Dear Loved Ones,
I believe this is my first blog entry during this second school year, and this is a shame. Believe me, I have tried to write, but each time it just didn’t feel like writing, and my blogs really are as much or more for me than they are for you. I apologize to those of you who just want updates…feel free to give me a call or send me an email and we can have that personal communication and I’d be happy to do that. But I want to reserve my blog for something different…something that will allow me to express my challenges, wonderings, or experiences in a way that will help me grow and also you, hopefully in some way.
I sit down to write this entry as this year has presented many challenges that are in some ways making this year more difficult than last. You see, you always hear that your first year of teaching is the toughest, the worst! This is mainly because you have NO CLUE what the heck you’re doing. You don’t know how to lesson plan. You don’t know how to manage students. You don’t know how to be as effective as you’d like to be. You begin questioning yourself: Why did I sign up for this? Can I really make a difference? Can I even make it through this year? Am I doing more good than harm by being in this classroom? These questions are extremely typical for a first year teacher, and yet I don’t believe I ever asked myself one of them last year.
The second year is supposed to be leaps and bounds better than year one. You know what you’re doing and you get to start out fresh. You have an air of confidence and believe that this year is going to be amazing, filled with incredible student growth and you’ll get to take credit for it. This year did, in fact, begin this way. It felt so awesome during September and every other second-year teacher I know all felt the same. It was incredible, to feel like you have a handle on this profession, that you don’t need to pray to just get through the week, but you pray that you have enough time with the students to accomplish all that you know you and they are capable of. This was September.
Today it’s November. Dread creeps in with thoughts about going to work tomorrow because the students have slowly but surely begun to take over the class. More and more battles are losing ones, and the true confidence once felt when an administrator walked into the classroom in September now turns into fear that those same people will come in for a visit. What happened? How did my class turn around so quickly? How is this year so different from last?
Well, last year, almost all of my students were recent immigrants. With this, though many of them lacked education and basic abilities present in 5th graders, I had incredibly invested and well behaved students. While my friends had stories about students physically pushing them, or not being able to teach one word of their lesson because the students simply decided they had their own agenda (which included playing games and cussing at the teacher when they attempted to stop the behavior), my headaches came from one student who talked out 2 or 3 times during the lesson. I didn’t even feel like I was allowed to complain last year because I really didn’t face challenges even close to what my colleagues were facing at different schools. (To be fair to myself, none of my friends had to walk into a class for an hour and a half and teach the entire time in English to a roomful of kids who didn’t speak a word).
This year, however, I finally get to experience the students that we call “Americanized.” These are the kids with the foul language, pants literally below their butts, knives in their knickers, babies in their bellies, you know the type. I could go in depth into what made this community (the poorest congressional district in the nation) turn into the awful and dangerous place it is. I could explain why 95% of its inhabitants are Black or Hispanic and how our nation neglects to believe that this type of place exists, or that the story of Claireece ‘Precious’ Jones is not a unique one. We would end up tracing it back to segregation and then slavery and that people today just blame it on black fathers not being fathers, neglecting to realize that NO ONE is helping them and that these fathers grew up with out fathers (or positive male influences) and that their fathers’ fathers were either imprisoned for being black or lynched (or just simply not given opportunities to be educated). Let’s forget about this terrible history for a second and look at the present: The term that’s used to describe these students is “Americanized.” Funny how many people would think this term should mean free, or liberated, or full of opportunities, yet it comes to mean something that represents the complete opposite ideal of the “American Dream” even while those who it describes are pursuing just that. And while my students say that they want to find a way out, to go to college and not become drug dealers like their cousins, I can’t shake the idea that I’m failing to help them do so. I allow them to behave badly when they don’t know any better. I allow them to distract other students and hold back my consequences for bad behavior because I feel sorry for them, and know that for many of them a phone call home would mean a black eye or bruises in areas that could easily be concealed from a teacher. But I’m brought back to a conversation between Coach Boone and Coach Yoast in Remember the Titans: The white coach was caught ‘babying’ the black players when he felt bad for them. He wanted to show that he wasn’t racist. When he told Coach Boone (Denzel Washington) to lay off one of the black players, Boone calls him out. He says that Coach Yoast doesn’t baby the white players when he (Boone) yells as them, but every time he hurts the feelings of a black player Coach Yoast is right there beside him to help him through it. He tells him that this does nothing to help the players. They don’t need handouts because this will continue to hold them back.
Similarly, one of the main problems in education with the achievement gap, is that wealthy white students are told they have no excuses. Their teachers have high expectations, they believe that they can achieve at high levels and expect no less. Our country has told the poor black and Latino student that they can’t achieve, that we need to have lower expectations for them. This is so completely false, and while I know this and wholeheartedly believe this, I am not following my beliefs when I don’t come down on my students. I am not keeping them at high expectations, I just decide that it’s easier to let them win the battle at times…but it’s only easier for me, and I’m not, then, doing the job I came out here to do. Now I ask myself, in this second year, “Why did I sign up for this? Can I really make a difference? Can I even make it through this year? Am I doing more good than harm by being in this classroom?”
To be clear: I write this not for pity, or for emails of support like “You can do it…you’re doing a great job. You’re doing better than you think.” That’s not what I need. I just need to be honest with myself. I need to write this blog, to have it on paper, to admit this to you and to me and to the Internet. I need to read it again and again until I have changed. I don’t have any Christian or community supports out here to admit this to (which has been an additional struggle) so I decide to write to you. I am challenged. Through Christ, I will prevail. My students will achieve way more this year than last because of what I am going through right now. Step one: Admit you have a problem. Done. As Lupe Fiasco states, “And don’t forget, the blessing is in the struggle.” Thanks for reading.
for the wild,
