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.