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Teachers also characterized Black girls as mismatched with the NDN model because they perceived them to be “selfish” and adopt an individualistic orientation. Remember, collaboration was central to way that JHS was supposed to operate. In many ways, this characterization as selfish was connected to the notion of Black girls as rebellious and wanting to follow their own desires, rather than go along with the established patterns or routines. When asked to speak on why more Black girls were not amongst the highest achievers in the school, Mr. Bryant, a history teacher, we heard from above, suggested that Black girls encountered academic difficulties because they adopted orientations that were focused purely on themselves, rather than

considering the needs of others. This comment was interesting considering how the teachers were constructing identities for Black girls that suggested they, themselves were not considering the young women’s needs. He believed their selfishness conflicted with the group-based learning model. He asserted:

So what I think gets in their way is they're not meeting teachers, and sometimes their fellow students, halfway. It's all, "I want. I want." It's, "What's for me? What's for me? What's for me?" It's very selfish, emotional behavior in a lot of cases where they're not realizing there are two people in the room or there are 30 people in the room. A lot of times, it's just – I mean that's the teenage mind too, right, like, "I'm the center of the universe." That gets in their way a lot.

Mr. Bryant stated that Black girls were self-centered and focused only on what their needs were. His comments implied that not being able to consider the needs of other key people in their classroom spaces—teachers and peers—was detrimental to their ability to be successful at JHS, though he never exactly stated why. Within his comments he did attempt to acknowledge that the young women’s egotistical nature could be developmental and a phase common to adolescents. However, that did not negate the fact that it was the quality that stood out to him the most when discussing the challenges particular to the young Black women with whom he worked with. The fact that he thought enough to mention it, and position it as something that “gets in their way a lot” suggested a deeper belief that when happening with Black girls it was more than simply a teenage process.

Mrs. Fitzgerald shared similar views about Black girls’ selfishness during her interview. When asked to describe a challenge she encountered when working with them, she suggested

that a big one was their “demanding” nature in which she was expected to be immediately available to respond to their requests at all times. She noted:

[Black girls are] demanding of attention…you know I had an incident with her [Dior] yesterday where she sent an e-mail. She finished something that was late. She sent an e- mail that said, not please, just “grade my essay”. And I responded saying you know, I'm not sure what essay you're referring to, but, you know, in future e-mails please try to be more professional, more respectful, or something like that. And she came back to me and said, I received this e-mail from you where you say that I always send disrespectful - I said, no. I did not say always. So it's kind of like you know that demanding - there's kind of a demanding theme in a lot of 'em.

Mrs. Fitzgerald perceived Black girls’ to be selfish in nature because they were overly greedy in regards to taking up their teachers’ time. Using an interaction with Dior, a 9th grade student, as an example, she suggested that Black girls had little regard for anything other than their personal needs. From Fitzgerald’s perspective, the lack of salutation in Dior’s email not only

demonstrated the negative attitude and means of interacting that was often attributed to Black girls (as discussed in Chapter five), it also meant that Dior was not considering the many tasks that she (in her role of teacher) had going on outside of grading her assignments. She perceived the email and follow up conversation from Dior to indicate that she was narrowly focused on what she wanted—her late work graded—and nothing else, because she could not even be bothered to be “respectful” in her communication, an implicit nod to Dior’s break with the conventions of proper femininity. Moreover she felt Dior was unwilling to listen and

communicate around the particular assignment that was driving the confusion. Her frustration with Dior’s desire to get her grade back also appeared driven by what she felt like was

unreasonable, or even inappropriate, expectations for how she should structure her time around student feedback. Importantly, Mrs. Fitzgerald failed to entertain other prospective reasons for the brevity and tone of Dior’s communication. Possibly, Dior was unaware of the norms of email etiquette and was simply communicating with her teacher in the way that she imagined was best. Interestingly, Mrs. Fitzgerald was one of the teachers who named “self-advocacy” as strength amongst Black girls. In fact, it was one of her top three traits. Yet here, she reduces Dior’s self- advocacy of approaching her and wanting personalized assistance and information regarding her grades, to selfishness and disrespect.

Mrs. Mann also characterized Black girls selfish because they were too demanding within her interview. When I asked her what some of the challenges she faced in working with the Black girls, she responded:

Sometimes their self-advocacy, it's too much for me. Like, sometimes they – especially the ones that want to get really good grades, um, want to do it without, like, okay, demand too much from me to be re-grading assignments or grading assignments that were late. As with Mrs. Fitzgerald, there was a tipping point for Mrs. Mann in which the self-advocacy turned from positive to negative. At some point in her interview, Mrs. Mann had situated self- advocacy as strength. Interestingly, here however, she converted this strength into a negative quality. Rather than view the young women’s attempts to secure the opportunities and resources necessary for success in a positive light, she positioned it as becoming a nuisance of sorts when it led to their requests for information related to assignments and grading. She appeared to be overwhelmed by her estimation that it was simply “too much” for her. Though her comments evidenced a belief (to some extent) that some Black girls desired to do well in school, what good would that desire be if situated within a classroom context where it was perceived as selfish

behavior? It is highly likely that the teachers were getting emails from other students—yet they never talk about those requests as a problem. Instead, they remained fixated on their frustration and frankly distain toward Black girls, who as students, were deserving of their support with respect to their learning.

Black Girls are Not Engaged

Teachers also suggested that Black girls were very disconnected from the academic environment. In some ways this disconnect was spoken of as a disinterest in the academic happenings at the school, while at other times it was situated as driven by a lack of self confidence and hope for the future. I will discuss each in turn.

First source of disengagement: Black girls are “Drama Queens”

A very prominent theme amongst the teachers was that some Black girls, whether academically capable or not, were not focused on their schoolwork and were disengaged. Some teachers suggested that the disinterest in school was driven by the perceptions that the things they were learning were not going to be useful. For example, Mrs. Mann, the Spanish teacher suggested that Black girls, when compared to White girls, had a high “affective filter” that meant they were opposed to learning a foreign language for no reason other than not being interested in learning it. She stated:

And they [White girls] are not as opposed on learning a foreign language...we talk a lot about what the affective filter is, like if you have a very thick affective filter, you don't even allow language to permeate into you and acquire it. So like if you have a down attitude like, " I don't need this," you are not going to be able to acquire the language. If you have a lower affective filter, you get the language. It's easy for you – for the

see the need or most of them are not motivated into learning a foreign language, whereas the White students – not the White – the non-African American students that I have do not have that affective filter so high.

While I could not locate any scholarship that could assist me in acquiring a better understanding of the “affective filter”, from Mrs. Mann’s comments, it seemed that she defined it as a

resistance to learning based on evaluations of the knowledge’s usefulness for future endeavors. From her perspective, Black girls were not motivated to learn Spanish because they could not readily identify a purpose beyond high school credits. This is interesting because Mrs. Mann did not share if she made any explicit efforts to help them see the relevance of learning a second language, which intimates that she positioned it as their responsibility.

However, many more teachers perceived them to be disinterested because they chose to invest their energy and time into the social side of school, specifically in creating and

perpetuating “drama”. When I spoke with Mrs. Taylor and asked what she felt the biggest challenges for Black girls were in the school, she immediately noted it was school drama. She stated,

Way too much girl and guy drama. Way too much. If we only had that magic touch to get them to focus on their academics and their education and not the my guy's looking at this girl and this girl's looking at that guy, because the bottom line is they all have to be responsible for themselves in their life and… No one's gonna take care of you. You have to take care of yourself. What does that look like intellectually? What does that look like for your future career? And they're just so into the, "Oh, my boo's gonna take care of me." [Laughs]

She suggested that Black girls could not focus on their studies because they too easily got pulled into situations revolving around a dating relationship. She interpreted this as detrimental to their current studies; she also believed it reflected a general orientation toward their education as a whole. In her mind, Black girls did not put the girl/guy drama aside in order to focus on their education because they believed that they would eventually end up in a relationship where their significant other took care of them and their education would not be important. Thus, rather than invest in building responsibility for their own lives, they invested in their relationships with boys out of a misguided belief that these relationships would do them more good than school would in the long run37. Interestingly, these men who would take care of them were situated as no more than a miscellaneous “boo” in Mrs. Taylor’s mind. She made no indications as to the status of their relationship (i.e. boyfriend, fiancé, husband), nor to the career the men would hold that enabled them to financially support a significant other.

Mr. Bryant suggested that many of the Black girls came to school with the primary goal of being involved in the non-academic happenings of the school. He commented:

I think too many of them come here and that's their main thing. I'm going to go either be part of drama, stir drama up, I'm going to go stop drama because I'm going to be the bigger person, "I'm just trying to stop drama," it's drama, drama, drama, drama. They walk in and drama, drama, drama, drama, drama.

For him, whether it was starting or stopping it, the girls were overly invested in drama in a manner that was detrimental to their academic performance. When I probed him to speak further on the nature of the drama and why it was such a problem, he offered the following:

I don't know. I mean I never tried to get that much into it because I can't help it. All I would do would be to make fun of it, so I don't want to – I mean but I've heard, "No, you won't believe what he said about you," and, "So-and-so is doing this and that," and, "Well, I've got to go talk to so-and-so because there's about to be some drama," and, "I've got to go talk to Mr. Ferguson because there's about to be some stuff going on." It could be about a various amount of things, but they pay more attention to that. It's like their own little reality TV show here. And you try to teach them history, or government, or econ, and – you know it's not every day, and it's not the majority of students, but it is a lot. There are a handful of students in this building who don't have the grades they should have because they're allowed to be in drama, and that's the bottom line...And you've seen it. Every day… And maybe they're avoiding their work by doing it. Maybe, if we were not allowing drama, then they'd be just acting out, and swearing, and doing whatever else. In this snippet of his interview, Mr. Bryant lamented the difficulty of teaching students whose attention he believed was pulled so strongly in a direction away from the actual subject they were supposed to be learning. Remember, he was one of the teachers who believed that the girls’ connectedness to their lives was a positive asset. It is unclear how he determined when thinking about what was going on in their lives became too much, or when it is just enough. Although he stated that the majority of Black girls were not overly engaged in drama, he nevertheless maintained that there were a lot of students who fell into this category, and obviously, enough of them to stand out to him as a concern. Importantly, he identifies the specific group of students he is talking about as those who end up in the RC with me when he commented “you see it”. This was another explicit attempt to situate him and I on one side, and the girls on the other—a frequently used rhetorical tactic that I highlighted at the start of the

previous chapter. Interestingly, at one point he suggested that if the girls were using school drama as an excuse not to do their work it was because teachers and other school officials

allowed them to do so. This line of thought had potential to shift some of the responsibility away from the girls themselves and toward the teachers and other school officials who created a school context in which this type of behavior was possible. However, he ultimately undercut this idea when he adopted a “if it was not this it would be something else” attitude by suggesting that even if the teachers did not allow it, the girls would find some other destructive behavior to put in its place.

Mr. Clark also perceived Black girls’ involvement in school drama to be a major

impediment to their long-term school success. When asked what Black girls’ biggest challenges were in JHS, he answered, “just the drama I think, I mean it's the biggest challenge of any high school girl, but again I think I see more and louder [laughs] drama.” Mr. Clark argued that school drama was typically a problem for any teenage girl, but that for Black girls there was a higher frequency in incidents, and that it was “louder”, which was likely a code word for more visible38. When I pressed him to help me understand how the drama that Black girls engaged in differed from what he would consider normative teenage behavior, he provided the following explanation:

Yeah. Its kind of I'm upset with her and so I can't even be in the same room with her. I'll get that a lot. Like, can I go to the RC? I can't even be in here today. Well, why? Because so-and-so said this. That's not a big deal [laughs]. But it's ruined their day and they can't even be in here and learn today. Whereas, I feel like other girls might just kind of pout and sit in their desk and be upset...Write an angry text and cyber bully or something.

Clark: Not explode… It's like when they do drama, they do it big. It's not just I'm upset

today. It's I'm upset and coming at this girl.

Mr. Clark suggested that the way Black girls engaged in school drama was different than what he believed was typical for two main reasons. First he intimated that the drama began for

insignificant reasons such as a matter of something trivial that someone said about them, much like the he said/she said that Mr. Bryant mentioned. He suggested that insignificant comments got turned into big deals that altered the trajectory of their entire learning for the day because they refused to even be in the same space as their adversaries. Second, Black girls did drama differently because rather than internalize their feelings or engage in passive aggressive

behaviors, such as texting and online harassment (which, in fact, were highly destructive ways of handling tensions with peers and should not have been considered a viable alternative), he described the girls as “explode[ing]” as means of expressing their feelings and attempting to avenge themselves. He described this as doing it “big” rather than the alternative of pouting to themselves. Here again is a teacher invoking bomb imagery; this time their perceived

explosiveness was not only destructive socially, but impinged directly on their prospects for academic success. Mr. Clark’s statements at this point were interesting given the fact that he had positioned Black girls as among his “best” students and really “hard workers”. Being a drama queen who is distracted by the social happenings of the school and being a hard worker seem to be contradictory identities.

Finally, Mr. Chase also contributed to the construction of Black girls as drama queens. In his interview he stated:

There's plenty of smart African-American girls, but their grades might not indicate so, and unfortunately, grades are the main way we measure. It's the main currency,

right?...Yeah. Like Candace is whip smart, man, like, man. I thought that even last year,