Questões de Concurso

GEORGE FLOYD, FROM ‘I WANT TO TOUCH THE WORLD’ TO ‘I CAN’T BREATHE’

HOUSTON — It was the last day of 11th grade at Jack Yates High School in Houston, nearly three decades ago. A group of close friends, on their way home, were contemplating what senior year and beyond would bring. They were black teenagers on the precipice of manhood. What, they asked one another, did they want to do with their lives?

 “George turned to me and said, ‘I want to touch the world,’” said Jonathan Veal, 45, recalling the aspiration of one of the young men — a tall, gregarious star athlete named George Floyd whom he had met in the school cafeteria on the first day of sixth grade. To their 17-year-old minds, touching the world maybe meant the N.B.A. or the N.F.L.

“It was one of the first moments I remembered after learning what happened to him,” Mr. Veal said. “He could not have imagined that this is the tragic way people would know his name.”

The world now knows George Perry Floyd Jr. through his final harrowing moments, as he begged for air, his face wedged for nearly nine minutes between a city street and a police officer’s knee.

    “Millions of children, every year, start school excited about what they will learn, but quickly become disillusioned when they get the idea they are not as ‘smart’ as others,” writes Jo Boaler. That’s because parents and teachers inadvertently give out the message that talent is inborn — you either have it or you don’t.

     As a math professor, Boaler has seen this firsthand. Many young adults enter her class anxious about math, and their fear about learning impacts their ability to learn.

     “The myth that our brains are fixed and that we simply don’t have the aptitude for certain topics is not only scientifically inaccurate; it is omnipresent and negatively impacts not only education, but many other events in our everyday lives,” she writes. Even though the science of neuroplasticity — how our brains change in response to learning — suggests learning can take place at any age, this news has not made it into classrooms, she argues.

     Some of our misguided visions of talent have led to racist and sexist attitudes, she writes. For example, many girls get the message early on that math is for boys and that boys are better at it, interfering with their ability to succeed and leading to gender disparities in fields of study related to math. Similarly, people of color may also have to overcome stereotypes about fixed intelligence in order to thrive.

Internet: <greatergood.berkeley.edu> (adapted)