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.

December 2, 2005 · Teachering, The South · 1 comment

‘Shots fired’ in Sardis came from police dept.

By Jason C. Mattox
(from the Panolian)

A shooting inside the Sardis Police Department Saturday night left one officer injured, Mayor Alvis ‘Rusty’ Dye said.

According to the mayor, officer Robert Turner was shot in the foot when a shotgun being unloaded by officer Daryl House went off.

“They were in the back of the department unloading the gun,” he said. “When the gun went off, some of the pellets ricocheted and hit Turner in the foot.”

Dye said Turner was treated for the gunshot wound at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Oxford. He is now recovering at his home in the city.

“The Panola County Sheriff’s Department investigated the matter and determined the shooting was accidental,” he said. “Officer House will return to duty today (Monday) and will not be placed on administrative leave.”

[I clipped this article and had it sitting on my desk at school. A student saw it and said, "Shots fired! I hope it wasn't Daryl House!" Upon seeing that it was, he said, "That the second person he done shot!"]

November 10, 2005 · Culture, Moments, The South · 1 comment

Nobody Else Is Laughing

(A little background, for anyone who wanders in: I am teaching in rural Mississippi. Essentially all of my students — only one exception — are black. I am not.)

We were going over subject-verb agreement, and the procedure for the day involved my reading aloud a list of sentences from the grammar book. Some had subjects and verbs that agreed, and some, according to the conventions of Standard American English, did not. I read to the students, and the students responded with corrections where applicable.

One of the sentences, a question I had to ask six class periods of my students, was as follows:

Does anyone want to help me make gefilte fish for the Passover feast?

(A few recognized “gefilte fish” from the movie Rush Hour, which I have not seen, but which I suppose might have been looking for comedy in a similar irony. And on a tangent: a local gang unknowingly uses the Magen David as its symbol. They are called G.D., an acronym I do not know, which they sometimes write G-D. My hall has a Star of David graffito next to the words G-D Block.)

September 30, 2005 · Culture, Teachering, The South · (No comments)

Conduction by Induction and Deduction

So we’re being required by the Teacher Corps to reflect here on the respective problems and benefits of teaching, as they say, deductively and inductively, by which they mean telling the kids the point or letting them figure it out on their own.

Now, I am of the opinion that the only things that are really and meaningfully learned are the things that are pulled out from oneself, whether or not an explanation from someone else coincides with the internal motion. So it follows that “inductive” teaching is a kind of teaching with an expectation of what must happen anyway, but which may not; and “deductive” teaching does not expect it, requiring only memorization. Though of course the magic can happen there, too.

I would prefer not ever to tell the kids the point, and I admit feeling dastardly sometimes for having one. But of course high schools don’t actually educate students; we train them. It is to me a sad condition, and I have not entirely resigned myself to its limitations, but I have basically accepted it. Students who are not interested in self-cultivation of any sort (not to speak of particularly academic efforts) do not easily engage difficult questions. They are accustomed to being baby-sat, to being kept occupied, to memorization and recitation. They sometimes grow angry when these expectations are not met. It is worth the trouble to anger them sometimes, but my energies are not limitless.

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, maybe with a comparable degree of wickedness: You teach the students you have, not the students you wish you had. What would Socrates do? He wouldn’t be preparing fifteen-year-olds for a state test, I imagine.

So I lecture, and they ignore me, and fall asleep (better than outright disrespect). And I try to surprise them often, and provoke them sometimes, and maybe make them a little angry. The objectives that I am required from all sides to write on the board and which are slightly less empty than the words I use to write them are taught in my classroom overwhelmingly in the “deductive” mode, because my students take silent moments or gaps in my control as invitations to chaos. I hope that they are getting an inductive lesson too, though. It’s not written on the board.

September 30, 2005 · Education, Teachering · 1 comment

Classroom Management After Five Weeks

My “classroom management plan,” as I’ve been conditioned to call it, has changed in only one significant way after five weeks of teaching: the introduction of The Ball. My three afternoon classes have been markedly more rowdy than my three morning classes, and one day a couple of weeks ago, after too many desk numbers on the board (warnings) and too many check marks next to them (disciplinary assignments; 30-minute and 1-hour detentions; office referrals), with a classroom of squirming and rambunctious teenagers still talking over one another with decreasing order and increasing loudness, I had a vision of The Lord of the Flies. I grasped frantically for some sort of conch shell, for law and order, for some symbol of the power to speak; and I came to a large and heavy volume of excerpts from world literature which I had inherited with the classroom. I told the students that Only He Who Holds The Book May Utter Sound!, and, if only for its novelty, it worked. The failure of the book, however, was to be its heft: great for symbolism, bad for quickly transmitting the Power to Speak to a student on the other side of the room. I considered transmigrating its Power into a marker or some kind of smallish stick, and I remembered the red foam ball another teacher gave me before the first day of school (for stress-relieving squeezing), and which still sat in my desk.

Of course, the second day of its use the Red Ball of Power was stolen by some student in my sixth period as they were leaving the room (I had absently left it on the podium). I knew that it disappeared at the close of sixth period, though, so I found a few of my sixth-period ruffians in the halls and told them to spread the word that if anyone “finds the ball in the hallway” they may assist its anonymous reappearance into my room within 24 hours and no penalties would follow for anybody; and with whatever fire I could project into my eyes I threatened nameless but assuredly awful penalties for the entire sixth period if it failed to reappear in such time. It was back the next day, and I’ve kept it closer since. The novelty has worn off and some students have become annoyed at the ball, and some days its effect wanes, perhaps as I become less strict with it. It has helped, however. There have been a few mis-throws that have elicited giggles, which are scolded as false laughs at the not-in-fact-funny.

(Two immediate rules were that the ball cannot be passed from student to student, only teacher to student and student to teacher, and that it must immediately be returned upon request, never played with.)

Otherwise my plan has remained as it was this summer. I am considering dumping the second consequence (disciplinary assignments, usually essays), and going straight to detention. It’s a pain in the ass to keep track of all the assignments, and many of my students have not been turning them in (I have their names, but haven’t had the time to follow up on them yet, despite threats that I still expect to act on). And I was surprised to find that I have appreciated — not liked, exactly, but appreciated — my time with kids serving detention. I will be there grading papers anyway, and having a student or two in the room doing work, helping clean, or sitting quietly is often more agreeable to me than sitting alone grading papers for hours, and I find that I actually like them better: so many of my students who are constant trouble in a large group become perfectly courteous in a very small one, and at the end of the day it renews my faith a bit to see my troublesome ones behaving themselves.

That said, I’ve also given out quite a bit of detention that remains to be served. I haven’t lost track of it, I’m proud to say, but unfortunately I haven’t been organized enough to remind students to show up under threat of being “written up.” I will though. Just after all this other stuff.

September 8, 2005 · Photos, Teachering · 1 comment

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