Race & Teaching

I knew teaching US History as a white man to a 99% black population would be interesting this year. I am one of 4 white teachers at the school and none of my students have met any Jews from Vermont so there's been an interesting cultural exchange. Although I don't know really how much of it is an "exchange" as it's hard to get a sense of what impact my presence and identity has on them. Sometimes students will accuse me of being racist because I give them a bad grade and they really do play the race card all the time in ridiculous ways. I get the sense that they think the "White man" is out to get them. Sometimes it's funny and it creates opportunities for learning and sometimes I see a lot of truth (and sadness) in their perspective. Students are curious about my viewpoints and what I think about race and I am also interested to learn from them.

With Michael Brown and the other events of the year I have not shied away from race either. Some students have expressed boredom with slavery and are sick of talking about. I don't think I've taught them about slavery anymore than another US History teacher, after all it's a huge part of the story...and a shameful part and I don't shy away from this dark chapter of our history either.

Yesterday I did a lesson on Martin Luther King as this week we are talking about the civil rights movement. One student commented that she had never read MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and expressed a lot of amazement to me about it. This was touching. But then I had a real downer later in the afternoon when another student complained about having to read his "I have a dream speech" yet again one more time. And I'm sure they have read it before, although many of them would probably get questions about MLK on a standardized test wrong or forget other important details despite this being Atlanta. And I'm not going to skip arguably one of the most influential people ever in US History whether or not they've learned about MLK before or not.

I was telling this student that we should all appreciate what he did and how he impacted other movements and helped created a more fair society. She told me that I wasn't the one that should be appreciative because I'm white. I actually found this offensive but looking back on it maybe I was being naive. This is a very tough thing to think about. I have no idea what she's learned from her grandmother and the stories she's been told about racism and discrimination from her own family. I can't really understand that, and no, I'm not going to play the Jewish card. Jews have had it very good in America for a long time now. How can I possibly understand her perspective? Eventually I showed her the lyrics to Macklemore's "Same Love" which talks about oppression to one group being oppression to all groups and that discrimination to one group is the same as any discrimination so we should all care about it. But perhaps this was not the right approach...

That's what teaching is though - you get lots of different problems where you have to think of solutions very quickly and later on you wish you had spoken differently or taken a different approach. This day will stick with me.

The Teaching Blues

I'm breathing again. That's how it feels early April at Spring Break and our one week off. Not having a break in February like other schools was tough as all we had was MLK day and President's Day off in February since Xmas in December. It's weird to have a job where you just think about breaks and summer, and it's grueling to go too long without a day off. I mean maybe that's most most jobs that people hate, but for teachers it's less about not liking our jobs and more about just how exhausting the job can be. And this is coming from someone with a lot of energy who doesn't often 'slog' through life although I know I am still new. And then you have people like Success Academy (just written up today) and KIPP who preach needing more time in the classroom...

I've been exploring options for next year and went to a teacher job fair a month ago. Leaving my newly minted resumes on the table brilliantly in my house, I hit the road and arrived ready to shmooze feeling a bit naked without my credentials. A few interviewers were shocked when I told them I could email them a resume and told me if I was looking for any info. I could check their websites. What's the point of having a job fair where you just drop resumes when you can do the same thing from the comfort of your home? Working in sales I learned that paper is often just a crutch. A true professional has all of the info. in their head - you are the product and you just have to convince people of whatever it is they are interested in. Besides, isn't anyone interested in actually learning about each other anymore? And why is the discussion of fit often missing from job conversations? I didn't realize that my first employer Equal Exchange was more of an anomoly in this sense but after Fenix this is one of the most important things to me I am thinking about at this point in my life. On a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest fit) I would say I am currently at a 5. 

But the bigger question is what am I doing with my life? Maya is starting as an attending next year with Grady Hospital, the big public hospital in Atlanta, like every other hospital - operating under the Emory umbrella. She is way more set in her career than I am. Coming up on the finishing dash of my first year of teaching, I have no idea if I could do this as a career. At the moment my intuition suggests no. Out of anything I've ever put so much effort into I've never seen so few results (I bet I could get more results learning Japanese). Yes there is the intrinsic reward of helping young people and doing something that matters in the world, but it just doesn't pay enough for the amount of work required of a truly good teacher. I am no martyr and while I am passionate, sometimes I feel like I don't actually have enough of it in me for teaching in particular. It still seems just like one option among many of important work out there. And yes, I know it will get better, the first year's the hardest, yada yada yada, everybody keeps telling me that. And that's why I'm trying this again at least for another year. But what type of career asks you to endure a  bunch of shit for awhile until things get better? Most? Law and banking probably - except in those cases you maybe are more likely to work your way up a ladder. Besides becoming an administrator or principal, you don't start making a lot more money or getting a lot more opportunities necessarily as a veteran teacher...do you? 

One good thing about teaching is that people respect the profession, way more than sales at least. Everybody always has something positive to say and conversation is easy with new people. Sometimes there are perks too; I mean beyond the free gas station coffee for teachers in February or discounts for Hawks and Braves games that I've gotten. I was running to a doctor's office about 10 minutes late last month and they cut me slack because they knew I was a teacher and they knew how hard it is too leave school in the middle of the day. That felt good. 

On the other hand, earlier that day, one of my students finished an assignment early with 10 minutes left in class so I asked them to do another reading and with all of the teenage attitude she could give, she responded stubbornly, "I'm not gonna do anything more than what's required." With the amount of sleep I run on and the dozens of more serious problems I face every day, I just don't even always have the energy to try and fight that. Take one student, let's call him Frazer. He comes to class 30 minutes late with no excuse the other day, asks if he can go to the bathroom 2 minutes in, I say no (which is also by the way a weird position to be in; I have the power to tell another human being whether or not they can urinate?), he leaves anyways and I'm responsible for wherever he went and whatever he does now while I'm still trying to manage the 8 other things going on (it's the ridiculous amount of multi-tasking consistently that is exhausting). So I call his mother as I've done many times, since write ups very little consquences at my school and I can't figure out how to reach this one student, only to hear her say in disgust: "I'm so sick of this child" and hang up before hearing anything else. I guess that's better than being hung up on in a cold call during a sales conversation but inspiration can be hard to come by in any industry I guess.

It's much easier to say that you are someone with high expectations, you would never give up on a student, and you understand that everybody learns differently (as 100% of teachers'schools promote), and another to execute. One of my colleagues constantly reminds me: "We aren't here for the many, we are here for the few." That makes the challenge feel not quite as daunting, but it's a weird reality and much further from the pedagogical non-sense that dominates my certification program and permeates the political rhetoric around education that we hear about on the news constantly. It actually reminds me of time in Uganda when speaking to an international development professional who told me: "Impact a village? What? I challenge you to just impact one person this entire year. I mean truly change their life." Either that man was super jaded, or one of the very few real people around.

I'm still deciding. 

Some scenes from my whiteboard recently...I do not have a teacher's handwriting