(This piece was generated this morning from a writing exercise with my Writer's Anonymous group. So fortunate to have this space, once a month.)
My K-12 experience was meaningless. Looking back, those were
a lot of years of wasted time and bullshit.
I looked at the masses of children going through the system, and I thought
to myself, “What a disgrace.”
When I read James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers,” as an
undergrad, there was a passage in that
essay that really struck me: “Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was
dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day
and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an
apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I
would try to teach them - I would try to make them know – that those
streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are
surrounded, are criminal. I would try to make each child know that these
things are the result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would
teach him that if he intends to get to be a man, he must at once decide that
his is stronger than this conspiracy and they he must never make his peace with
it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it
and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth. I would
teach him that there are currently very few standards in this country which are
worth a man’s respect. That it is up to him to change these standards for
the sake of the life and the health of the country. I would suggest to
him that the popular culture – as represented, for example, on television and
in comic books and in movies – is based on fantasies created by very ill
people, and he must be aware that these are fantasies that have nothing to do
with reality. I would teach him that the press he reads is not as free as
it says it is – and that he can do something about that, too. I would try
to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various,
more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it,
so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but
principally larger – and that it belongs to him.”
I went into teaching, to teach children, that their lives
are worthy of doing activities that are not a waste of their time, and that
serve them, instead of them serving the system. I went into teaching to teach
children that the sentence handed down to them by the system because of their
zip code, their skin color or their family’s income, is an illusion and they
could choose a different identity, a different destiny, a different
experience. I went into teaching to
challenge the adults who live in permanent deficit thinking, and who are themselves
trapped into judging and labeling children, and who feel powerless in the lives of their students. I came into teaching to smile warmly at the
hard working families, in worn clothes, hand-knitted scarves wrapped around
them, firmly shaking their hand and looking into their eyes to convey, “When I
see you, I see my own working-class family, and you are important to me.” I
came into teaching to affirm the humanity of the people that I work with
everyday, and to bring the light of the bright, bright sun into the darkness of
our heavy, confused and damaging system.
