Community Building

Totally another snow day. So-this week will turn out to be a 2 1/2 day week before a 3 day weekend. Nice…..Maybe these are God’s little subtle acknowledgements.

Given that I have had all this time this week, I have have been able to complete a book on community building among prisoners and ex-prisoners by a gentleman named Robert Roberts (strange but true). He started the work as his doctoral dissertation trying to see if he could increase literacy rates in a Southern prison by first instituting a close-knit learning community where people were free to share all the hardships in their lives. After people trusted one another in this learning community, Dr. Roberts could help increase literacy through both himself and model mentors. His control group was attempting to institute literacy programs in non-community based learning communities in the prison. The rates for the community-based learning soared, while the control group remained flat.

It eventually evolved into a program on the outside where he would use the community model to help ex-prisoners stay out of prison. The thrust behind both the prison and later program was that people in desperate circumstances needed to feel part of a positive community before they could trust, heal, learn and ultimately prosper.

Can this type of model work in a school with students/children? I think it could in a modified sense. I think the major hurdle would be the hesitation to make yourself so vulnerable to the group that one must share secrets, fears, shames, etc. The enforcement of strict confidentiality would be imperative, but if we could get beyond that, I think that level of connection to others and a feeling of being in a positive place would be astounding.

I think it could also be modified to include the adults that are responsible for the children. This might have the potential to open channels of communication between adult and child as well as help build new avenues of trust with other students and adults.

I can feel walking down the hallways and watching/hearing the interactions of students that so many of them are simply starved of positive attention. They turn (and this list is by no means exhaustive in the slightest) to classroom disruptiveness, gang activity and risky sexual behavior as outlets for that need to feel paid attention to.

The bureaucratic part of the educational process spends so much time trying to figure out why these students do so horribly in school and subsequently mandate some form of curricular modification. What they fundamentally fail to do is address needs like community and positive relationships with their peers, parents/guardians, teachers and others that this child NEED in order to do better academically.

Like literacy rates in prison, the educational acheivement of these students will continue to remain flat until we come up with alternate forms of intervention.

Me for one likes this learning community model.

Articulation

As promised, I will get back to the middle class social order issue that I raised yesterday in terms of behavioral standards/acceptable conduct, but I first want to share an example from class today. It may seem rather tangential, but I do not think so later on…

We are engaged in a role-playing activity that is asking the students to simulate the roles of various actors involved in the Underground Railroad. They advance to various safe houses and avoid capture by answering review questions from the test they have later this week. Fun, interactive, and educational….

When we ask for volunteers to play the various roles, we do not have trouble finding people to play the parts. But when one particularly light-skinned girl raises her hand and says she wants to play the role of the slave, another students says:

“She cannot play that role. She is too white to be a slave.”

You could see the pain in the girls eyes when that comment hit her. You could almost feel the thousands of other times she has heard this in her short life, and I realized this:

To be looking white to these students is as close to a mortal sin as it gets. To talk white, to act white, to look white-its all bad to many of these students.

That brings me back to my comments of yesterday. I believe that many of these children, race entirely aside, have NOT been brought up to understand how to interact socially with both their peers and other adults, including teachers. These interactions skills are taught and learned behaviors. They, as plain as it is, totally lack these skills. And in an educational setting, it is difficult to teach them effectively when they lack these social tools.

That comment has the perception to make me look culturally myopic. It may seem as though I lack sensitivity to their different, predominantly lower class social order. I am middle class. I was raised to interact with different people in different ways. I believe that these children lack those fundamental middle class social skills. They need these skills because these are tools that are necessary way beyond your interactions with me and my desire to teach you about American history. They are successful tools in part because they are middle class tools. What many of us want as educators in these types of environments is to help these kids OUT of the cycles of poverty and degradation. Middle class social skills are an important part of that process in my mind.

Where the disconnect occurs is why I shared the example above. These students tend to see that middle class social order as being tied to whiteness, rather than an issue transcendent of race. They see white as bad, and therefore any action-including talking and acting or LOOKING “white” in their minds-is bad form.

Looking and acting more white means being less black-poverty and lack of education be damned.

Disrespect II

In a conversation with a friend about the whole disrespect issue, she made a great point to me that had totally eluded me before….

When you have nothing, and with so many of life’s often turbulent circumstances treating you cruelly, all many of these students have is their honor. The essence of that manifests itself in a constant obsession with disrespect.

My question then becomes-and my job to a certain degree boils down to this…

How can we make these students understand and realize that they have control of their education in addition to their honor? The choice to engage in their own education positively is such an unrealized tool for these students.
Thank you for the insight. It really helped…..

I fear for tomorrow. Details to follow soon.

Disrespect.

Disrespect is a word that has become a daily part of my vocabulary over the last month or so. The students seem to think and act about this relative emotional abstraction on a near-constant basis. It is an idea that permeates nearly all interactions between students and between teachers and students.

I had an two incidents yesterday that I really struggled with-both in class to deal with and outside of class on an internalized level. I shall share both in a moment, but I need to clarify what disrespect in the school context means to me as an educator:

1. When you show up to class late, without supplies and are unwilling to do the classwork.

2. When you curse loudly in class-at me or one another in any fashion that seems threatening.

3. When you attempt to deface supplies in the classroom-textbooks, desks, etc-many of which belong to the teacher.

4. When you interrupt and talk when it is inappropriate to do so.

These are only a few notions of my ideas of disrespect at work-many of these happen to me on a 100x daily basis. I am working on it…It is NOT all their fault, and I am surely not innocent of giving it back to a certain degree.

To the incidents….

1. Identified problem student from one of my other sections comes into the classroom first period of the day-unannounced and unwelcome-most definitely without knocking or asking permission to be there.

Me: “Excuse me Joesph*, what are you doing in here?”

Him: “I need to talk to my peoples.”

Me: “Ummm…well I am trying to teach a lesson and you are simply not welcome in here now. Deal with it later. Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

Him: ” Yeah, but I don’t feel like being there.”

He has now walked right past me to the person he wanted to see….they start talking loudly.

Me: “Yo, Joseph*, get out of my class. This is ridiculous.”

Him: “Stop disrespecting me like that. I will leave when I am done.”

I go back, grab him by the collar and push him out the door.

In the hallway….

Me: “Find somewhere to go.”

Him: “I cannot believe you would fuckin disrespect me like that. Just shut up and leave me alone.”

AT WHAT POINT WAS I BEING NOT ONLY DISRESPECTFUL, BUT FUCKIN DISRESPECTFUL?!

2. Last period of the day, a student who is really likable and capable decides to leave class without a pass and promptly disappears. When she finally does re-appear, she comes racing into the room, kind of like she is hiding from someone.

Sure enough, another known difficult student appears at the door-banging to get in. (At least he knocked, right?) I see its him and ask him what he wants through the smallest possible crack in the door. He wants to shower this girl with water since she did it to him. I explain the rather ill-timing of that idea and tell him to scram. Like that happened…..

The details of that moment are unimportant….After it has all calmed down in a relative fashion, the same female student is being disruptive…..I start into a scathing red-faced rant and her to shut up, sit down and do some work.

Her: “I cannot believe you would talk to me that way. You don’t have to yell at me. You don’t have to be so disrespectful to me about it.”

Me: “Do you not see that the disrespectful-ness you have given me…leaving class without a pass, bringing unwanted guests and attention to class time, throwing all conventions of classroom decorum upside-down?”

Her: “No. Whatever. Fuck this. Im not doing any work today for a teacher that would disrespect me like that.”

Me: “Fine. Just be quiet then.”

ARRRGGGHHH…..

So I was talking later to a colleague about it all. I asked him at what point he thought the students had gotten so disrespectful.

His response: “At what point did they ever learn to become respectful? That’s the more pertinent question.”

Me: “Well said, well said.”