Ode to Ron, Sandy, Janie and Roberta (Why I Teach)

Fifth Grade - P.S. 397 (Foster Laurie)

Today's post isn't about my novel, my writing, or what I'm wondering about the characters I'm creating. It's about my love for learning, and why I do what I do. I'll write about the novel again when it feels right. I'm getting ready to go to camp in a couple of weeks, so a hiatus will be in order from 8/4 - 8/12 anyway. I'll probably post next weekend and then take a break.

I think I was eight-years-old in this picture. I started school a year early, so everyone else was probably nine, and about to be ten. I spent a lot of my life being the youngest everywhere. In school, in my family. I didn't mind being Baby Girl. My mom still calls me Baby Girl, and I still don't mind. I never will. I love it, actually💖.

My parents tell me that I've always loved learning. My home was my first school. I can still see the bookshelves filled with books by W.E.B. DuBois, Alex Haley, and James Baldwin, and though I didn't understand the title back then, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. I don't remember a time when I didn't love Sesame Street, and when it was time for me to go to daycare/preschool, I didn't cry. I was excited. See me?

#3 Train Track Shadows Above Little Me

I remember fourth and fifth grades most vividly, and I think it's because I had two amazing teachers both years. Janie Miller and Roberta Kamler.  I remember our big open classroom - no walls, no desks, no chairs. We sat on the rug and we learned. We read Shakespeare - Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, and MacBeth. We learned Latin. Tempus Fugit. Mater. Pater . . . and when our day was about to end we sang It's quarter to 3. There's no one in the place except you and me . . .  I loved school. Loved our art and musicals - The Pajama Game and Annie Get Your Gun. I loved our annual holiday show. School was like magic . . .

When it was time for me to choose a career, I knew I could go the civil servant route. I could take an exam (which I did when I finished school), wait to be called from the list and then I'd have the security of a steady salary, health benefits and a pension when it was time to retire. I tried. I worked for the Immigration and Naturalization Service for six weeks after college. I hated it, so I left. They were mad, too, because a good deal of money was spent on my background check, but I couldn't do it. I couldn't spend hours and hours day after day in a file room waiting for Washington to approve my login credentials (and no one could tell me when that would happen the whole six weeks I was there) just so I could spend hours and hours day after day in front of a computer. My soul needed to breathe. I know me, and I knew that if I just tried to suck it up, it would have been a constant challenge to stay connected to joy, and that is essential for me. Joyspirit. That's me.

I am so thankful for the generations of ancestors who came before me who never got to experience what it felt like to have choices because they were kidnapped, branded, starved, torn away from one another, drowned, physically shackled, enslaved, tormented, sold, used, lynched, shut out, denied opportunities, imprisoned, excluded . . . but through all of that madness, their dreams never died. They pressed on to survive through hell and brokenness and stored their hopes and dreams and creativity and song and dance and arms wide open deep breaths in the open fields of the future away in their DNA and passed it on to me.

It was scary to try to follow an unfamiliar path hoping that I could make a living doing something I loved. But what did I love? I loved writing, so I started out in a graduate creative writing program at Boston University. I was in a class with Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted), and I loved being her student just like I loved being in Janie and Roberta's class. She was so skilled at helping me to see the beauty in my word pictures and tell my best story. Susanna Kaysen was an amazing teacher. Teacher? Yes, Teacher. I wanted to be a teacher.

So I transferred to Boston College and became an upper elementary teacher, and then went on to teach teachers as a Literacy Coach, Teacher Developer and Curriculum and Instruction Director. What I have seen too often is that schools (not all schools, mind you, but many of the schools with students who are brown like me ) have become like those locked places my ancestors worked so hard and died to change. Incarcerated, joyless spaces where the laughter, curiosity and wonder all children come into life with is erased and replaced with despair. And some of the schools that allege to be better often try to convince students that in order to be successful, you have to be someone different than who you are, and different from those who raised you.

What I most want now is for every student to be free to love school and for schools to be places where teachers love to be, and for them to honor the places from which their students come. Notice I didn't say love test prep or recite learning objectives, and I didn't say that I want teachers to feel like they work for Kaplan or like they need to rescue students from their families and communities.  School should be a place to grow ideas, create, discover, read books, articles and poetry from all kinds of folks, write, wonder, learn, discuss, understand, be understood, be included, be honored, be inquisitive, be inquired about, dream, plan, reconsider, sing, dance, laugh, connect,  debate, advocate, go on field trips, transform, be transformed, and just be . . .

Not to be suspended for wearing braids.
Not to be yelled at.
Not to receive demerits because you didn't wear the uniform.
No to be ignored or merely tolerated.
Not to complete worksheets.
Not for test prep drills.
Not to rush through content to get it "covered."
Not to be told when they can go to the bathroom. 
Not to be punished.
Not to supply inmates for prisons.
Not to lose hope.
Not to hear about how deficient some people think they are.
Not to be judged and labeled because of demographics, socioeconomics and crime statistics.

Preach, Chris Emdin!
Preach, Clint Smith!

This Sunday as part of Dishon's sermon he asked what we think God put in our hands to do. I see it as a calling to help schools and teachers to transform. I feel passionately about culturally responsive/relevant/inclusive/affirmative/proficient/competent/empowering teaching and learning that helps schools to become the places kids love to be because when they go there, they can shake off all that weight loaded on them by those who can't /won't value who they are and just fly . . . What's stopping us? And why do we let it? Not me. Not on my watch.