Teaching Should Be Political

What do people think about this review of Becoming a Teacher? The title doesn't do justice to the article, as it draws broader connections between teaching in ordinary and extraordinary times.

The Atlantic

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Anderson doesn’t mention James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers,” but Hall was very much acting on his urgent suggestion in that 1963 essay. “Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children,” Baldwin wrote, addressing a group of educators, “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.” Note that “try.” Helping students see that it is not the Black child who is a criminal, but the larger society that this child has been born into, eludes tidy teaching scripts. But Hall came to believe that striving to do that was central to her work.

But the more time I spent with my students—almost all of them Black or Latino (many of whom were undocumented or came from mixed-status immigrant families), and more than 70 percent of them eligible for free or reduced-price lunch—the less possible and productive that approach seemed to me, as it did to Hall. “That’s just how it is here, Mr. Smith,” one of my students said to me, and a semicircle of matter-of-fact nods rippled across the classroom. A fellow student had just been shot and killed in a drive-by. It was not the first time a young person from the school community had been killed, and would not be the last. I had never taught the young man whose life had been taken, but I remembered the sound of his laughter—his high-spiritedness had been contagious—in the hallway between classes.

After hearing the news the night before, I had decided to scrap my original lesson plan so I could open up my classroom as a space where we could collectively mourn. Students paid tribute to their peer and expressed disgust toward the shooters. There were tears, raised voices, and monologues of grief. I had them write as we tried to find a way to heal and move forward, pushing against the fatalism so many of them justifiably felt. Indeed, within the span of the next two weeks, one student’s parents were deported, another’s family was evicted from their home, yet another student was arrested, and several revealed to me that they had been coming to school without having eaten the night before.

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The pandemic, the protests, the economic downturn—the events of this year have made any notion of the classroom as an oasis moot. They have meant that teachers, many of them trapped on screens, are surely feeling overwhelmed and unsupported. At the same time, as I’ve learned by talking with teachers across the country, the compounding crises have spurred many of them to recognize the need to revamp lesson plans, to think in new ways about how to incorporate the debates over inequality that affect their students so directly. Ours is not the first time of ferment in which teaching to the test, as in the standardized variety, has seemed inadequate—and let’s hope that if, or when, political urgency ebbs, pedagogical aspirations do not. As Hall puts it, too many of her students are “already up against the greatest tests that people can experience, which is surviving in a city that is out to kill them every single day, or make them look bad.” Baldwin reminds us that the crucial work of educators is to fortify their students, joining them in the quest to make the society into which they were born fully account for the conditions it has created.

Submitted January 11, 2021 at 07:39PM by dwaxe https://ift.tt/3sfhpan