This is, in part, a response to the main diary of today's "WYFP." It's not a challenge to the diarist or a call-out; it's just a different point of view.
As most of you know, I got my Ph.D. last summer. This fall, I'm teaching two courses at my alma mater and four courses at an inner-city four-year state university, as an adjunct professor.
My classes at the inner-city university are almost all composed of first-year, nonwhite, mostly inner-city kids. They come in underprepared for college, both because their secondary schools were frankly inadequate and because they're thinking it's going to be just like high school. They don't realize, at first, that college at the undergraduate level is not about memorizing facts and spitting them out on tests - that the person who remembers the most facts wins. That was high school. (I call this method of learning "summarizing and defining.")
When I break it to them in the first week that college involves writing, analyzing, relating, and understanding - not just memorizing - many of them look both shocked and terrified. (I call this method of learning "explaining and relating.") I've had students come to office hours and say "But I don't know how to write a paper," or "I need you to choose a topic for me," as if their boss will always pick their topics or they'll always have an algorithmic list of steps towards whatever task they have to do.
The underpreparedness, I deal with using a few workshops that I work into the curriculum. I figure it's worth sacrificing a little bit of course content if the time spent on how to learn, write, and understand helps them remember more of what I do give them to deal with. The algorithmic, step-wise learning, I gently break them of with the homework assignments, which tell them to explain what they learned this week, tell me what really made them want to know more, tell me what didn't make sense, and then relate it to something else they've learned and explain how it relates.
But getting them to learn is often more a cross-cultural endeavor than a content one. Content, they can usually get, as long as they pay attention. The cultural differences, however... that's something else again. Come past the fleur-de-Kos with me for some of the discussions my inner-city students and I have had in the past few weeks.
Two of the courses I'm teaching at the inner-city university are criminology and juvenile justice. This means that I'm talking about issues that many of these kids have experienced firsthand. Some of them even have the "code of the street" mentality that Elijah Anderson identified in the book of the same name, where "respect" is the be-all and end-all of their existence and they can't comprehend why it isn't for those of us who aren't part of that subculture. "Respect," as Anderson explains in his book, means the sense that you are better than everyone else and that they both fear you and admire you for it. And respect is a zero-sum game, in the ghetto.
One of my brightest kids is a young man I'll call LaVon. That's not his name, but I'm sure you understand why I need to keep anonymity here. LaVon, on the surface, seems like the "dumb jock" stereotype of black inner-city males who happen to be in college. You expect him to talk about football, not issues. But once you get past his "I'm too cool for this" outer shell, LaVon is one of the brightest and most diligent students I've ever had. He never misses a homework assignment, and he never phones them in - he gives his all to each of them. He got the highest grade on the last exam, and held his own in the first one (and I am known for really tough exams). And in class discussions, his contributions can't be beat. He points out insights and asks questions that make everyone - me included - think about the issues from a new perspective.
But when it comes to getting away from the idea that "respect" is the be-all and end-all, he's really having a rough go of it. LaVon was shocked when I revealed, in a pre-class chit-chat, that I had zero interest in going to my high-school reunion (next year would be my 25th; I've gone to none of them since I left that wretched memory behind me). He couldn't understand how I didn't want to "show them," now that I had my doctorate, that I was better than they were. The revelation that I honestly couldn't care less about the opinion of people I hadn't seen in twenty-five years or more left him speechless. A young lady in the same class followed up with the explanation that she, too, no longer cares what the people in her ghetto neighborhood think of her - that she shrugs off their disrespect. He was left shaking his head in wonder and disbelief.
LaVon is in both of the classes I mentioned, and in the juvenile justice class, we talked about effects of family issues on juvenile delinquency that same day. He was equally shocked to hear that hitting a child with anything more than an open hand, and even with an open hand if you left a mark, was legally child abuse and thus actionable. This really hit him at the heart of his own upbringing - for fifteen minutes or more, the class derailed into an debate over the relative goodness or badness of corporal punishment, with LaVon (and several other students) arguing passionately for its use, and me (and several other students) arguing just as passionately against it. LaVon's point was that you have to keep kids in line, and a smack on the rear (or several smacks on the rear) gets the point across. My response was that yes, in the immediate moment that works - but what does it do to kids over the long term? Answer: it teaches them that violence is the answer, and it makes them much more likely to be delinquent in the long run - for boys, over five hundred percent more likely.
Both of these issues stem from the problem I have with many of my inner-city students like LaVon: Their heads are in college while their guts are still in the ghetto. The real education they need from school isn't just facts and numbers and how to think critically - it's an education that is crucial to the social mobility they hope they will achieve with those magical letters "BS" or "BA" after their names. It isn't just about knowing what this theorist said about that crime; it's about knowing that you have to learn to negotiate, and be ready to walk away and come back later, and that the immediate solution may not be the long-term functional solution. The real education involves peeling back the layers of street code, of street society, of street culture, and learning how to operate in a world where the long term is as important as the here and now, and where the solutions can't come at the end of a fist or the barrel of a gun but through slow and careful negotiation.
LaVon isn't sure who he's going to vote for in this election, at least as of this past week. He said that he likes that Romney seems to be someone who will take action, and he doesn't see the President taking the kind of action he wants taken (which, when translated, means fast and decisive and yes, violent). But he does like having a black man in the White House, and he does remember - when reminded - that Obama has done far more for students and for people of color than Romney ever has or would.
I'm not sure I've reached LaVon fast enough. I hope I have. I hope that the discussions in our classroom have penetrated enough to let him know that violence is not the only way, or even the preferred way. But this is why I teach: Reaching one student at a time. Helping them learn how to operate in the world that I live in - not just the academy, but the middle-class world so many of them aspire to and which so few of them will reach.
I have hope for LaVon. Just last week he said to me, "You know, Dr. KoSC, you make me think really hard about things. I never had a teacher like you before." And in an email the other day, he told me that he was planning on applying to law school in a year or so, and he hoped I'd write him a letter of recommendation when the time came. (And of course I will - anyone who argues the way he does will do well in law!)
LaVon may still shake his head in wonder and confusion when I present him with theories that say his culture is not the only way to live, but he listens. Most of my students do. And every one of them that gets it will go out of my classroom more prepared to understand and to change the world.
That's the hope and change that I'm looking for.