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.)

December 7, 2005 · Teachering, The South · (No comments)

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?

December 7, 2005 · Culture, Education, Teachering, The South · 1 comment

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.

December 7, 2005 · Teachering · 1 comment

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.

December 7, 2005 · Culture, Education, Teachering · (No comments)

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.

December 7, 2005 · Teachering · (No comments)

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