my school.  During 6th and 7th grade we meet on Mondays to talk about the importance of representation, excellence, and identity.  The goal of Aftermath is to inspire and support these brilliant scholars to stay in competitive rankings with their peers.  Math is the ONLY class that can be pushed down to lower grade levels.  With that, students can get head start on high school courses, therefore, opening their schedule to other classes as many of them take college courses for free at the high school level. 

This advantage is for everyone and yet sometimes we do not support the ones that are disadvantaged.  I happy to report that over the past five years we have had 4-5 black boys taking Math 1-2 and all of them scoring fives (the highest level) on their State tests.  The rest of the boys are in Math 1, a high school level math class that is taken year-round.   

I believe that teachers gatekeepers!  They can either open the gate for others or keep the gates closed only accepting what they view as the norm.  Aftermath is DESTROYING the norms at Piedmont!

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