Have you heard of Blair Holt?

This child died being a hero. He gave his life for other classmates on a Chicago city bus. So many children had died before Blair. In fact, he was number 20. Why did it take 20 for them to pay attention? When a white child disappears it becomes national news. A Black boy gives his life to save his classmates and only one national network reports it. Thank God for Anderson Cooper.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/mitchell/385585,CST-NWS-mitch15.article
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news&id=5295070
http://video.nbc5.com/player/?id=109760
They're offering $10,000, is that all this child is worth? Stop the violence, save our children! And demand that America puts value on the life of Black children just as they do on the lives of white children. There are too many missing Black children and too many dying to violence and they go unheard of. Racism is insidious and the media perpetuates it every time a White child goes missing.

Poverty in America

Poverty is a killer in these United States. I have seen a couple of documentaries about poverty in America and they each one shocks me more and more. I was watching one on MTV today called "I'm Dead Broke" and there was another that I saw recently called "Hardscrabble Childhood" that really spoke to me. Sometimes we take for granted the things we have without thinking twice. There are people who have to hustle up a dime so they can find places to live or so they can eat. These people are the parents of the children that walk into classrooms everyday and we can't ignore the reality of this. There is such a thing as Third World living in a First World Country, ask the people who had to suffer the ills of Katrina and those who live below the poverty line in many rural and urban areas in the United States. What can educators do? We can be empathetic towards all of our students, even without knowing who's who. Notice that I said empathetic, not sympathetic because sympathy often renders itself in unwelcomed forms. We need not isolate a child and offer him/her financial support or clothing to make the child feel stronger. We simply need to continue to make the child feel valued, worthy, important, and capable of achieving his/her goals. Empathy requires that we constantly reflect on our own lives and our practices as educators so that we could make the classroom experiences of students more empowering. Sometimes a simple daily smile can help change a child's life, if even for a few hours. To learn more about how poverty affects children in the United States, check out Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children, Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and The Shame of the Nation, Barbara Ehrenrich's Nickel and Dimed or Anne Lareau's Unequal Childhoods.

Invictus by William E. Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of Circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of Chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Believe..

A friend sent this to me today and I don't think he knows how much it meant to me. I'm sharing it with others because I believe that this will make someone else's day too... Thanks LW

BELIEVE WHILE OTHERS ... by William Arthur Ward
Believe while others are doubting.
Plan while others are playing.
Study while others are sleeping.
Decide while others are delaying.
Prepare while others are daydreaming.
Begin while others are procrastinating.
Work while others are wishing.
Save while others are wasting.
Listen while others are talking.
Smile while others are frowning.
Commend while others are criticizing.
Persist while others are quitting.

Images

I just read a post on a message board that says that a particular family reality show on television is portraying a disrespecful image to the "black struggle." The argument that this person used to defend this claim is that "most black people do are not wealthy, driving Bentleys, they are poor to middle class." Of course there were no statistics to back THAT up but I had to wonder how many people actually thought that was the standard--poor to middle-class and WHY?

I had to seriously reflect and consider the source of this kind of thinking and the only sources I could come up with are schools and the media. In her article concerning social class, Jean Anyon (1980) highlights the differences between the way poor children are taught versus the wealthy. It is unfortunate that black people come up in many studies done about poor people but in very few about the wealthy. It is then no wonder why people think that most black people are either poor or middle class and that this is an OK concept. Why is it bad that some black people are affluent and can afford the Bentleys and the jets without going broke? This leads me to the second responsible source of this form of thinking: The media.

You know what annoys me the most? Pictures of starving children in Africa. Yes, more than the show Hollyhood or The Flavor of Love or I Love New York, pictures of starving children in Africa annoy me. Having traveled to the motherland three times and having the best experience of my life, I am appalled when the only image of Africa is suffering. This is not to say that there are not starving children in Africa (I personally didn't see any and I went to villages, towns, cities, schools, church, the market, people's homes) because I'm sure there are. But I have seen more homeless people in America than in the the developing countries I've visited. But I digress. The way that black people are depicted on television is nothing short of appalling. I grew up on the Cosby Show and A Different World and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Black people were part of families--successful families. A dual parent household was normal and children such as myself aspired to own brownstones in Brooklyn because we thought we could. College, success, stability, THAT was our reality. When did that change? When did having a family, a big house, and values become disrespectful to the black struggle? It was once the aim of the struggle! But money and the media have both influenced society's image of what being black is.

For two great perspectives on this issue, I recommend Dr. Bill Cosby's Come on People: On the Way From Victims to Victors and Dr. Michael Eric Dyson's Is Bill Cosby Right?

long

I am aware that my posts are long. Can you blame me? I have spent 13 long years in public school; I have a lot to say! Ok, so I will try to make shorter posts...TRY...operative word. And we all know what that means. If you don't, ask Yoda.

urban schooling

Yesterday I sat to reflect on what I really want to do about the way non-white children are educated. I thought of it because I was creating my syllabus for this class I'm going to teach about education policy and I had to skim through the readings I was assigning to figure out what order I wanted them to follow on my syllabus. That's when I started to realize that it matters not where Inequity and Overcrowding or Censorship and Overrepresentation of minorities in special ed. were placed, they are all equally horrendous and nobody is doing much to solve the problems. Instead, more problems are being created and more education leaders are turning a blind eye because their children's private school education is paid in full.

I'll tell you something sad. I taught public school but I am an advocate for independent schools. I have stories to back my belief and I promise to write about that another day. My colleagues always snubbed me when I said that I would never send my children to public school in New York City but I guess they just never understood where I was coming from. I am a product of public schooling and what I now know about my history wasn't taught in my textbooks. NYC public schooling, for Black children, is just another medium of teaching survival and subordinance. "Here's your schedule," "No, you can't graduate early," "Take this class, it's good for you," "Apply to this school, your average isn't high enough," "Here's a scholarship application, don't tell anybody I gave this to you," "Take off your coat and put your bag through the scanner," "Walk slowly through the metal detector." I don't think that was preparation to be a leader or a corporate executive or a professor, do you?

None of my high school teachers ever told me that they expected me to be better than them. And that's a crucial lesson that I taught to my own students. Having taught at my alma mater, I told my students that I deemed myself successful and I expected that since I have taught them my secrets to success, I expect them to be greater than I ever was or could be. Teaching was not my way to keep them below me; it was my way of giving them the little I had and showing them ways by which they could get more. I remember one class that I taught. They thought I was a total bitch (another term reserved for Black female teachers who push students harder than their white counterparts and who tell students the truth) and that I was grading them unfairly. I gave them the grades they deserved. How could you write one-page summaries in AP English and get a 95? But that's the mediocrity that was expected of me and was now expected of them. I sat in a former teacher's classroom with them once and I was able to recite her entire lesson; she had taught it to me 6 years prior, in another century...and in the 21st century, she was teaching the same lesson. It was appalling. I can't recall a lesson in my years of high school that actually highlighted my experiences. Why? Because none of my teachers had actually lived my experience. Those who didn't live off in the suburbs of Long Island, lived in brownstones in fancy neighborhoods where many of us had never visited except to collect something from our West Indian mothers who sat in their homes babysitting their white children for a small, tax-free fee and second hand clothes--a far cry from stuffy apartment buildings. Maybe their children attended public schools but none of their children attended my school--they went to their neighborhood schools where most of the other students looked like them.

So when I started teaching, I went with one goal: To make my students better than I was. I wanted share with my students my own experiences and give them possibilities. No, you don't have to apply to state and city colleges; there are other great institutions out there! Nobody ever assured me of this--they just mentioned it in passing. So you don't have money for college, ever heard of a student loan? Nobody told me that loans were ok, nor did they tell me that there were programs that would forgive my loans. I had to go back and tell somebody! After all, I am African and that is how we learned to uphold traditions (and community stories): By word of mouth. I had to tell my students that it was not okay to keep scholarship information to themselves, even when they had no intention to apply. I had to tell my students that it is ok to travel abroad and see new places. I had to tell my students that applying to Harvard isn't such a bad idea even if you're a student in an inner-city school who has been told that he/she isn't good enough. I had to tell my male students there just aren't enough basketball scholarships for everybody and even NBA players needed a brain, that they weren't work horses responsible for dragging the load of keeping American sports competitive, that there was more to life than just sex and money and jewelry, that they were important and what they had to say was valid and that somebody was listening and observing their talents.

If I were to ask my students to tell you the things they have been told in schools, they would probably shock you. The sad reality is that oftentimes, children are hurt but they absorb what they are told because they think these things are normal. It is not normal to tell a child to apply only to city colleges. It is not normal to call a child an animal for break dancing in the hallway. It is not normal to tell a child to be quiet or else you will take off point from his/her grade. It is not normal to make a child feel inferior and second-guess him/herself. It is not normal because they don't do it to their own children. This is not to say I am not guilty of hurting students or that I have never offended them. I have. I have also loved them, each one differently for the difference they brought to the classroom. One poster I had in my classroom says, "an original is always better than a copy." I love that quotation.

A professor of mine once asked us "why would the colonizer teach the children of the colonized the way he does his own children?" And I pass that statement on to every Black parent today. And don't be mistaken, the colonizer is not always of a different race. I wish that every Black parent would follow the news and learn about the things that are going on in inner-city schools. I wish that every Black parent could be a fly on the wall in his/her child's classroom to see the atrocities that occur when unlicensed, untrained teachers become babysitters and no more than just that because they feel that their daily plight is to sedate rather than educate our children. They used to ask me how it is that I had no referrals from my class or how it is that I never talked about discipline problems and I used to simply say "because I'm too busy teaching." My students were too busy learning to find time to create problems with each other. I knew and understood that my students were civilized human beings with feelings and thoughts and ideas that were sometimes far better than my own and that the classroom was a place for sharing ideas, not for pushing my own agenda and I didn't need John Dewey to tell me that. Some white teachers take things too personally. They want to respond to every comment a child makes and to correct every "deviant" behavior through punishment. Never through love. When I interviewed for my teaching position, the interviewer said "you have the heart of a teacher." I wasn't sure of what she meant but I am hoping she didn't mean the heart of those babysitters.

Teaching is one of the most inspiring jobs one can have. When I woke up each morning, I wasn't fearing going to work. My greatest fear was failing to teach my students what they needed to know. I wanted to teach subject matter but I also wanted them to understand life and to feel that they had an advocate. Many of them had brothers and sisters and parents who had been successful college grads but some of them had no examples of success to follow. Most of them wanted be doctors but nobody had ever taken the time to explain to them the process of becoming an Oncologist or a Cardiologist. All they knew is that they were going to college. They didn't know how long it would take for them to achieve such goals, they just knew they had to do something "big". Now tell me, how can one do something big if he/she has no idea of the steps to take? Walking blindly into traffic, is what I call it. I shared every happy moment with my students and told them that failing was not an option. They had to learn to code switch, they had to learn to smile with a fork in their side, they had to learn to take responsibility for their work, they had to learn to present themselves with pride. The kids you see on the subway and on the bus and on the street aren't superficial: They have stories that they can tell if only someone is there to listen. They have real-life characters and plots, settings, climax, denouement. They have their own rhythms and their own rhymes. They have their own theatrical productions to write. They have their own ideas of what reality looks like and it does not always resemble Jay Gatsby's.

When it comes to teaching children of non-white parentage, it is imperative that people understand that their stories, like mine, aren't going to be read in textbooks, they will only be heard but only if we listen keenly.

My first year as a doctoral student

It felt like nothing I had to say mattered. There were so many times when I just felt like giving up and then I realized that others would follow me and so I had to fight the good fight. I am one of two Black women in the program. The other woman was told that she doesn’t even deserve to be in the program. I was never told but was rather treated that way. Nothing that I said mattered. It was as if I spoke and no one was listening; like I wrote and nobody read what was written in black ink; like I taught but nobody learned.

At 26 years old, I am the youngest in my program. My age and my ethnicity have worked against me in myriad ways. First, I had to put up with the agist comments of some of my colleagues who did not think that a 29 year old superintendent knew what he was doing. I had to put up with racist comments by professors and colleagues. They spoke things in front of me that shocked the daylight out of me but I had to tolerate and subdue my anger and rage for fear that they would consider me another “angry black woman.” I tried to understand this culture of power, but I felt like an outsider ALL THE TIME. I remember one specific incident in which a woman spoke about the disempowered children in her school. She told the class about the clear difference that can be seen when some children drive Escalades at 16 years old and others have to walk or take the bus. The professor’s immediate response: “so you have the Black kids and the White kids.” I was floored. The woman had said nothing about color, she just spoke about privilege and already the assumption by the person leading the class was that privilege or lack thereof was equivalent to race.

I was always the exception: “City kids have no skills when they come here, they lack basic skills.” A statement like that would be followed by the furtive glances by certain class members and then the person would correct the statement by appeasing me with a “oh not you because clearly you’re here with us.” But what about the city kids that I had taught for four years who are now attending Ivy League institutions? I recall a time when a white woman brought her daughter who was on spring break from college to class. I watched as she introduced her daughter to everyone but me and the other black woman in class. We were standing right next to her but she never thought it necessary or proper to introduce us. Not that we cared, we just noticed and my friend and I talked about our memories of the Jim Crow era when white people would never introduce a Black person to another white person and here we were in 2007 experiencing the same thing.

And then there’s the woman who despises Martin Luther King because there were so many other people who fought for civil rights that have gotten no credit. But she never took the time to highlight the accomplishments of King who so constantly and respectfully gave credit to his supporters and to Mahatma Ghandi for the teachings of non-violence. She never showed respect for the fact that I sat in the room as one African American in a class of 13, and never acknowledged that the very things that Dr. King fought for were still not being practiced in our school. All she could say was that Dr. King didn’t deserve the accolades he received because he did not do it alone. Her point, though valid, was offensive to me, a Black woman who appreciated the leader that helped spark change in the way America views difference.

It was as if I was invisible in some of their conversations. They said things that shocked me. I was amazed that people who have been exposed to difference, who have traveled far and wide, who are teaching children from varied cultural backgrounds could say the things that my colleagues said. Whenever they wanted an international perspective, they would point the direction to the only non-fluent English speaker in the class—the woman from South Korea. They even once asked her what it was like to live in a Communist country and in my mind I thought—She’s South Korean…how could you guys even ask such a stupid question. I would watch them flinch and roll their eyes as she spoke. Some would often offer a condescending nod in agreement even when what she said didn’t require agreement. It was as if they were sorry for her simply because she didn’t speak English well. They didn’t speak to her outside of class. In fact, they hardly spoke to anyone but each other outside of class and this is why I didn’t attend social functions.

The two social gatherings that I actually attended confirmed to me that I would never attend anymore. They were stuffy. If anyone brought anything as a dish other than crackers, cheese, or cucumber sandwiches, the food would remain untouched. Another rule I learned, don’t bring ethnic food unless it’s from some European country. They don’t eat it. I made the sad mistake of bringing rice and beans to a dinner and then I realized that my rice and beans remained untouched as people reveled in the luscious taste of brownies and ham sandwiches, barbecued ground pork and some other very White meals that I tried out of deference. All the white people spoke together with an occasional acknowledgement of the fact that I was in the room when they wanted to know what the dish I had prepared was. “It’s rice and beans,” I’d say, as I conjured up creative names for the rocks they had been living under for their very white, middle class lives.

We have an annual lecture series in which they invite an outside speaker. Last year, before I joined the program, they had Dr.Lisa Delpit. I don’t think they learned from her or else they would not do the things they do. I went back to read Other People’s Children and I am all three of the graduate students quoted in Chapter 2. I made a copy to give to my professor. I don’t know what else to do. This year, it was some other lady who talked about kiddy literature and something else. They had really wanted Cornel West but he was “booked.” I am of the opinion that they really hadn’t tried to get Dr. West, they just said it to appease my query about why this year’s lecture wasn’t featuring someone who dealt with social justice issues. For this year’s lecture, I had been sick all week but I thought I’d do my best to attend since my school was responsible for the event. Upon entering the reception area, I saw my advisor and since I had my partner with me, I thought it would be nice to introduce him to her. As we walked over to her, I saw two other professors, who acknowledged us and inquired about my health. They offered their well-wishes. As I approached my advisor, I realized she had been engrossed in a prior conversation. As is my cultural custom, I did not interrupt. Instead, I stood to her right and waited. She did not acknowledge my presence. She carried on in conversation and then proceeded to walk right in front of me and made her exit. For the entire evening, she did not make eye contact, nor did she as much as wave to say hello. And then I remembered something I learned about some white folks: They won’t acknowledge you in public.

Then there was the struggle of writing. I’d get papers back with comments such as “well-written, well-organized paper.” As if they didn’t expect that I could write or organize my ideas. Nothing is said about what is written, except if what is written is wrong. As an English teacher, it is my practice to have conversations with my students’ work on their papers. I’m not reading their papers for organization but for substance. These doctors of miseducation seem to have missed that lesson in teaching. I would get papers referring me to ask my classmates about certain topics as if what I had to say was not valid but their knowledge was. I got comments that were directed towards personal things rather than what I had written on the paper. People assumed that what I said on the paper constituted my opinion rather than my research, although I had listed several sources to confirm what I had written. It was as if nothing I said mattered unless I could cite a million white people who said the same thing. I would write about Black people and then I was always asked if this isn’t true for all people. I’d be referred to read books by white authors never by a Black author. If I were to find something by a Black author, it would have to be on my own. I was not free to speak my mind for fear of backlash. People warned me to be careful of what I said and to whom. But I have never been that kind of student. I was never one who would sit and take what people said without responding.

The one thing I have learned during my first year of doctoral studies is that my experiences are invalid and that I am not a member of the “group” although I did the same things—if not more—that the others did to get where I am. I found myself constantly defending myself and since there are no Black faculty members in my school, I felt alone and vulnerable. I became resentful, angry, but subdued. I spent extra hours working on things that would be simple if I hadn’t felt the sting of racism at my tail. People wanted me to fail. They corrected spelling and fixed my commas, took points off for me forgetting an ampersand on my works cited page and I constantly received grades with a – or + next to them; rarely a solid grade. It was after my second semester after I had painstakingly written what I and others who read it considered an excellent, informative paper that I began to feel the need to fight back.

I knew that I had done the right thing and that my paper had been based on the research I had found. I made one simple blunder, which I acknowledged, and I became a sacrificial lamb. I am tired of defending myself from their mindsets. There is just no way I will be able to withstand the rabid racism that lives in these people’s minds. I thought about quitting three times during my first year and it was not because I thought the work was too difficult for me to manage. It was mainly because I felt demeaned, disrespected, and distraught by the things I was told and the things I heard and saw.

My program and the people who run it are no different from public schools where Black children are treated as inferior. They have built the program on a social justice theme, where they claim that the focus is to change society but my program is more of a replica of racist America than they realize. On one of my last papers, my professor asked how can we solve the problem of retention and recruitment of Black scholars in programs dealing with education and after pondering on her question, I realized and understood why more African Americans are not in doctoral programs. We are tired of being banged against society like the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. My first year made me wonder what these professors are teaching teachers to do to Black children, if this is what they do to Black adults. It made me realize that retention rates of teachers and drop out rates of students is probably never going to change as long as there are people who think they are superior to others.

I have never come this close to giving up the fight and though my program is two years long, I fear, no DREAD the day when I would ever have to enter another classroom taught by another white person who has predispositions about what I should and should not know or say. I have to think back to the days of segregation and wonder what those who have come before me would have done. I cannot sit by and allow prejudice to dictate what will become of my life because although I do desire to do better for myself, I love what I do. Education is my calling and I will not and cannot allow white people who think they have written the books on how to teach, dictate what will become of my self-esteem and self-worth as a teacher.

I think of what will happen if I stay here. Who will sit on my committee? I look around my school and there are no faces that look like mine, no hearts that dance to the beat of African drums, and no lips that speak the truth about my people; I cannot stay here. Yet, I need to stay here so that I can do for someone else what nobody here can do for me: help. Never before in my educational career have I felt so hopeless, so undeserving, and so useless as I have in my doctoral program. These people have worked and continue to work to squeeze every bit of pride and self-esteem that is left in me and in my other Black female colleague. Nothing we say matters unless I can cite a million other white people who are saying something similar.

But I can hardly find enough white people saying similar things as I have experienced them in New York City’s public schools. They are all saying that Black children are not achieving. My children are achieving and have achieved with very few resources and yet nobody chronicles their experiences. I have reached the point of saturation and I am seeking a mentor, someone who can guide me; someone who can provide one word of encouragement to say “hold on” because they are doing everything to crush my spirit. They constantly challenge my knowledge and my scholarship as if they have written anything groundbreaking or earth shattering in the last ten years. I am frustrated and ready to give up and go back to my students who I love and miss so much. They send me motivation everyday and they are behind me, rooting for me to finish this program and do something to fix the inequities in their school. But I cannot endure the sting for much longer and each step I make towards endurance and resilience is pushed ten steps back by the powers that run my school. I am lost, alone, and frustrated and I cannot even tell this to my advisor because she is one of them. I am a fallen tree in an empty forest: nobody is hearing.

I’m meeting with a professor next week to defend another paper...How much can one person take?