I am not yet done reading it, but find myself wanting to write about it now. And I will tell you more about this book. But now I am about to explode.
How large is your heart? Who is included in it? What is possible? I remember reading somewhere the words of Jerome Bruner that every child was capable of some level of mastery in every subject. My job as a teacher is to help that child connect with the subject and support the child so that the mastery becomes possible. Every child. Just as my job as a human being is two-fold, and here I refer again to the words of George Fox that guide me: that I need to walk gladly across the earth and answer that of God in each person I encounter.
I am writing this for myself. If it benefits anyone else that is a nice addition, but I need to write, to clarify my own thinking. Hopefully as I write what I mean will become clear, at least to me.
It started when Erin Gruwell was a student teacher whose mentor was close to retirement, and basically left her on her own with a group of juniors. The following year she was hired, but due to seniority rules began with freshmen. It is that group of students, whom she was able to teach for the next few years, that became the reason many know her and them. Eventually they became known as the Freedom Writers, and it led to a best-selling book entitled The Freedom Writers Diary : How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. Gruwell is listed as one co-author, the other being Zlata Filipovic, who herself became a well-known author in her early teens with Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo, based on the journal she began when she was only ten and first published when she was about 13.
The book I am reading makes me about to explode is a later book by Gruwell, entitled Teach With Your Heart: Lessons I Learned from The Freedom Writers.
Here I must digress: the story Gruwell tells in this book is inspiring. But not every teacher can fully accomplish what she did. She had connections which led to other connections which empowered in ways almost no student teachers and few beginning teachers can replicate. And she had more than a little luck. After all, no matter how hard one tries most teachers could not connect with Miep Gies, the secretary of Otto Frank who helped hide the family of Anne and who is responsible for preserving her diary. Or Thomas Keneally, whose novel Schindler's Ark eventually led to the Oscar-winning film about the Holocaust.. OR Steven Spielberg, who directed that and many other films.
But every teacher can draw from the book, and be challenged by it, because Gruwell was unwilling to give up on any of her students, and sought to find connections with and offer validation of their lives and their experience. And so often that is the key to successful teaching.
Perhaps I became interested in her story when I found that her father named her Erin because he wanted to honor a baseball player he admired (he worked in the sport), one who when I was growing up was also my favorite, Hall-of-famer Hank Aaron. I idolized him and felt he was robbed in 1954 when Wallie Moon won Rookie of the Year over him. And perhaps that illustrates what I mean about connecting with the lives of students: that fact alone drew me in a bit more near the start of the book.
I do not intend this as a book review. But there are things about which Gruwell writes that I have to note.
Her school used a strict seniority system in assigning classes: thus when she was hired she was NOT allowed to continue with the students she had student-taught, because beginning teachers got the least desirable students, those 9th graders who did not qualify as "Distinguished." Perhaps instead of that term your school uses Honors, or Talented, or Gifted, or some combination. No matter how the labeling is done, there are several things that were exportable from the environment in Long Beach in which Gruwell was teaching: (1) there was a clear racial demarcation between the favored group however it was labeled and the other kids; (2) parent of the favored group tended to look down on those children who did not attend classes with theirs and teachers tended to have negative mindsets about the "lower" kids; (3) the kids in the out group knew what others thought about them, and often felt little inclination to try as hard in school.
Gruwell experienced teachers who didn't think "those kids" were up to the same books as the more talented kids. The tracking was so rigid that in order to have her students be able to read books like Anne Frank's diary she had to purchase copies on her own. Too often students from poor and minority families who already are disadvantaged by lack of access to literature and other resources are further denied these as part of their schooling, something very much exacerbated by the mandates of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the insane focus on test scores.
If one reads either of the books about these kids that I listed above, one quickly discovers that even the least-skilled academically has stories s/he can tell, if only given a chance, only their lives and their experience is so rarely validated in traditional academic settings that they disconnect from school. In reading the powerful stories some of them had to tell, I was reminded of something from my own teaching experience.
In my third year of teaching I had two classes of students each for two 72 minute periods daily. I was responsible for their language arts (English and Reading) and social studies (US history through Reconstruction). I knew I could not hold their attention with a history that was so disconnected with their lives, so I also interwove material from the Civil Rights era, and earlier related material from the Harlem Renaissance, and from the development of the Gospel music tradition: the vast majority of these students, who were not allowed in the Talented and Gifted (TAG) category, were African-American. During the year we did visit the Holocaust Museum and I brought in a friend who was a survivor: Anne Frank was part of the English curriculum. I also took them on another trip to museums along the National Mall, where they saw the lunchcounter from the first sit-in in Greenboro, where they went through exhibits on the Great Migration and on Gospel music, and where they saw the relief of Shaw and his troops which connected with the movie Glory which they had all seen.
One of the passages in their Reader for language arts was a selection from "Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored" in which the narrator experienced discrimination - they could not attend a revival because it was not a day when "those people" (Blacks) were allowed in the tent. I wanted my students also to write personal narratives of their lives. I decided to illustrate with a brief narrative from my own life, when as someone of Jewish background and at the time a member of the Orthodox Church began to attend a Roman Catholic Seminary. I wrote two versions of an incident where one of my instructors, a Monsignor, took especial care to make sure I was not uncomfortable because of my Jewish last name. I projected one brief version which lacked descriptive detail but functionally described the incident. Then I put up a version that was far more descriptive, rich in narrative and far better able to hold their attention. I should also note that I came dressed as a Monsignor: by then these 8th graders were used to my periodically coming in costume, and walking into my classroom and seeing me in some weird get-up would always have them on the edge of their seats, because they knew whatever else might happen, class would be something interesting or challenging.
After they had seen both versions we explored the difference. I also allowed them to question me about my experience, about what it had meant to me. And then they were given their homework; to write a personal narrative about something in their own lives that had affected them. They now had two models, that of Clifton L. Taulbert, who had written the book from which we had read the incident, and that from my own experience.
I remember how blown away I was by what I received. One narrative has remained forever burned in my memory, and illustrated to me something Gruwell encountered with her students, how different the life experiences of the students and the teacher. Chanel wrote about her uncle (who was perhaps 10 years older) taking her out for her birthday. His pager kept going off, he would look, and ignore it. Then, after he had been with her for an hour, he looked again, became very quiet and said "Baby, I'm sorry but I have to go." As she later learned, her uncle, who was a gangbanger, had skipped a gang-related event to be with her on her birthday. He had been ignoring messages from other members. The message that quieted him was from the head of the gang, who when her uncle finally showed up killed him for not having done his gang stuff. Chanel wrestled with whether she was therefore responsible for her uncle's death.
Why am I about to explode? As did Gruwell with her students, I found incredible riches among my students, some of whom read and wrote well below grade level. Often they felt disconnected from school, because it was so structured that it seemed to exclude the validity of their own life experiences, of which they desperately needed to make sense. My students were not as poor and financially disabled as many of those about who Gruwell wrote, but too many still came from broken homes. I think of two incidents that came from an assignment of exploring your family, where you came from, in any fashion you chose. This is from a different year than Chanel's classmates. I had four classes at a time of social studies students, a total of over 250 for the year.
Most did family trees, albeit sometimes in incredibly creative fashion. One young lady proudly displayed a chart of four generations, and as she was going through it one boy asked "where are the men?" since only women were listed. She said that she only listed women because the women in her family did not marry, and in fact, three generations back, only one great-aunt had ever married. Perhaps that explained some of her hostility towards her male classmates, perhaps it also explained her insecurity about her future, or her difficulty in connecting with reading that described more traditional family life.
The other incident came about because two students in different classes wound up being referred to the same person as the family historian, a great-great-aunt to both, and thereby discovered they were sisters. Not half sisters. Sisters. Not twins. But the parents had separated shortly after the birth of the second, only 11 months after the birth of the first, and neither had been told about the existence of the other.
Perhaps I am ready to explode because the book challenges me by reminding me of a time when I was incredibly focused on connecting with each child that came into my care. Perhaps it is easier to do when the students are younger than it is with the high school students, mainly tenth graders, who currently populate my classes. But should it be different? Should our role as teachers be so focused on content that we do not have time to make the connection with the students that can assist in helping them achieve mastery as Bruner says should be possible?
As I struggle to make sense of the feeling I am currently experiencing, I had several artifacts from my students. One is a portrait one of the most gifted students I have ever had drew this year. I describe her as gifted not because of her 4.0+ average, or her incredibly high PSAT scores, or the quality of her written work, but because she has been able to connect with the inner persons of others. She might not think this deserving of such attention, but it is something that tends to humanize any situation of which she is a part.
The other is a set of coasters made up to look like American flags. It was made by the mother of 9th grade student some years back, a family that are Jehovah's Witnesses, in an attempt to express their gratitude for knowing about and respecting the difference their religious beliefs impose upon them - no celebrations of Christmas and birthdays, no participation in the Pledge ceremony. The boy was in my homeroom, and it was the first time in his school career the family had not had a battle over the Pledge with teachers. Others might take offense at the idea of turning the flag into coasters, but I understood and appreciated the real sentiment behind the gift.
I easily get depressed on weekend and during breaks like now, because I am not interacting with young people, because I do not have the opportunity to try to empower them. Note that word: Empower. It is hard for people to feel empowered if they do not think they matter, if their lives and experiences and perceptions are not accorded weight and value.
If we really wish to use education to transform lives, we have to recognize that education is more than factual learning, and far more than spitting out the predecided choice of one among four or five possibilities as a demonstration of achievement. Students will best learn skills when they need to apply them. They will most effectively learn information that is relevant to what they then need to do. And they will learn how to learn not by being lectured or by drill and kill to raise test scores, but by asking questions, by trying to make sense of the world in which they live. Teachers need to know enough about their students to be able to offer windows into understanding HOW things are relevant to the students, and to expose students to possibilities beyond those they may have considered.
I am about to explode because so much of what is important in education has long been understood. One can choose to dismiss Gruwell's memoir because of the connections she was able to utilize, but that misses a larger point, one that is transferable even absent such connections. The same way we should be validating the experiences and perceptions of our students as a means of empowering them, we need to rethink how we train our teachers: too often we neuter them. That is, we insist they teach in certain fashions, express and organize in manners that dehumanize them. Dehumanize. At the extreme would be everyone on the same page at the same time with scripted lessons. Lessons that not only do not connect with the lives of the students, but which are often contrary to the life experience the teacher can bring to bear and hence help connect the material with the students.
Teaching is relationship. And if one is not allowed to be oneself one is a far less effective teacher. If the true personality behind the persona of teacher is not acceptable in a classroom setting, then such a person should not be a teacher. But that is rare.
Students will frustrate you. Sometimes it is a test, to see if you really care, or if it just words. Why should students risk with you if you are not willing to risk with them? How can they demonstrate that they are worthy - of respect, of trust - if we do not respect them enough to be vulnerable to them.
There is so much our students need to learn. And I increasingly believe that most of our discussions about educational policy lose sight of the millions of unique individuals that pass through our classrooms. It is part of my love-hate relationship with my vocation as public school teacher, that I am responsible for policies which I think are wrong, detrimental, but which in order to give some window into other policies I must enforce.
How large is your heart? If one is to teach with one's heart, is that heart big enough to include and value every student who passes through one's care, even knowing that there may be those one does not reach? That is the willingness to be vulnerable, to be willing to risk a broken heart.
And how willing am I to accept the brokenness in the hearts of many of my students, to make it a part of accepting them so that unlike Humpty-Dumpty the pieces can again be put back together, that just maybe those students will begin to believe that they, too, can demonstrate "mastery" in a fashion that is meaningful to them.
Can I learn from my students what I need to know and understand to help them to achieve that mastery, that sense of success? Am I willing to make the effort and commitment they need from me to overcome their reluctance, their self-doubt?
If my answer to either question is not a whole-hearted (terminology deliberate) affirmative, then my heart is not large enough and I should no longer attempt to teach.
But here's the thing. My students may need to be encouraged to believe they can succeed. So must I, as teacher, or you as teacher if like me you have such responsibilities.
How large is your heart? Do we believe that is is limited in its capacity to love, to enfold others? If so, who is the one who suffers, if not ourselves?
How large is MY heart? That is the question that is making my head explode.
Peace.