In the nineties, as a private citizen working in various industries that left me unfulfilled and vocationally adrift, I was bombarded by radio and tv messages. "Reach for the power, teach." was one slogan I remember. I also remember in college when an African American visiting professor at Kenyon College had the audacity (I felt at the time) to suggest to me that I had a responsibility to teach because I made it into to one of the top colleges in the nation, was successful there, and I needed to show others the way--- because I was African American. That one bugged me. First, I had zero interest in education as a career at the time-- we all knew that our teachers were overworked, undervalued, and underpaid. I also had been raised by parents who remembered the Jim Crow Era bad old days when the only things academically gifted black males were encouraged to do were to teach or preach.
She also was the first person to inform me I wasn't black, but that I was African American. Honestly, that was news to me. My elementary, middle, and high school transcripts all identified me as black. As a college sophomore, finding out someone changed the rules and decided for me how to claim my heritage was unsettling. It was the mid eighties and academia was encouraging all Americans to become hyphenated.
I did and still do have Countee Cullen's response to Africa in "Heritage" :
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
I was miffed, but I did not forget what she said to me. Nearly ten years later, I decided to go back to college to earn my masters and teaching credentials. I intended to teach urban education and I student-taught at West Philadelphia High School. My experiences there could fill a book and they shaped many of my ideas about adolescents and teaching them, but ultimately I ended up teaching in suburban and rural districts.
If teaching is a mission, (and I believe that it is) then we should teach where we can make the biggest impact. For me, I had to listen to my own inner voice. Was that impact going to be greatest in the inner city world that was so different from the life I had known and from the roots that gave me my values? Was I going to do the most good teaching the sons and daughters of captains of industry, finance, higher education, medicine, and manufacturing, or would I do the most good returning to my rural roots?
Having met with success in all three environments, I am (to date) still not sure of the answer. If success is receiving praise for your efforts by your peers, bosses, and clients (students and parents,) then I have made an impact everywhere. One concern I never had was whether I would teach public or private.
All students deserve highly qualified, well-rounded educators, regardless of the sequence of their zip code, their net worth, or their access to the 1%. Are there schools that offer higher salaries? Yes. For the first time in my career, I teach in the community where I live and worship. I had always been leary of doing that, but it has been a powerfully positive experience. The community knows me not only as an educator but they know the rest of me too. It actually helps to recognize parents on back to school night because they sit in the congregation with you on Sunday mornings, checked out your groceries in the supermarket, inspected your vehicle, or helped you build an addition to the house. I have sung in the choir for years with grandparents of current students, live on the neighboring farm to an aunt. I have gone to national tournaments with neighbors of students and competed with them in leagues. They tease me about grading all the time. My commitment to my profession and to my students is known before many of them see my name on their child's schedule. All these connections actually help build trust in the teacher-parent relationship that is pivotal to a child's success.
Why not private? It's not the same. I lived in a military school environment for eigth and ninth grade. There was a sense of community but it was more regimented and less organic. Parochial education had a strong influence upon my values as a student an as an educator but there is a problem with access. In private schools, children are weeded out and preselected. I think someone who is a teacher at his core can teach any child anywhere. It also still shocks me that a private school in the Philadelphia suburbs offered me a teaching position even though I (at the time) had only a BA in English from Kenyon College and had never learned anything about pedagogy or about best practices. They didn't require that I had a teaching license or that I had gone through the vetting process public school teachers are subject to. I would only have been able to rely on my instincts as an educator without the background in the research to inform my instincts. I would have relied only on my limited life experiences and innate empathy to "read" my students-- no knowledge of adolescent psychology to have a sense of what was normal and what was unusual adolescent behavior. I didn't think I was ready to be a "dorm dad" and educator at 25 without that background.
I didn't believe that I would be giving these millionaires and movie star parents their $30,000/year tuition's worth in 1992. In 2012, I know that what my clients get for their modest investment of property taxes, from all of us, is an unbelievable bargain. They get better educated, better prepared teachers for a fraction of the price and they still get the advantage of small class sizes for optimum teacher accessibility.
I guess that is why I am protective of the influences I allow into my classroom. The values of our school are espoused in our district's mission statement: "Providing progressive education to strengthen the global community." That value is exemplified in our commitment to integrating technology into our pedagogy so that students may truly be global learners-- skyping with other classrooms around the nation and world, collaborating on shared projects. I plan to skype with my students from the USBC Master's tournament this winter in February. Our community food drives and community closet drives for those in need also show our commitment to an enduring understanding that we are a global community and that we take care of each other. We are teaching values.
Last week, I received an offer to receive a free class set of Ayn Rand novels and I was horrorified at the suggestion that I indoctrinate my students with text whose theme runs against what we strive for. Ayn Rand emigrated to the US from the USSR. Her militant dogma of self-interest and individualism was in reaction to the tyranny of the collective she grew up with in communism. Her writings were embraced by some during the McCarthy era and red scare. It seemed insidious that I, a teacher in a cash-strapped district, would be approached to teach these novels, complete with teaching aids--without an appropriate counterpoint for students to engage in a discourse about the conflicting messages so that they might be able to form their own conclusions.
The head of my education program at UPENN told us something that seemed somewhat revolutionary at the time. I did not understand it fully until I became an established teacher. He said to us "Teaching is a political act, there is no such thing as value-free education. Know what your values are when you teach. Your students already know what they are." I believe that every member of a community has value and that we have a responsibility to respect each other because only then can we uncover our roles. Can you believe this whole entry was sparked by a piece of junk mail?
