Marie has been out sick for the last few days, so I've been thrown into teaching her kids. It's weird being a student teacher in a small town; essential strangeness gets broadcast. They vibe on my newness, and have all the kinds of questions that they would have for a substitute, except I’m a more permanent fixture. The students know I'm around for some duration, that I'm not going to disappear tomorrow--like the collection of subs that have had to sit in the room with me, since I'm not licensed to teach and must therefor be supervised by characters like RJ (in his seventies, a kind of bumbling, absent-minded professor) and Karlyn (in her sixties, a 20-year substitute who described to me today a whole category of children: "The worthless, those who don't know how to learn and therefore don't care to learn"). I’m here for a while, but not long enough to really matter. Now I am pretty skilled as a teacher, but no amount of skill as a teacher can cut through the very notion that I am, in the long term, irrelevant to their lives down the road.
This is maybe the fundamental flaw to doing student teaching this way: a few months in one place, a few in another. You can form bonds with some individual students; I'm sure that many do. I already have with a few of the kids. But if once they know--and they know by now--that I’m ultimately a short timer, how can they believe that I am really invested in their lives? And if they can’t believe that, how can I really cut through the veneer of schoolism that we must all genuinely cut through if we are to be educators and not mere baby sitters?
Then there's this creepy sensation that I am, ultimately, a cook in another's kitchen. I've been teaching lessons written by another, and I have very little sense for where the ship is sailing in the long term. There is no overarching idea holding the course together--not that I can see and not that the kids can see. Today, teaching a lesson on voice, I was probably lucky that no one asked me why are we doing this? since I would have had to resort to one of those old teacherisms--it will help you to express yourself or get into college or because I said so. So I didn't have a sense for the overarching purpose, which made it hard for me to really buy into it.
And then there's this: during the course of this lesson on voice, we read a poem by Langston Hughes. The poem was a kind of dialogue between a black couple, and the poem contained both of their voices. The overwhelming majority of the students in the room are white, and they were being asked to draw conclusions about the "personas" of the two speakers in the poem based on the way they talked. The conclusions they drew were things like: "they are poor" or "they are uneducated" or "they don't speak good English." Even the lone black student in the room took a swipe at Hughes' characters lack of "American English."
I have no history with these children, not yet. I've been in their midst four days. I have only a limited future with these children--eight and a half weeks and counting. How could I engage them in a challenging conversation about language, power and race when we have just met? That conversation was raised by their naive--and sometimes innappropriate--reactions to Hughes' poem, but I felt powerless in that moment to do anything but prevent them from saying horribly racist things. And that made a few of them feel weird about me, since I'm white. They've also noticed that I saw "y'all" a lot, but since most of them still think I'm from Washington state, they are patently confused.
Part of me hopes that Marie gets well very soon and is back in the room with us tomorrow; another part of me wants more time just to get to know the kids, so that when I am sailing this ship on my own for the last six weeks of the term, I will have a better sense for which way the winds tend to blow.
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