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49 Chapter 4 Too Cool for School Masculinity and the Contradictions of Achievement Donte, a tenth grader at Woodrow Wilson, approached life with effusive optimism. He was relentlessly outgoing—constantly talking and joking with other students and teachers and instantly befriending me early in my fieldwork, even though he hardly knew me. The more I hung out with Donte, the more impressed I became with his energetic, positive demeanor and his ability to insert levity into the most quotidian school routines. When I interviewed him later in my fieldwork, I was further impressed with the surprising depth of his thinking and his buoyant dreams of success, despite growing up with seven other siblings in poor living conditions.1 Yet Donte’s spirit and goals changed when he confronted school. Education did not appear to factor into his plans to become successful in business, and his youthful exuberance chafed against academic exercises required in classrooms. He appeared to be unconcerned with school. Sure, he knew it was supposed to be important, but he simply neglected to invest his seemingly boundless energy into things such as reading, completing math homework, and answering questions (seriously) in class. Donte was not alone. After following students at Woodrow Wilson and Clayton through ninth and tenth grades, I found that boys at both schools approached education casually but with a certain contradictory purpose to their casualness. Such practices, which I term contrived carelessness, hindered achievement but aided representations of masculinity. In a phrase, many of these boys were simply too cool for school. When constructing masculinity, boys at both Woodrow Wilson and Clayton interpreted pro-school behavior as inconsistent with or irrelevant to 50 learning the hard way manliness and interpreted much anti-academic behavior as indicative of the power of masculinity. This general statement is, of course, seriously complicated by differences in class, race, and personal choice (not all boys acted in the same way). However, I noted similar discourses at each school that framed manliness as empowered and superior but tended to separate masculinity from high achievement. Gender and Achievement When I began my research, I did not know that Clayton and Woodrow Wilson had salient gender gaps; but once I became immersed in the schools, I quickly recognized the importance of gender and noted that girls at both schools appeared to be more academically conscientious than boys were. Although the schools were very different in many ways, the gender educational outcomes were the same: girls, on average, outperformed boys. At Woodrow Wilson, the discourse regarding gender was overt. In my first visit to the school I met with Mr. Shultz, the school’s testing and data coordinator. While we were talking in his office, a polite black girl wearing a pink track suit came in and asked him for information about postsecondary credits, a program in which students could take college courses and receive credit for them. Mr. Shultz gave the girl some papers describing the program, and after she left I asked him about it. He replied that more girls than boys took advantage of the program, adding that girls at the school also graduated and went on to college more regularly. To demonstrate his point, he pulled up the current class rankings on the computer. He told me that, in the senior class that year (2005–2006), eight of the top ten students were girls and that, of the top twenty, only four were boys. Teachers and other administrators at Woodrow Wilson were aware of this gender discrepancy and were concerned about it. Many attributed the difference to race and culture. Mr. Shultz echoed this view when I asked him about the gender discrepancy, saying, “I think it has a lot to do with culture. The gender gap is biggest among African Americans, and that’s true in the top ten. There is a perception among the boys—and it sounds silly—but that school isn’t ‘cool,’ so a lot of it’s a cultural thing.” Indeed, on the surface it seemed as though this gender difference was peculiar to predominately African American urban schools. Suburban schools proximate to Woodrow Wilson did not show such stark gender differences. For example, one predominately white suburban high school nearby had five boys and five girls in its top ten seniors; another had eight valedictorians—four boys and four girls. This contrasted with class ranking and graduation rates at Woodrow Wilson, which, based on the data [3.139.82.23] Project MUSE...

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