Ethnic Frameworks

I believe I've already written in this blog about my students' interest in my "race," about their sometimes identifying me as "Spanish but not Mexican" and somewhat widely as "Middle Eastern;" even, however surprisingly to me, as Iraqi.

I don't recall if I mentioned that a young boy from the elementary or grade school, and who is white but ethnically ambiguous, was in the Homecoming parade, and that for several days I had students telling me that they saw my son in the parade. Upon my denying that I had any son they insisted that I've "been down here before!" (Though I couldn't have been older than twelve when this boy was born.)

Last week we discussed literary allusion, and the particular allusion in the story we were reading was to Adam and Eve. When I went through the familiar story, a student exclaimed, "I thought you was Jewish."

My non-response response was that, actually, somebody's being Jewish or not wouldn't matter, because this story and so many other Biblical ones are very important to secular literature, and besides, the Adam and Eve story is in the Old Testament of Christian Bibles, which means it's also included in Jewish Bibles.

A different student's non-response response, almost whispered to herself: "You do look Jewish."

(I remain surpised that though they might have never heard the name Christopher Columbus, they might believe most Americans are black, they might not know that Hitler was German, "looking Jewish" nevertheless means something for some of them.)

Impromptu Lessons

There are a group of somewhat crazy black veterans in Ellison's Invisible Man, and the difference between the treatment of blacks in Europe and in the American South in the first half of the 20th Century, as well as the political and cultural influence of that difference, were important subjects in my honors English class at several times this year. And now we're reading Death of a Salesman, for which the subject of post-war America has come up. I discovered in all of this that most of my honors students know the name Hitler, but don't know who he was, what he did, or what war or movement he was associated with.

Another time I learned that a majority of that, the honors, class believed that there are more blacks than whites in America today.

Last week, helping a student with a question in the grammar text book, I found that this student (this one not in the honors class) had no particular associations with the name Christopher Columbus. It didn't ring a bell.

Where do you even begin?

Excursions

One day, at about 9:45, a student from the office comes around announcing that an assembly will be held at 10:00. There is no P.A. system, and this level of organization is by no means suspicious, so ten minute later my class and every other class on my hall marches to the auditorium. We find it empty, and are told the assembly is not until the next day.

Another day, at a similar time, I get a message from the asst. principal that I need to take my students to the auditorium and report to the conference room. Class stops, and we go. I find that I had been called to an emergency meeting of the discipline committee to discuss a student who is to have a conference in mere minutes, and in order to ascertain that we all, in fact, agree that he be recommended to the alternative school. Twenty minutes later I find my class unattended in the auditorium, impressively well-behaved, and to a chorus of groans lead them back to class. (They asked me if I got a paddling.)

This Monday about ten minutes after the start of first period I get a message that I am to take my students to the library. I ask why, and where I am supposed to go myself, and I learn that I am going with three other teachers to Water Valley High School for the day to have a sort of mini-conference on how they improved their school. All of my classes sat in the library.

This semester I've had three conference days (one conference plus the Water Valley excursion) and one sick day. I have always had lesson plans and materials for the students to work on. I have not had a single substitute and those lessons and materials have always been ignored. If I'm not there, they sit.

A Semester

I have a long row of index cards stapled to the wall above my dry-erase board, one for each week of school year. Red cards replace the white for the weeks of the state tests, and there is one black card that I move over every week. We've only got one card left until the half-way indicator. How time flies. (Especially when there's not ever enough of it.)

I don't think I've changed my mind much about education or approaches to teaching or management, though I've certainly made many small adjustments. I use fewer words, and am much more inclined to settle for imprecise or philosophically insufficient explanations (or rules, or procedures). They're just as unsatisfying and distasteful, but I've become somewhat more pragmatic about these instances when the answer that's satisfying to me won't get anybody anywhere. (I lie constantly. It's like a hobby. We need to move on, folks.)

I don't dress as well, either. I used to make it through the day with my tie all the way up and the top button fastened. Eventually I started pulling the tie down half an inch and unbuttoning the top button sometime during sixth period. Then, sometime during fifth. Then, at the start of third. Then second. Now sometimes before leaving the house. And I don't usually wear a tie at all on Fridays.

Sometimes I feel like I'm not really teaching, especially when I feel like I'm teaching for the state test. In some ways maybe my thoughts about school have become more like they were when I was a high school student myself. Maybe college and lofty ideas about education made it easier to forget some things. When I was in high school I sat in the back of most classes and read books, or slept. With a few exceptions, I usually felt like my time was being wasted, that I was being baby-sat, that I was being held in a pen because I couldn't be trusted on the street during the day until I was arbitrarily branded an adult. I certainly learned a lot, but I believed that most of it was learned not because of school, but despite it.

I am very uncomfortable wasting my students' time, and they often look at me like that's what I'm doing, and I'm often afraid that I agree with them. If only their resentment was like mine was, and consoled with J.D. Salinger or Dostoevsky. . . .

I don't want to teach a state-tested subject next year.

I probably would have melted down and quit if not for the regular excursions to Oxford. Certainly that is an enormous argument in favor of the Teacher Corps. I am compelled to admit that the principal benefits I have received there this fall have been with my colleagues Friday nights at the hotel, and Saturday lunches and evenings in the Square. Certainly I benefited on campus as well, especially in the afternoons when I met with the other English teachers, but the benefit balance tilts very heavily away from the time on campus; maybe the social nature of man requires that it be this way, but I wish the difference were subtler. I am looking forward to the different sort of class we'll have after the break.

The hardest is over, according to everybody who has anything to say about it.

Succession of Successes?

I cannot very well "share a success [I] have had" (quoted from blog assignment sheet) since I neither know what success is or what it would look like. For most of my students it seems to mean leaving this place. I have wondered if it wouldn't be success for my district to be absorbed into this county's other (wealthier and more successful) school district. Or for the migration out of the Delta to be completed, leaving only cotton fields and robots to labor in them (which doesn't often seem harder than bringing jobs and good educations in).

It's fairly easy to come by stories of special exceptions, of gifted students, of one teacher who made a difference in one student's life; and I will not denigrate these stories. I must see them, however, as a very particular species of success, since they are defined as exceptions. World-savers and knights errant encounter in the Teacher Corps a kind of cynicism that often seems realistic, or a kind of realism that often seems cynical, and I'm not wholly at odds with it. But I'm still unsure of our reduction of "success" into a series of anecdotes that we can use to motivate ourselves on rainy days. We have not one success, but a whole swarm of them! (Even pinned, literally, like dead bees and butterflies, on cork.) There is pragmatism to this view, but I wish some more time were allowed -- pragmatic or not -- to the collective consideration of what that one success would look like.

Like all the gold coins in the construction-paper chest that Mrs. Monroe has placed on our Board of Success, we each have our little collection of treasures (to return to her explicit metaphor, and backing away from the entomological one). And sure enough, they are nice on rainy days. It felt like a little treasure when a slew of students first thought of me for letters of recommendation to some academic club. It felt like a little treasure when a student who received unsolicited letters from admissions departments inviting her to consider their schools thought that I would be the teacher she'd ask about the quality of those schools and for advice about them. And when another student, who rode on the hood of a car during the Homecoming Parade giving everybody the mechanical wrist-motion-minimizing Miss America wave, broke out of it for a second to wave at me like a normal person waves. And there are so many students who were very troublesome and openly hostile to me who are now only slightly troublesome and usually not hostile. My fifth period can now usually get to and from the cafeteria without a constant threat of chaos.

The anecdotes surely are like little treasures in their own way, and there are many more of them. But I'm happy to live without the little reassurances, with whatever uncertainty or tragedy that requires, in order to keep that bigger kind of success unmuddied and to keep my foolish heart and eye searching for it.

Reflections: My First Year of Teaching in the Mississippi Delta

The difficulty of comparing my expectations of teaching in the Delta (in the economic and cultural Delta if a bit outside of the geographical one) to the reality is that they don’t feel like real categories. What were my expectations? What is the reality? There’s something of a fallacy even in the tenses of those verbs, and it seems to me that my expectations have been changing with my perceptions of the reality.

It is hard to remember what my earliest expectations were. I was told that all or nearly all of my students would be black. I was told that many or most would be poor. I was told that the Delta is still deeply segregated, and that blackness and poorness are not wholly unrelated conditions. Precisely how these facts came together in my mind, the impressions and the expectations that they first formed, are lost to me now, because they’ve been shifting so gradually and so consistently. What it means to be poor and black in Mississippi was surely no more than a vague notion in my mind last May, which coalesced into something clearer over the summer but continued to change. It changes still today, and though my students surely have a different and more intimate view of it than I do, I am not sure that even their view is unchanging and definitive.

I remember something of how distant actual teaching seemed this summer. The preparations of soldiers for battle was not an uncommon metaphor for our training as teachers, and though there’s something terribly wrong about that metaphor there are some things right about it, too. One of the things it gets right is how close and yet how far away the physical reality of war must seem to soldiers in training. Teaching was an idea for me, and it was a very vivid idea, but no more real than the vivid feeling of being involved in the story of a movie or book one is watching. It was still in my head, still a fantasy; and the me who was the principle character was the same fantasy-me that inhabits all of the books I read and the movies I see. One never does walk into the plot of the book or movie, and it’s rather startling to walk into some other vivid imagining. The actual-me, with all his stammers and awkwardnesses, suddenly finds himself in the role of his fantasy counterpart.

I must have expected to be a good teacher. I expected to bridge the divide between myself and my students, between my background and theirs, with sympathy and understanding. I knew I had to be firm, to manage my classroom with discipline, and I expected doing so to be difficult. Somehow I expected to have free time. I expected the job to be stressful, but I did not very vividly imagine the stress. I expected disorganization from the school and its administration, and I expected little support apart from my excursions to Oxford.

So what was the reality that I found? More audacious still, what is the reality? I don’t really know. I’m afraid any description I can make will be a superficial one. I was surprised by many things.

I was surprised by how taxing teaching can be -- or at least how taxing it is in the beginning. I did expect stress, but was somehow surprised by it (by its quality? by its degree?) nonetheless. I found that I was perhaps optimistic about the power of, or at least about the consistency of the power of sympathy and understanding. I must have known that not all battles can be won, but I think I was still surprised to find that some students don’t want any divides to be bridged. Or maybe they do want it, in the same way they really do want (as we so like to declare) order and rules and strictness and education. But just as so many of them seem deeply convicted, despite our declarations, that they don’t want those things, they are similarly convicted that they don’t want the divide that separates us to be bridged. I continue attempts at bridge-building and so many keep cutting the ropes.

For all the warnings of problems and disorganization and corruption in the educational system, for all my expectation of them, I think I was still surprised by them, or by how difficult they are to work around, or by how damaging they are to the business of a school. Maybe my expectations failed to account for the extent to which a teacher is a dependent part of a system. I probably would have agreed that a teacher cannot be a school unto himself, but the breadth and depth of that assertion were not assimilated into my expectations before the first days of school.

Still, I am a teacher, as I expected to be; and I have students, most of whom are not hostile to me and many of whom are actually interested in learning something. I expected steep hills and I was surprised by their steepness (though I probably expected to be so surprised). I do have hopes, and still some energy remaining to dedicate to them.