Talks with Teachers #1: Mutual Respect

Rachel: Okay… here’s one. It was my first year of teaching at my school in Brooklyn—I was teaching 9^th grade at the time—and I’d had a particularly stressful day. Students wouldn’t stop talking and concentrate on the lesson. I was in my classroom at the end of the day, ranting around a little bit, and one of my students, a 9^th grade girl, happened to overhear. I have a great relationship with my students, and it must’ve been clear that I was stressed because she decided to offer up some advice.

“Ms. P—,” she says, “You need some dick!”

She wasn’t trying to be a bitch, she wasn’t trying to offend me, she was sincerely just trying to help. It came from a place of complete good intentions. I was speechless. Which I guess is why that’s the story I offer up—working with teenagers always keep you on your toes.

Rumpus: So…was she right?

Rachel: [Laughs] She most certainly was.

Rumpus: Tell me about your students and your relationship with them.

Rachel: I really truly love 90% of my students. They are amazing people, even those who cause me major headaches. They’re into reggae, R &B, hip hop, pop. They’re proud of their Caribbean heritage, although there is a definite hierarchy of cultures, with Jamaicans at the top and Haitians at the bottom.  This structure has a lot to do with money, I believe. Many of them, just like teenagers everywhere, are obsessed with name brands and showy signs of wealth. Unfortunately, most of them can’t really afford these things. Most of them are struggling in some way with their racial identity. Respect means a lot to many of them and they are prepared to fight when someone treats them with disrespect.

The truth of the matter is many of the students in my school have an enormous amount of shit going on outside of the school.  They have financial issues, but are constantly trying to hide it. Their parents are involved in drug dealing or other crimes. They have family members in jail or that have been murdered. They live in small apartments with lots of people and no quiet place to do work. They have to take care of their younger siblings, cousins, nieces or nephews, or they have older people in their neighborhood pressuring them to fight, join gangs, carry guns, party. They don’t have a stable place to call home and live in shelters or in other people’s living rooms. They have people threatening them, forcing them to have sex or commit crimes—it goes on and on and on.  It is very hard to expect them to put that all aside, come into school, and just sit and learn quietly and in an engaged manner. The sad part is that even the students who have less stress in their lives and come to school to learn have gotten used to an environment full of drama and interruptions to their learning, causing them to sometimes join in the misbehavior.  If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  They also don’t know anything different.  They haven’t been in a classroom in a suburban school where students don’t come to the door with so much baggage and just come to school to learn.

Rumpus: You just mentioned that most of your students are struggling with their racial identity—what do you mean by that?

Rachel: They feel they have to look hard and act a certain way. I can sense it some times, this defensiveness—they feel the effects of living in a poor neighborhood and that most of the people living in that neighborhood are black. It’s frustrating to a lot of them. It messes with their self-confidence. For the kids who are recent immigrants to the US, they seem forced to make a decision: do they identify with African-American hip-hop culture or with white culture, which is the culture they associate with doing well in school? It’s become clear to me that no matter the kid, no matter their background, they all share this divide between them and white people because they live in a primarily black neighborhood.

We took a bunch of new kids up to Maine this year [as part of the exchange program mentioned above]. They’re really good kids, but also really good at toeing the line and acting ‘gangsta,’ being close with the kids in gangs, etc. When we went up to Maine, it became really interesting to see what identity they presented to these rural white kids. For example, one of them was trying to act hard, talking about where he could find the closest liquor store, making sexual remarks about the ladies, and the kid he was staying with got freaked, told his mom, and it caused all sorts of commotion. But I know that the talk was all an act.

Rumpus: What do you think is the key to your success with your students?