In a World of Colonization, #MeToo and Racial Profiling, What Does Helping Really Mean As a Teacher?
As I let the dog outside this morning I noticed that it is still snowing. It started on Friday about noon and it's now Sunday morning. I don't know the official total but I do know that my fifty-pound dog is now wading in the snow. He's too tired to leap around like he did yesterday. I'm guessing we're close to 20".
At about 11:00 yesterday I rallied my three children (age 15, 14, and one month shy of 13) to don their snow gear because we were going to shovel the driveway. It was heavy, wet snow, perfect for snowmen and fort, but hard work shoveling. As we each worked on our own zone, I looked down the hill and notice a car stuck, a woman desperately trying to go, and one of my neighbors attempting to push her out.
I tried to get my son to go down and help. "Come on, put that Strength Training class to work. You'll be really helpful," I coaxed. He was not enthused. Like me, he just wanted to get this driveway done so he could go back inside.
"Ok," I said,"Let's both go. The girls can keep shoveling here, and it probably won't take long to help her." And off we went through a good foot of snow to help. Another neighbor joined us, and we shoveled out around her tires and the street, directed her on which way to turn her tires and when to hit the gas, and then we all pushed, and finally, her car was moving again.
We trudged back up the hill and finished our shoveling. We could have asked her why she was out. I mean, come on, lady, we're clearly in a blizzard here. We could have told her this was her own fault, not ours ("Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on our part."). We could have let natural consequences take their toll--too bad, I guess your car stays there. And, we most certainly, could have attempted to help, not succeeded, and said, "Yeah. Sorry. We tried." None of this would have gotten her unstuck. And none of it would have created a positive relationship with any of the people in my neighborhood.
This, of course, made me think of my job as a teacher. There's always so much to do with my work for class and being a reading specialist. Yes, I'm busy, we're all busy, but do the solutions and consequences we offer really help our students in any kind of meaningful way?
I could take a simple approach to this question and assume positive intention. That lays this question to rest, right? Yes, we're all doing the best we can! We all want what's best for kids! Teaching is hard and you really can't expect us to do anymore! Compassion fatigue is real!
True. But what if our "help" isn't help at all, and we're spending our energy in the wrong direction?
Several things I've read lately make me believe this might be true. This summer, I read White Fragility by Robin DeAngelis and For All the White Folks Who Teach in the Hood by Christopher Emdin. Both address the idea of colonization, where "well-intentioned" white people have taken over whole cultures, stripped them of their own ways of doing things, and demanded the indigenous groups adopt white ways. Whether that is Christian missionaries or intentional land-seekers, this idea that someone knows better than you and you need to drop your ways and pick up theirs muddies the waters of "help" tremendously.
I also think back to Malcolm Gladwell's examples in his book Blink. Our gut reactions, our intuition, about what to do and how to respond is valuable to us if we're experts. If we're trained, like a surgeon, in best practices and we've had years of experiences honing our skills so that we are able to quickly and efficiently, almost without thought, make decisions and take action, then yes, we should rely on our intention as enough. We should listen to that inner voice that tells us what is best and we should act.
But in a world of racism, sexism, and ableism, who among us doesn't need to question our intentions? In the presence of racial profiling, #metoo, border walls and homophobia, who among us can be assured that our choices are honestly helping the students in our classrooms? Who among us today does not need to step back, read, engage, question, and take a deeper look at the impact we are having on our students, on the citizens who are growing to be the adults in our country?
This all makes the concept of helping quite messy.
And when I have big questions, I feel like Flannery O'Connor. "I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say." And on this issue, that's just where I am. I don't have answers but want to explore what I'm doing, what my role is as a teacher, and maybe encourage others to think, explore and jump into learning about helping with me.
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| from www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html |
I teach two different classes in my high school: one is AVID, a college readiness system designed to help students who want to reach their full potential learned skills and strategies to help them be more successful in high school and beyond. My current students are juniors who've been with me since they were freshmen. My other classes are literacy classes filled with mostly 9th and 10th graders who have been assigned to me because they are not being successful. I find that with my students, the more I become a detective rather than a teacher, the more successful I am. So, my "what to teach" has to follow my "who I teach". I put Maslow's Hierarchy in here because I needed a reminder of the needs my students might have. It's all well and good to say I have to have high expectations and that I can't make my students be internally motivated. I teach High School, for God's sake. We can't baby them!
Maslow checks me. He reminds me that my students are humans first. And without basic needs being met, no human, not kids, not adults, no one, is going to live up to any teacher's self-actualizing expectations. But a magic thing happens when as a teacher, we actually figure out what the student needs in that moment. Relief of suffering, and a brain free for other things.
The other day I was in the hallway and there was a 9th grader refusing to go to class. Two adults had attempted to get him to class, and because he was refusing, they were going to get an administrator. "Let me try," I said getting the details of what they knew: he needed his phone.
I approached him and told him he didn't have to go to class, but would he just tell me the story? It tumbled out: a girl had picked up his phone and headphones in their last class; he didn't know her last name or where she was; and he had to get his phone back. I said,"OK, let's get your phone." This meant, returning to his last class, finding out the girl's last name, going to the office, having the secretary look up her schedule, walking to her class, talking with her teacher, pulling the girl out (to whom I simply said, "You have a phone and headphones that belong to someone else. You're not in trouble, just give them to me." She retrieved them from her desk and handed them over). I gave the phone back to the boy (whose relief I could feel in waves) and he happily let me escort him to class.
This kind of help did not meet my need: I had papers to grade, lessons to plan, errands to do. I did not get them all done. This kind of help did do better things: it met a genuine, timely need of a student; it modeled multi-step, real-world problem solving (yes, I narrated all that to my new friend); it built relationships with two 9th graders in my building that I had never met before but who undoubtedly I will interact with in the future and my chances of those interactions being positive just went up about 80%; I also did some major PR for teachers: we're here to listen, we're here to help; you can trust us with the truth without getting in trouble at every turn. And the more love we pour into our 9th graders, the better the next four years will be. What would happen if every adult in our building decided to listen and figure out the need of the students first? What would happen if we consistently met those needs and developed strong, trusting relationships with all kids? Wouldn't actual growth and learning be possible?
On Thursday night I had the incredible privilege of being part of a Facebook Live Event at Booksource in St.Louis (www.facebook.com/booksource/videos/544817546020647/). As we sat talking before the event Jacqueline Stallworth, an English teacher on the panel said she had been reading bell hooks again recently. "I really seem to need her and Audre Lord's words again right now." She said she was really struck by how in her book All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks defined love as "the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth." As teachers, this might be a question we need ask ourselves more often, "How are the actions impacting each student? Are they actually nurturing the student's growth?" We know humans can't jump from the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy to the top in one step, so are we nurturing growth? Are we looking closely at where this student is and what this human needs to move forward from a place they may have been stuck for a long time?
I believe we each have that power. But it's going to take time and it's going to be messy because some of the kids who need us most have some of the biggest, ugliest problems that we encounter. And I suspect that getting to know and really help these students is going to be hard and take all of us working together to come up with new solutions that nobody has thought of yet. It's going to take actual brainstorming and problem solving, and it's going to take courage to take purposeful action when it might be a lot easier to blame the kid, say we did our best, and turn our backs.
Listen to kids. Build true relationships. Take purposeful action to help kids in the ways they need help and for most of our kids, I think we can make a big difference.
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I sit here tonight, January 1, 2020, a whole year after writing this, I have no more answers than I did last January, but I will say I do have a lot more courage. Asking myself these hard questions every single day makes me a little less afraid to ask questions, to start conversations with others--both students and colleagues, and a lot less afraid to embrace the mess of real helping. I don't just think it makes a difference any more. I know it does.
Lynn
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