"From the time they were babies, I wish our students saw the faces of people with their skin color and of the ethnicity in movies and on calendars, on postcards and in film. What a difference it would make if voices with a dialect, accent, and language like their own were part of their school lives from kindergarten on. And such pictures, such voices, would not be segregated to part of the school, the month, or the year. They would be there all year round, woven into the everyday: of doors-opening-bells-ringing-large-orange-buses-pulling-up-to-the-brick-building-in-the-dead-of-a-winter-night-morning..."

" '...There was a hit song by James Brown which had that line [With your Badd Self], so it was a slang term, but this man made literature out of it and that really enabled me. It opened up a door and said, "Wait a minute! There's poetry in the language I speak. There's poetry, therefore, in my culture and in this place." '

I want, more than anything as a teacher, to bring to the foreground the poetry in the language of my students."

A required reading for my Instruction and Management in Education class is Julie Landsman's book, "A White Teacher Talks About Race," from which the above excerpt is taken. The quotation she cites comes from an interview with the author of Makes Me Wanna Holler, Sekou Sundiata conducted by Bill Moyers.

I have found this book to be extremely compelling in its compassionate dealings with the issue of race in the school. Unlike many articles and books I have been required to read for similar classes, this book does not come with the charge that we ought to "respect diversity" or be aware of "differences" in our classroom spoken in an overly-PC tone. This teacher's perspective is nearly heartbreaking as she recounts her own grievances over the hurt and struggle of her own students.

A large portion of the section I have read in the first third of the book deals with the reality that students who are not middle-class white children are starved of significant examples of their own people as significant members of society. These students do not see the familiar faces of their ancestors and cultural brothers and sisters in the context of success or significance.

The author recounts and experience in which she accompanies a student of Hmong descent to a play put on the people of her own culture. The student's very young brother joins the teacher and sister at the performance and is extremely distracted (as most young children are at such events) during the portions spoken in English, but intensely tuned into the parts of the performance in which the familiar Hmong language is spoken.

There is something empowering and comforting when we encounter something familiar to us, isn't there? This story in the book instantly reminded me of my own experiences last spring and summer when I would meet someone from Colorado or when I saw a movie filmed here-- even something as small as the culture of this state did something in me that at once brought me back to all sorts of feelings of home, familiarity, and rightness. As white people, we do not understand what it is like not to feel at home here, do we? It is easy to forget, difficult to imagine what it must be like for someone born in this country to lack the familiarity of faces in history like his or her own. Students need that safety and comfort found in the familiarity of their own families, this message that they do belong, regardless of what they and their predecessors have been told for too long. We all need to know that we belong, don't we?

Landsman makes a compelling point with anecdotes from the lives of many students that when a student is able to see him or herself in another, in a hero, a role model, there is something extremely empowering in that experience. There is this unspoken message that they too can become like this, there is hope for them too as they see their story in the story of another. It is so easy to forget the importance of showing students their own lives in the experiences of those like them that have come before-- maybe this is the place where we are most strongly able to communicate their value and worth.

I love this line from Sekou Sundiata: "There is poetry in the language I speak." As I read this, I realized that more than anything, I want my own students to be able to say this of themselves. For students, no matter their race or background, to realize that there is beauty in who they are is something miraculous and so deeply needed. It is something I need-- to see that there is beauty in me, in this very moment, that I am acceptable and free from shame regardless of what I have been told.

As we are often encouraged in our undergrad to "steal" the ideas that we like, I am stealing Landsman's thoughts (although this has been simmering in me for a while): I want, more than anything as a teacher, to bring to the foreground the poetry in the language of my students.



Landsman, Julie. "A White Teacher Talks About Race." Scarecrow Education, 2001: 27, 39

The New York Times published an article today dealing with the current climate of high schools directed towards getting kids into college. Here is a portion that I found particularly interesting:

At Brighton High in Boston, for the first time this year, John Travers, the head of counseling, and his staff visited every freshman English class to begin mapping out the steps toward college: Maintaining a high grade point average. Taking tough classes. Building a résumé.

When I was in high school, these sort of "prep-sessions" were not all that uncommon, yet, when I read about fifteen-year-olds needing to "build a resume," it makes me wonder if this is actually necessary. And I don't post this because I think it is right or wrong, but rather, possibly, because I find myself in this same quandary. The article highlights the steps schools are taking in response to a society in which a high school diploma no longer earns you a ticket into middle-class. I can't help but wonder, if this is our state today, what will it be tomorrow? By the time these high school freshmen make it to college, will they need a graduate degree to make their way into middle class?

Another emphasis in the article is on the financial necessity of a college education (which, in some ways, seems a bit ironic). There isn't a lot of emphasis on encouraging students to pursue a degree for the sake of making a difference in a hurting world or doing what they really want to do-- the point of a college degree is to maintain a lifestyle above a certain level of income, as one student says, “I want a whole lot more. I want to be financially stable. I don’t want to be struggling on $30,000 a year."

And true, as another student quotes his parents, "money makes the world go round," I'm just not sure if this is what matters most. What about sending the message to students that they are valuable and acceptable regardless of their educational level, income, or resume (which they've been compiling since they were fifteen).

another new read...

I've just greedily snatched from the interlibrary loan desk a book written by Jonathan Kozol just a few short months ago entitled ,"Letters to a New Teacher," which I have been quite excited to open. Here are a few passages within the first few pages that I already find quite compelling:

"It's a humbling experience, but I think that it's a good one too, for someone who writes books on education to come back into the classroom and stand up there as a teachers does day after day and be reminded in this way of what it's like to do the real work of a teacher. I sometimes think that every education writer, every would-be education expert, and every politician who pontificates, as many do so condescendingly, about the "failings" of the teachers in the front lines of our nation's public schools ought to be obliged to come into a classroom once a year and teach the class, not just for an hour with the TV cameras watching but for an entire day, and find out what it's like. It might at least impart some moderation to the disrespectful tone with which so many politicians speak of teachers."

"In my writings through the course of nearly 40 years, I have always tried to bring the mighty and ferocious educational debates that dominate the pages of the press and academic publications, in which the voices of our teachers are too seldom heard, back from the distant kingdom of intimidation and abstraction-- lists of "mandates," "sanctions," and "incentives" and "performance standards" and the rest-- into the smaller, more specific world of colored crayons and chalk erasers, pencil sharpeners, and tiny quarrels, sometimes tears and sometimes uncontrollably contagious jubilation of which daily life for the real teacher and her students is, in fact, composed."

"But teachers, and especially the teachers of young children, are not servants of the global corporation nor drill sergeants for the state and should never be compelled to view themselves that way. I think they have a higher destiny than that. The best of teachers are not merely the technicians of proficiency; they are also ministers of innocence, practitioners of tender expectations. They stalwartly refuse to see their pupils as so many future economic units for a corporate society, little pint-sized deficits or assets for America's economy, into whom they are expected to pump "added value," as pundits of the educational policy arena now declaim. Teachers like these believe that every child who has been entrusted to their care comes into their classroom with inherent value to begin with."

Just five pages in, I am already enthralled with the beauty of Kozol's writing and his fierce tenderness for teachers, children, and the classroom. I have a feeling I will be aquiring a new favorite...





***Kozol, Johnathan. Letters to a Young Teacher. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007