“Because I Want to Be Somebody:”

Although several school and community-level factors caused many students at Hillside to experience low motivation and underachievement, students at Hillside also had opportunities to learn. This chapter gives voice to a group of students who were able to take advantage of these opportunities and achieve academic and mathematics success. Narratives from seven students are presented. These narratives will be used to elaborate the themes that comprise the third level of the multilevel framework that I introduced in chapter 1. Those themes are reproduced in Table 4.1.