As a teacher it's hard not to develop favorites. Certain things about certain kids jump out at you and, depending on the kid and the thing, make you want to hug them, smile at them, or listen to them with more patience than you knew you had. Some kids win you over because of how engaged they are in class (read: how well they stroke you teacher-ego); some because they will run up to hug you in the hallway at the risk of getting yelled at for leaving the class line; some because they're the picture of kindness and bliss despite a less-than-ideal home situation.
Jeremiah (not his real name) won me over with his easy smile and his insistence that every moment is for having fun. Our first time in class together was a tough day for Jeremiah. He refused to join our circle and felt upset because he thought everyone in his first grade class was teasing him. It didn't help that it was rainy outside, and inside garden class rarely inspires joy. Standing near the corner of the room away from the other students, Jeremiah and I had the closest thing to a heart-to-heart as you could reasonably expect between a six-year-old and a 22-year old. He agreed to re-join class if I would sit next to him. I did, and we've been pals ever since.
Jeremiah has trouble sitting still in most garden classes. He's so bright, and even when he's wiggling around the benches in our outdoor classroom he's still totally engaged. My instinct is to be relaxed about kids moving their bodies as long as they're learning, but because of school expectations I've felt compelled to discipline him more than once.
Once after a particularly wiggly episode Jeremiah felt frustrated that I had given him a negative point on the class chart - a form of discipline in our school. As the class was lining up on our way out of the garden Jeremiah was nudged from behind by another student vying for a place in line, and Jeremiah reacted by punching the boy in the arm. I pulled him out of line and asked why he had hit the other boy, to which he answered: "Momma says if someone hits me I have to hit them back."
This was my first really difficult moment of teaching. I tend to buy into the logic that violence begets violence, that hitting back tends to escalate a situation rather than solve anything. And yet I don't have a damn clue about the environment that Jeremiah or his mother grew up in. Maybe acting tough is a way to earn respect or credibility among kids or adults in their neighborhood. Maybe Jeremiah's mom has been hit so many times that she can't even think about teaching her son not to hit back.*
I wasn't about to tell him that momma was wrong. I told him that there's one set of rules with momma and another with school, and left it at that. A few weeks later a similar incident happened with Jeremiah and even though he shocked me by remembering what I had said about hitting people, he had again behaved according to the rules that momma had set.
Every day some interaction with students will remind me that what we teach in school is often not the same as what they learn at home. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes the difference really matters, sometimes not.
School is as much about socialization as anything. Many of our students in kindergarten are just beginning to develop a sense of adults' expectations for their behavior. It's adorable to watch. Like my favorite be-sweatered TV personality used to preach, "kids say the darndest things." Part of what we're teaching our students is how to function in a culture: how to think about people and things, how and when to use their bodies and their voices, what behaviors are and aren't acceptable and when. These are really important things to know to live a reasonably stable life, and even though there's a big, heady can of worms about cultural-norms-as-regulating-behavior-and-stifling-human-liberation, that's not the can whose lid I'm trying to pry.
I'm more concerned with acculturation: the question of whose culture they're being socialized into.** As far as I can tell all of the students in our school are of African descent, most of them from low-income families, and many have roots in New Orleans running several generations deep. Each of them is embedded in a very specific set of values, norms and behaviors that they don't even realize they know. Much of those are informed by their home lives, and as their time in school goes on the more their schooling experience plays a role in shaping their understanding of the world. The cultural distinctions between home and school can lie anywhere between vivid and almost collapsing, depending on the values, norms and behaviors of the people whom students spend time with at home and at school.
The question is: how will the cultures of home and school interact in the minds of our students? Will they flourish in some mythical-melting-pot-mutuality? Will they mesh into some mangled-but-manageable co-existence? Will one masticate, melt or minimize the other? (sometimes alliteration is more important than making sense, but you get the idea)
Perhaps the best thing we can do as teachers is to enhance our students' understandings of the cultures they come from - to instill some pride, augment their senses of identity and connection to place - while also teaching them how to navigate between cultures (read: white educated middle-class cultures). If we stumble the worst we can do is to acculturate them straight out of New Orleans, to the point where they feel more comfortable on a college campus, in a big anonymous city, or in a subdivision in Anywhere America.
For teachers the process of socializing students is a bit like painting a mural blindfolded. It's impossible to tell which parts have been coated three times over and which are still bare, or to even know the size, shape and texture of the mural's surface, or to see who else might be painting the same mural and how. No teacher can know when or how they're painting, and some teachers don't even know they're painting at all.
This is why my relationships with every single one of my students makes me at least a little uneasy. I want Jeremiah to understand that momma and teacher can both be right. I want him to be able to flourish among his family, neighbors and peers while still understanding how to operate outside of that community. I don't have the tools or wisdom to know how to do that, and it's certainly not a topic of conversation in the teachers' lounge or at professional development meetings.
Throughout the day classes float along the hallways of our school, a teacher at the head followed by 20 or more students in matching-colored uniforms. We ask them to face forward in a straight line while remaining silent and almost unmoving. A momentary dance move or a single misstep to the left or right will compel a stern, sometimes irritated request: "Get back in line."
The question that we can't ask enough is: whose line are they falling into?
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*Don't mis-read this as writing off violence as a "cultural difference." Every culture that I'm familiar with has aspects of violence whether they're physical, psychological, structural or whatnot. And within cultures there are vast differences in attitudes towards violence, even within and among families.
**Although sometimes it's acculturation be damned. Some of our students have such difficult home lives that they've actually become seriously traumatized by violence or neglect. Thinking about acculturation in these students' lives is so secondary to providing some stability and love, which is something that many people at my school seem to do exceptionally well.
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