Reviews tagging 'Misogyny'

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique W. Morris

2 reviews

lpdx's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective slow-paced

4.75

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historicalmaterialgirl's review

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emotional informative slow-paced

3.75

Praise / Things I Learned:
  1. What is called "problem behavior" really might not be a problem at all. Sometimes, classroom management is just about control and discipline, not learning. Like a teacher shouldn't respond to talking back the same way they would respond to physical violence! But sometimes the responses are almost equivalent when students get kicked out or failed for "willful defiance" or talking back or rolling their eyes. 
  2. Sometimes "problem behavior" is just a student dealing with oppression / asserting their worth. Like talking back can be a way of standing up for yourself (or at least it feels like that! And tbh I relate to that, even now)
  3. Schools teach students to accept the PIC, from punishment-heavy classroom management to suspension to metal detectors. 
  4. PIC stuff (SROs, zero tolerance, suspensions, etc) gets in the way of supporting students. It hinders their education, on physical and emotional levels. Physically as in you can't learn if you're not in a classroom.... emotionally as in not wanting to show up in a place where you're not valued or respected. 
  5. Morris calling out how Black girls are left out of conversations about the school to prison pipeline was crucial. I'm walking away realizing that understanding the gendered aspects of the school to prison pipeline are important to understanding it more thoroughly / holistically. 
  6. I love love loved how Morris incorporated interviews with incarcerated Black girls in every chapter. It models the kind of respect and valuing of Black girls this book calls for, and it shows me as a reader that Morris was going to the people directly affected.

Critiques:
  1. I get the impression a little bit that Morris thinks diversity training, curriculum, and basically all the actions associated with #DiversityAndInclusion would be the main factor in ending the criminalization of Black girls? And I disagree on this; I think giving students a say in teaching (having them lead lessons, asking directly for their feedback and actually applying that feedback, building appropriate connections with students, etc) would help much more. This would establish that they are in fact valued (self worth is one of the main reason's Morris says Black girls talk back, get loud, etc). This would also help better support students because they're literally telling you and showing you HOW to do those things. 
  2. Of course, a truly actually radically student centered classroom with the activities like that ones I described above (that I'm basically ripping off from Christopher Emdin's For White Folks), wouldn't be enough for some of the issues Morris talks about. Like, zero tolerance and SROs need to be dropped entirely. (Along with prisons and policing lmao). No amount of diversity training is going to stop an SRO from arresting a kid or at least putting them into contact with prisons and courts... because at the end of the day, that is literally the SRO's job. Even if they are forced to hear about racism, that's still their job. Even if that actually believe what they're forced to hear, that's still their job. 
  3. Which leads to me saying: I felt like this was very reformist rather than abolitionist. There was even a line that implied abolition is just about "let[ting] people out of prison" which is kind of like... hmmm.... what I've read about abolition talks about creating systems of support and care, bringing community together, really basically just making people care way more about each other and show up for each other.... thus leading to less harm, and being able to support each other when harm does happen.
  4. There was not a lot of specific, practical shit. And the more I read theory, the more I really want that. Especially when it comes to teaching. This was annoying in the last chapter especially because Morris kept saying "alternative practice" over and over..... but doesn't give much of HOW to do alternative practice. She doesn't ever explain WHAT that is until Appendix B. Maybe this bothered me because in teaching I have to be super extremely clear and specific all the time always, and include examples. And this is more of a "why" book than a "how" book? 
  5. Sometimes Morris was really saying a whole lot of nothing. By that I just mean like wow I did not need intersectionality or variations of it to be defined like 20 times!!! Though I could see this being useful for people who aren't as familiar I guess? And sometimes it just felt like things were thrown in randomly and not expanded on or connected to the rest of the section.... or chapter.... or overall arguments of the book....
  6. Building on that, I know in academic writing, typically people critique the jargon / vocabulary / word choice. This book didn't have that, which I am immensely grateful for. But another trend in academic writing is tangents, poor sentence fluency and repetitiveness. Yes please repeat your thesis! Repeat a few times throughout the book if you want! But not definitions and statistics that are tangentially related to your argument, it makes the writing confusing and the reader focus on the wrong thing. And I completely understand that sometimes you have to write a complicated long ass sentences to articulate your idea. But every other sentence being like that? It honestly made me dread reading this

Do I feel like I wasted my time? No. Would I recommend it? If you haven't learned that much about about misogynoir, absolutely. If you have, maybe? 

I'm still gonna read the other book I have by this author because I did learn about how misogynoir manifests itself in classrooms and other educational contexts. 
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