Journal #2

Journal #2

This time I am going to comment on Vinz, chapters 7 and 8. In some ways I readily connected with Bill, the new teacher in Chapter 7. Like him, I had worked in other professions before becoming a teacher later in life. Unlike him, though, I had no misconceptions about the challenges facing a lot of students today.

Bill’s first experience was in an environment where learning was valued and it was part of an accepted set of expectations that students did their homework. Moving to another school where this was not the norm unsettled him. He clung to the myth that the classroom should somehow be immune to the social ills outside, and this reminded me of some teachers I know.

After doing my observations and student teaching in Minneapolis (Washburn and Patrick Henry), I was accustomed to working with students who came from challenging home situations and for whom schoolwork did not rank in their top ten priorities. When I accepted my first teaching position at Osseo Senior High, I was joining a school in transition. For decades it had been an almost all white school with kids from the middle to upper middle classes. In the previous seven years, however, there had been a very big swing in the demographics of its students. Many kids from the east side of the district who would normally attend Park Center were enrolling at Osseo.

Many of the teachers who had been there for years couldn’t handle it, and found themselves going with Marilyn’s approach of universalism. When their classes didn’t go along, they bristled. When they didn’t do the work as assigned and tried to explain about the pressures from home, the teacher’s reply was often along the lines of, “how does not doing your work, and ultimately not passing this class, help solve your problems at home?” Not helpful.

I was teaching Read 180, so my classroom was very much like the one described by Vinz where anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of the enrolled kids didn’t show up on a given day, and all were students of color. While other teachers were groping for ways to deal with the new dynamic in the school, I chose to go with the flow established by the students. There were, of course, standard practices to be followed for classroom management’s sake, but rather than direct the discussions of literature so that the kids would “arrive” at my predetermined destination, I tried to let them take the various turns and reverses that they naturally would do in their casual conversations, and almost invariably, someone would bring their examples back to the text and make interesting observations and connections.

To be honest, the value of this type of discussion waxed and waned the first year. I got better at knowing when to let it go and when to ask a guiding question. What was most gratifying, though, was watching how the students who started out as combative or competitive in these discussions, eventually backed off from their need to be “right” and learned to listen to ideas they didn’t agree with, without jumping in with personal attacks.

Bill spoke of trying to see the world through the eyes of his students. This is a daily discipline that I am still working to master. I am the poster boy for white privilege, so it doesn’t come naturally to me to begin with considerations of safety, hunger, or knowing where I will be sleeping the next night. Most students are pretty adept at masking their situations, so it takes a little time to build trust so that they will feel free to let you know that they were kicked out of their house and have been couch surfing for the last two weeks, or they are pregnant and just cannot get up for first hour, or whatever their issues are.

Once that trust is built, however, they are more willing to share both privately and in small groups, and this greatly enhances the opportunity for them to engage in meaningful discussions of the text and how or if it relates to them.