Apartheid. USA 1988

[p. 137]

November 11, 1987:

Eleanor Wilson Orr, Head of the mathematics department at Germantown School in Philadelphia published a new book: ‘Black English and the Performance of Black Students in Mathematics and Science.’ Inspired by the research of cognitive scientists on problem solving, some teachers have discovered that paying attention to words can help students learn to cope with numbers. At the Hawthorne School, an independent co-educational High School founded in Washington in 1956 and closed in 1982, first-year algebra students began with word problems before they learned anything about solving equations. The mathematics department wanted students ‘to experience words as tools with which they can think.’

Over a nine-year period 320 students, 98 percent of them black, transferred to Hawthorne. Within two years these students failed 87 percent of the math and science courses in which they were enrolled. In her book, math teacher, Eleanor Orr describes her attempt to trace how differences between black English vernacular (the first language of the transfer students) and standard English affected concepts of quantitative relationships for these students. ‘In fact,’ she wrote, ‘I didn't even know there was something called Black English when I first began to realize that many of the difficulties my students were having were rooted in language.’ The book further describes the approach that teachers at Hawthorne developed to correct the problems they had identified.^171.

171. The New York Times, from a report by Joan Countryman