Teachers Lounge: The Strange World of Education

Ah, the things I’ll do, the people I’ll see …

Unfortunately, none of it is coming to pass because one of the problems of teaching is how little time is left over. This is particularly true if a teacher decides it’s more important to get the material across to the students than to simply decide what they *have* to learn, then leaving them on their own.

It’s a problem I’ve been debating all week with an exceptionally gifted student: a young Black woman, a proud lesbian, a self-proclaimed poet … and a complete believer in the You gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps mantra.

Ayiiiii.

True, there was the tiniest of openings in all that she said through which I could have demolished her arguments. You see, this is the first time she’s ever been in a school in which the minorities are the majority. And, although she *sees* this, although she’s been *raving* about this all week, she hasn’t quite put all the pieces together.

Her education to this point has been almost exclusively in white, middle class schools where she *was* the minority.

And so, when she walks into my office to find Brazilian students teaching Portuguese to native speakers of any one of infinite American Indian languages, she looks a bit puzzled because it hasn’t quite clicked for her.

When she and I are busy debating it, and a young Black man sticks his head in my office to show me he’s braided his gorgeous Afro – omg, that afro was rockin’! – she knows more is up, but still can’t quite grasp the backstory of ex-gangbanger, father in prison, student himself ex-prisoner and now, thanks to years of patience on our part, he’s actually making it as a student. No, instead what she sees is me as enabler, me doing for them what they should do for themselves, me telling them things she assumes they already know.

So, when she pokes her head into my classroom and sees detailed instructions on the board for writing in some arcane rhetorical mode, when she sees me stop the class and shout “Okay, how many of you have written this down? Stop what you’re doing *now* and write this down!” she’s simply appalled.

She sees someone who’s telling them what they already know, but are simply too lazy to do.

But I see a classroom full of students who have never had to be students.

And what I can’t say to her is that her mother wasn’t shot and killed in a drive-by, and she didn’t help the family earn their living picking oranges and watermelons.

She wasn’t a victim of social promotion and television babysitters and kids raising kids and intergenerational PTSD.

She isn’t escaping a community of alcoholics and meth heads.

And although each of us is lucky to be alive, she doesn’t understand many of these kids are lucky to be alive.

But I can’t tell her that.

No, the truth is, I don’t want to tell her that because I’m looking forward to seeing the lightbulb go off over her head.

Just as I’m looking forward to seeing the lightbulbs going off for all my other students.