Two

This week I became a teacher…but I don’t really feel all that different. No epiphanies have come, no revelations…not even much pure excitement or intense frustrations…just more stress than I’ve ever experienced before, which has come mostly from putting together all of my lesson plans and creating posters for them with 18 hours of work each day and a “lucky” 5 hours of sleep each night. I know it’s all going to be worth it though, especially once I can stop treating my students like guinea pigs. I am, after all, their actual summer school teacher doing real instruction, unlike student teaching. This is definitely real and I still haven’t grasped it yet, which is pretty difficult when the direction of your life has shifted as dramatically as mine has in such a short period of time. Just three months ago I was waiting to hear from Teach For America, waiting to turn them down if I were accepted into the corps. I thought my immediate post-college life was supposed to be lived in Los Angeles for a few years, working with companies I was equally as passionate about entailing working with college (or prospective college) students. New York wasn’t even a thought on my mind since it wasn’t my top choice for placement. All I knew for sure was that I was going to return to Argentina for the month of May, leaving just 2 days after my graduation.

One moth in Argentina, a week in NYC, and three weeks at home later I found myself taking on the greatest challenge I have faced in my life up to this point, in a brand new place with brand new people learning brand new skills. While I’d love to go on and on about my feelings, my stresses, my difficulties, and my joys here I really want to write about a 30 second conversation that I was a part of today that has, so far, had the greatest
impact on me (during my interaction with my students).

Just 3 days into being a teacher and I have already faced my first collision with racial awareness. Part of the preparation for Institute was to read specified texts on all sorts of topics: lesson planning and delivery, elementary and secondary literacy, and many more. They were all great, necessary, and engaging texts that I have begun putting into practice and am using in my teaching. The one that hit me the most, however, was not about instruction or instruction planning at all. It was, rather, the diversity and culture text. At one point I was even called out pretty clearly within the book. When discussing the idea of racial identification and white privilege, it read that all future corps members, of all races, genders, and sexual orientations, need to be aware of these things in their classroom. It emphasized, however, that those who are white, male, affluent, straight, able-bodied, Christian, or able speak English need to pay special attention to what’s discussed in this text. What I found was that I did not resonate with much of thoughts on racial awareness that was discussed, which was the point of calling me, and corps members like me, out. I had never even been faced with the thought that being white gives you privilege in this nation and in this world. I also have never identified with a “white group” or “male group” or “affluent group” or any of these groups (well, except Christian but I don’t’ count that because it’s comfortable often times to be a Christian within these white, affluent communities…which is interesting when you read in the Bible that Christians are supposed to face ridicule…maybe something to think about.) The text explained that there is a process by which black, Latino, poor, and other minority children go through in identifying with one of those descriptions. This was demonstrated today when one of the girls in my class, Julia we’ll call her, made a comment to another student while we were reading:

“You sound white when you read.” she said to the other student we’ll call Joe.
“…Thanks.” responded Joe, seriously and defensively after a pause.
“No offense Mr. Simmerman,” said Julia as I was trying to figure out how to respond.

Both Julia and Joe are Hispanic.

While the readings in the text prepared me to understand why comments like these are made and where they come from, it didn’t offer a crash course on tackling these issues. As a brand new teacher, let’s just say my response was less than preferable (I favored ignoring the comment and quickly moved on rather than address the situation).

There are two primary questions about this conversation I would like to pose. The first is why did Joe respond in that way? Why did he say thanks, and what does that mean? This is almost as troubling to me as the comment made by Julia. The second question, one that’s more of a reflection that I will surely be thinking about throughout my time in the Bronx, is how can I combat the view that being educated and being able to read is viewed by many students as being “white” – something that is clearly not desirable by these adolescent students? The no offense part tells me that Julia doesn’t necessarily categorize me as the “white” person that has brought her to the conclusion that “white” is something bad, but still, when you have peer pressure saying that the moment you strive to be educated you are no longer a part of your race, then how can students find any desire to advance their learning in school?

As part of something I hope to do in every installment of “Stories from a Streaker,” I will leave you with (or put somewhere within the story) a quote that either specifically pertains to something within the installment or has simply came to mind while writing. The following quote is one I just ran across from President Lyndon B. Johnson:

“Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”

Four decades later, we have a long way to go, and this is why I streak.


for the wild,
andrew