Concluding Post

            There is a moment in “The Class” where the teacher, François Marin, is in a heated argument with his students. He has insulted two of his female students, who have taken it very personally. Another student now refers to teachers who issue suspensions as “assholes.” François says, “Everyone goes wild over some word I said. You say asshole and I shouldn’t react?” Upon watching this scene, I couldn’t help but blurt out, “No, you shouldn’t, because you’re the adult here!” After finishing the film, I went back to read over the prompt for this concluding post, and my eyes fell on this line: “Think, in particular, about the expectations you carry around what it means to be a child, an adult, and a teacher.” Well. It seems I certainly had some of those expectations pushed on as I watched this film.

In François’s case, I think that being an adult, being a teacher, means maintaining your self-control, even in the face of children who don’t. They need you to model that control for them. They need to know that you will be a steady, stable presence in their lives, who will be there for them even after they’ve demonstrated their adolescent need to rebel, to push back against authority figures and adults. They need to know that their (fairly typical) adolescent actions won’t push you away or cause you to give up on them. Throughout most of the movie, it’s clear that he attempts to do this – his talk with Khoumba after she refuses to read from “The Diary of Anne Frank” is one excellent example. He tries to build on their history together, since he also had her in his class the year before. He notices the conflict that she seems to be having with her best friend Esmeralda, and he reiterates that he truly does want to know what is going on in her life. I certainly don’t think that François is a bad teacher. On the contrary, I think he is a dedicated teacher who wants what’s best for his students, allows them some leeway with their language and behavior out of respect for them as humans and for their life situations, and goes out of his way to praise the troubled Souleymane for his use of photographs in his self-portrait. But in a pivotal, emotional moment, he lost his cool, and it had significant consequences for Souleymane, who was already wounded after hearing that this teacher who had praised his work had referred to him as “limited scholastically.”

I’ll be honest – as soon as Souleymane’s disciplinary hearing started, I had tears streaming down my face. A lot of that is due to the great work of the actor playing Souleymane (Franck Keïta), who made the character’s vulnerability, regret, and pride palpable throughout the scene. But partly, it was also because of my own experiences with students like him. I spent a year teaching at a charter school in Dearborn Heights, where much of the school population consisted of first- or second-generation American students with parents who had immigrated not from Mali but from Lebanon, Iraq, or Yemen. At this school, I had a number of male students who seemed to be a lot like Souleymane and Boubacar. They neglected their schoolwork, were sometimes combative with me or with other students, and walked with a swagger that displayed their “I don’t care about school” attitude. The scene near the beginning of the movie, where Souleymane is not completing the assignment and shrugs off the teacher’s suggestions that he borrow paper from a classmate with tossed-off promises that he’ll complete the work at home? That could have been lifted directly from my own classroom (so could several other scenes throughout the movie). Yet they were still just kids, teenagers. At the time, these students made me want to tear my hair out, and I carried around some anger at some of them for making my experience as a first-year teacher so difficult, even after I left that school. Watching Souleymane, go through his disciplinary hearing, though, I just wanted to hug him (although I doubt his pride would have allowed him to accept that hug). I thought about how I could feel so strongly for this fictional teenager, and how my own students’ feelings and troubles were probably not too far off from his, and I cried.

My experiences with these students also gave me insight into some of the issues surrounding the relationship between school, cultural assimilation, and social mobility that were addressed in this film. One scene that addressed these issues pretty heavily was the students’ discussion about soccer and the upcoming African Cup of Nations. Nassim talks about his support of Morocco and about how the fact that Mali is not participating in the competition may make his African classmates feel “less African.” Boubacar responds by pointing out that black Africans can support the team of Ivory Coast, but Carl says that his own national team is merely “France.” This spoke to my own experience in Dearborn Heights. I am able to list the countries that my students’ families came from because my students readily named and identified with those countries, like Nassim, Souleymane, and Boubacar. Even though the majority of my students had spent all or nearly all of their lives in the US, there were still conflicts based on their families’ nations of origin. One student, who was somewhat unpopular, was mocked for being Iraqi (since Iraq is apparently seen by some as a “backwater” nation). The specific circumstances of the school where I taught contributed to this dynamic, as well – it was a charter school with a fairly small, somewhat homogeneous student population. All of my students spoke and wrote Arabic, many because it was their first language at home. At the same time, though, one of the most common insults that students would lob at one another was “boater” – that is, someone “fresh off the boat, someone who isn’t American “enough.” There was a bit of contradiction in the degree to which they viewed themselves as integrated into US culture. They were a little bit Carl, and a little bit Nassim.

Race and religion also played a significant role in this situation for my students. I remember one instance when I was administering a standardized test to my students, which began with a bubble sheet requiring students to provide their names and some demographic information. “Miss,” they asked, “what are we supposed to put for race?” The options given were about the same as those that had been included on the 2010 census:

“I guess you can put white? I think you’re considered Caucasian, in the data.” Some accepted this. Some gave me what can only be described as an incredibly skeptical look. I told them to put “other” if they weren’t comfortable identifying as white. In truth, I really wasn’t sure how to answer their questions. While my students were American by birth, many of them felt far from the American default of “white,” and yet America didn’t give them any other way to officially identify.

It wasn’t just the way they felt internally that created this distance from Americanness for many of my students – it was also the way they and their culture were treated by others. The vast majority of students in the school were Muslim, and in a post-9/11 world, many Americans conflated race (for people of Middle Eastern descent), religion (Islam) and culture (un-American). At the time that I was teaching in this school, we were barely a year removed from Pastor Terry Jones’s inflammatory, hateful burningof the Koran in his Florida church, which was frequently in the news. I remember talking about this incident with one student in particular, a football player who was popular among the girls and had a bit of a cocky attitude that sometimes got him into trouble, but who was mostly a sweet kid. He often didn’t seem to take things too seriously, but during this conversation, he wasn’t joking. He asked me why people would burn the Koran, and why Americans seemed to think that was a reasonable and okay thing to do. I don’t remember how I answered him, but I do remember the sadness I felt, thinking about how this must be so alienating to my students, and my embarrassment at not having an answer for my student.

In my previous blog post for Cycle 2, I talked about how the racialized experiences of Rodriguez and those I could point to in the news put the lie to Rodriguez’s contention that one could, and indeed should, assimilate into the dominant culture in order to succeed and achieve upward social mobility. Rodriguez also wrote about the function of schooling in this process – that the education provided by school creates distance between students and their home cultures, when those home cultures are different from the mainstream academic culture that school is preparing them for. This distance, as described by Rodriguez is not a regrettable consequence of schooling but is actually a necessary part of education, of assimilation and upwards social mobility, because education induces a change in the student, but not in his parents. Yet, the school where I taught seemed to have the opposite function as its goal. As I mentioned, this school was a charter school, meaning that all of our students were there because their parents had purposefully selected it over the local public high school. Many of our students’ parents had seemingly made that decision out of a desire to limit the Americanizing effects of school. All of our students were required to take Arabic for their foreign language credit, even those for whom it was their first language. We did not have an explicit religious affiliation, but many of the families sending their children to our school were somewhat conservative, and we did not hold school dances (instead of prom as an end-of-year celebration for our graduating seniors, we held a fancy dinner, to which parents were invited, where awards were handed out and the students gave out mock election titles). Our school’s principal was a Lebanese woman who was deeply familiar with these families, their cultures, and their hopes for their children.

Yet, at the same time, the language of instruction was English. My students took, and enjoyed, their US history class, where they learned about American presidents and social justice movements. In their English class, they read books like “The Hunger Games” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and discussed how the themes of these books related to American history and culture. The students in this school were simultaneously being pushed to stay connected to their roots and to branch out and assimilate to the modern American culture they were in. Rodriguez would say this is impossible, a contradiction. I don’t agree. I think it provided students with the opportunity to stay connected to and proud of their pasts while also acknowledging that their futures were to take place in the US. There were certainly things about the way this school was run that I took issue with (there are reasons I only stayed there for a single year), but this bicultural approach wasn’t one of them.

Connecting this reflection back to my own practice is somewhat difficult, because I am no longer a classroom teacher. As I move through my PhD program in math education, I have fewer opportunities to work directly with teenagers, as I did in the past. Yet, these reflections certainly have implications for my own professional practice. One aspect of that practice is my work with pre-service teachers. When I look ahead to the type of job I hope to get after earning my degree, I think that I would like to be at a small, teaching-focused college, giving me lots of opportunities to influence those who will go on to enter the classroom and teach students of a variety of cultures, races, and religions. I can help my students become the kind of teachers that we need as our student population continues to grow more and more diverse.

We need teachers who are open to learning about the lived experiences of their students and who try to develop an understanding of those experience. We need teachers who respect their students’ cultures, races, religions, family backgrounds, etc. We need teachers who encourage their students to reflect on who they are, who they’ve been, and who they hope to one day be. We need teachers who help their students to see that their school education is merely one resource they can draw on as they work to succeed in the world, and that it is equally important to draw on their families, their neighborhoods, the elements of their backgrounds that make them “both different and the same,” as François says to Arthur at one point in “The Class” (about his identification with the goth sub-culture). We need teachers who seek to recognize their students’ skills and achievements and who encourage them to pursue these (as François does with Souleymane’s photography). I can help pre-service teachers become these types of teachers. But I can’t do it just through talk – I need to model it for them. I need to incorporate these values into my own teaching of pre-service teachers, as well.

Cycle Three Post

“Instead, they have looked back with longing at the curriculum of their youth – a course of study designed for an earlier age and a different people. Impervious to our nation’s pressing need for a new inclusionary concept of curriculum, they have allowed the inability of that old course of study to serve all our children to escape their notice” (p. 43).

Upon reading this quote, I could hardly tell that it was written almost 25 years ago. It seemed instantly relevant to me, as a math educator, given the recent battles over the Common Core State Standards. Many people out there, including parents whose children are learning math in this “new” way, have expressed frustration: “Why don’t we just do it the way we’ve always done it? It’s so much simpler!” Yet these complaints are eliding the fact that many of the pedagogical tools that are gaining more widespread use in elementary classrooms, like 10-frames, are actually designed to make math overall simpler for students by helping them develop their foundational number sense. I can’t find the link now, but I specifically remember reading a blog post from a teacher who talked about the fact that, when teaching her elementary students some math concept (fractions, I think?) with the new curriculum that had been adopted by her school in order to comply with the new standards, she was surprised to realize that it took about half as long for students to demonstrate mastery as it had in the past. On top of that, she recognized that the understanding and skills that her students were developing in working with these equations would serve them well when they began studying algebra down the road.

A number of other elements of this book felt quite relevant to me, as well, and I enjoyed reading it quite a bit. The lengthy discussion of the devaluation of domesticity and women’s work really hit home for me. One quote, in particular, put me in mind of a book I read some time ago (Homeward Bound: The Rise of the NewDomesticity, by Emily Matchar), which I found very interesting and would definitely recommend. It’s not about teaching or even children, exactly, but rather about the rise of “new domesticity” that includes, among other things, the trends of attachment parenting, home-schooling, and other methods of parenting and ways of organizing one’s life that have a very DIY ethos. Near the end of the book, Matchar describes the phenomenon that she had witnessed in all her research for the book: “So many of the women I visited throughout this book sought a simpler, more authentic life through downsizing their careers and focusing on their families and their personal passions. Their motivations for living these kinds of lifestyles were very twenty-first century … But what they wound up with was a life that was, in many ways, not that different from their grandmothers’” (Matchar, pp. 235-236). Compare this to Martin’s line on p. 153: “Woolf … was far too attuned to the psychic damage self-sacrifice does to accept at face value the women’s claim to be ‘truly content’ in her new life – really woman’s old life.” A generation later, and women are facing the same issues in attempting to balance their work and home lives, with many ultimately deciding that they can’t do both, and ending up right back in Betty Friedan's shoes.

In one portion of the book, though, I had some ambivalence. Martin twice cites John Dewey’s well-known quote: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children” (p. 40, p. 45). Simultaneously, Martin wants to establish the schoolhome as a place where gender roles are questioned, domesticity is promoted for boys as well as girls, and students of all cultures and races are welcome. It is not explicitly addressed her, but I think (or hope) that in an updated version of this book, Martin would extend that inclusivity to transgender students and students who don’t identify as heterosexual. There’s the catch, though – plenty of parents don’t necessarily want [transcript] their students in a school with that degree of inclusivity. Now, obviously Martin (and myself) don’t believe that those are the “wisest” parents, but surely they believe themselves to be wise, and their own positions to be the correct ones. I foresee a great deal of conflict, if schools were to explicitly take over some of the social and emotional aspects of raising children and instilling social values in them. How can we approach this goal of establishing an inclusive environment for students (both to allow marginalized students to feel safe, and to enable privileged students to develop empathy for their fellow citizens of the world) without driving parents who disagree to cause huge amounts of trouble, or to simply pull out their kids and send them to a different school (leaving us preaching to the choir, essentially)? I don’t think there’s a single right answer to this question; it’s a complicated but worthwhile goal.

Cycle 2 Blog Post

Throughout Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez speaks again and again about his alienation from Mexican/Mexican-American culture. Initially, he writes about how learning English (academic English in particular) separated him from his family and made their interactions with one another feel less intimate. Later, he talked about his negative feelings towards the “Third World Student Movement.” I can’t quite put my finger on the right word to describe how he talks about the students in this movement… I almost want to describe it as “disdain,” although that’s maybe too strong a word. At any rate, he certainly doesn’t agree with their ideas. Frankly, he’s pretty condescending when he talks about these students. They don’t ‘view’ themselves as “belonging to two very different societies,” but rather they “imagine” themselves to be so (p. 168). He refers to the ways that they display themselves as cultural beings (their accents, the way they dress) as a “clownish display” (p. 171) (maybe disdain isn’t so far off, after all). They made “claims” that they didn’t have to give up their culture in order to join the culture of academia, while Rodriguez had accepted the “fact” that such change is necessary. He describes white women agitating for gender equality as taking on the mantle of “victim” and decries this as “ludicrous” (p. 176).

Yet, Rodriguez also talks multiple times about the ways that he and his family members faced stereotyping or oppression just because of their racial and cultural background. How he was invited to join minority leaders on trips that he felt were ill-suited to his own work. How painful it was when others made comments implying that he had only been offered jobs because the departments “need their minority” (p. 178). How his sister suffered for her dark complexion, and how he felt ugly due to his own, similar skin color. Regardless of whether a person feels plugged into the culture of their background, regardless of whether a person maintains their first language as their primary language or if they abandon it for English, regardless of how educated or upwardly mobile or wealthy a person is, their race/ethnicity (deeply intertwined, and deeply connected to their home culture) is still one of the most visible things about them. A person’s race mediates how they interact with the world, because it affects how they are seen by others, by strangers who don’t get the chance to learn much else about them during a passing interaction. This is apparent when Oprah Winfrey, one of the richest and most influential women in the world, is shopping and the clerk assumes that she can’t afford theexpensive handbag she’s eyeing. When young black boys are perceived as olderthan they actually are, and receive harsher punishments than white boys for the same misbehavior. When black men and boys are viewed as inherently dangerous and are shot with little to no provocation by law enforcement officers over and over and over (as are Hispanic men and women).

Rodriguez talks about a distinction between public and private selves, and about choosing the public self at the expense of the private self, but it seems to me that it’s not possible to 100% leave behind your private identity – your culture, gender, race – when participating in public society. As described above, even if you disavow these things, they will follow you and influence how you’re seen by others. If that’s the case, then what would even be the benefit of sacrificing that private self? Why does Rodriguez deem it necessary? If a person draws strength from shining a light on their own culture, rather than keeping it hidden away at home, and if this doesn’t impact their ability to participate in public, societal culture, then why should they be pressured to cast their culture aside? For example, Dr. Adrienne Keene, who writes extensively about representations of Native American peoples and cultures on her blog, Native Appropriations, found it immensely powerful and moving to hear a graduation prayer at Brown University’s Baccalaureate ceremony given in the language of Wampanoag people, who originally lived on the area around the school. Far from giving up the language of their ancestors, the students who delivered the prayer must have been actively working with a project to revive the language. These students are graduating from an Ivy League school – it doesn’t seem that their commitment to retaining their Native culture has made them less capable of succeeding in public society.

It is very interesting to me that Contreras seems to imply that Rodriguez has “evolved” and possibly adjusted some of his divisive positions. One of Contreras’s critiques stood out to me, though, since it reminded me of a piece I read a while back. Contreras undermines the idea that “If everyone has sex with everyone else, we’ll get a world of mestizo-looking people, peace and love would reign supreme, and racism, as we know it, will disappear.” Similarly, Jia Tolentino wrote about PolicyMic’s commentary on National Geographic’s predictions for what humans will look like in 2050: “look how nice we look, as a people, when white gets to be more interesting and minorities get to look white. Look at this freckled, green-eyed future. Look at how beautiful it is to see everything diluted that we used to hate.” In Tolentino’s view (and mine), the idea of racial and cultural identities being erased and disposed of isn’t likely to be a simple or purely good thing.