Drafting My Teacher Piece
I don’t really have a draft so my title is misleading but I have an idea. I think I want to take my demo and a brief discussion of teaching in a working class school and draft an article for publication. I have no idea what this will look like, it is just an idea.
I better get moving.
The Scene
The room looks like your typical high school classroom. Students are sitting in desks pen in hand working on a piece of writing. In the second to last row, the second seat from the back sits Mike. At six foot five Mike towers over my small five foot four frame. He wears a lot of black t-shits, and baggy pants which seem to be dragged down by a chain connecting his back pocket wallet to a belt loop around front. His shoulder length hair is often pulled back into a ponytail revealing a shiny shaved head underneath. Lately he has taken to wearing a black baseball cap with army embroidered in huge yellow letters across the front, something I notice when I ask him to take his hat off as per school policy.
I crouch down beside his desk and whisper, “Mike, are you going to get your letter started?”
Looking down at me, appearing even taller, he replies, “Yeah, I guess, eventually.”
“What do you mean eventually? We have a deadline, they are going to be voting on the proposal soon and you have to let you voice be heard. What’s the problem? Why is starting so difficult? And don’t give me the, ‘I have nothing to say’ line because we both know that’s a lie.”
He smiles. I walk away. He begins to write. At the end of class he hands me a draft.
My Problem
Recalling her childhood experiences author Sandra Cisneros told a Los Angeles Times reporter, “When I was eleven years old in Chicago, teachers thought that if you were poor and Mexican you didn’t have anything to say.” Each year, during the first weeks of school I ask students to respond to this quotation. I also use Cisneros’ words at the start of a workshop I give that focuses on reluctant writers. In my own responses, and often in those of both my students and workshop participants, we gravitate and focus on Cisneros’ use of the word Mexican.
When I began my teaching career I was one of few white teachers working in school that had a one hundred percent black student population. The environment forced me to constantly think about my whiteness and the effects it had on my classroom and the experiences of the students I worked with. During that time I frequently returned to Cisneros’ classroom experience and reflected on the practices I employed in my classroom and prayed that my students did not identify with Cisneros. I hoped that they felt our classroom offered a place for their voices and that my pedagogy reflected and welcomed their stories and experiences.
I carried this concern with me when I began the job I currently hold at a career and technical high school in upstate New York. And although when I look at the students in my current classes and find that the majority of the faces looking back at me look like me there is still a reluctance to write. This reluctance again brings me back to Cisneros’ statement and this time it is the word poor that holds my attention.
The Career and Technical Center is comprised of students who attend the eight component school districts in Ulster county New York. The school is as diverse as the county’s population.
