Why I teach...

(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.