Samuel Betances began his general session address by teaching the audience how to pronounce his name: Sahm-well Bay-tahn-ces. He used this brief lesson to underscore that valuing diversity "starts very often with getting to know people and calling them by how they want to be called." The United States is composed of people from all over the world, noted Betances, a professor of sociology at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. "Let's make everyone comfortable by saying, `I'm willing to inconvenience myself and call you by how you want to be called.' It starts from there."
In a dynamic presentation laced with salty humor, Betances discussed the challenge of making our society "safe for differences." The popular culture tends to define a people "solely by their worst elements," he charged. Native Americans, for example, have been depicted as "savages in the '50s, drunkards in the '80s, and in the '90s they run casinos—and not much in between," he said. "The scripts that we get do not tell the whole story."
Distorted media portrayals, stereotypes, and demeaning jokes "debilitate" people, Betances said. The effects are especially harmful to minority children who internalize the negative messages. "As children look at themselves through our eyes, do they feel empowered, do they feel like they can make it, do they feel like they want to reject rejection?" he wondered.
Above all else, Betances advised, educators must "fight [so] that our profession may start behaving as a profession. We must say to ourselves, `Professions exist to solve problems, and the educational profession exists to solve problems of teaching and learning.' Bring the right attitude. Stop this nonsense that we often hear: `This used to be a very good school before those people came into it.'"
Just as doctors diagnose their patients, educators must assess their students to determine their needs, Betances said. Too often, teachers "give tests on the assumption that if [students are] in my grade, they should know everything that prepared them before they came to my classroom. Nonsense! How many of them came through social promotion? How many of them are intelligent but do not have a grasp of English?" he asked rhetorically. "You are not a professional if you are not giving tests as audits—tests that give you information about what your strategy is going to be. Don't just assume that [students] at that grade level are supposed to be there," he insisted.
Educators must stop complaining that their students don't know certain things, Betances said. "We were hired to teach people, not to fail them for not knowing what they haven't been taught." Teach the children, and teach them to reject rejection, he urged.
