Well, wow. Just wow. About two years and two weeks ago, I was reading similar words from people who were just wrapping up the program while blatantly procrastinating, trying to avoid finishing my college honors thesis. I had committed to the Corps in November, almost half a year earlier, and it still felt hard to process that in just two months time I would be teaching in Mississippi. Needless to say, it’s now difficult to believe that those two years are nearly past. I honestly just cannot wrap my mind around it. It’s hard to sum up just how this experience has changed me, but I’ll give it a shot.
I went into my classroom in August 2009 with what I thought were clear expectations. I had procedures. I had consequences. And boy oh boy, did I have some rules! And yet, I was insanely unprepared. I didn’t know how to read students yet, and I didn’t have experience actually applying consequences. My summer school classroom initially had zero, then one, and eventually two students. When I or another teacher was speaking, the student(s) were silent. There’s not much competition for who’s in charge of the power dynamic when there are next to no students. Between my lack of practice, my lack of compelling lesson plans, and the collection of hooligans that made up the Forest Hill High School ninth grade class, my classroom environment fell apart by the second week of school.
What surprises me now that my classroom rarely has significant interruptions is that my rules haven’t changed much. It’s just that in a school where I can’t easily put kids out of the classroom for misbehaving, being disruptive, or using disrespectful language, I’ve figured out a way to keep the consequences inside the classroom. I think that most of this simply came from experience at reading my students and having figured out when and where I can push and provoke them and in what ways. My rapport with them now varies somewhere between the strict, friendly, and downright silly depending on who’s in which class and how they’re behaving on a given day. Say I give a kid a copy assignment and he sullenly puts his head down. Now I instinctively know whether to leave him be until he calms down, or to make a joke about him going to the “crying corner” which will cause him to laugh at himself and rejoin the class. I just didn’t have that ability to read my students last year.But my experience here cannot just be explained by my progression as a classroom manager. I was coming from a very different place two years ago.
It was the third day of school last year. I gave a kid some lines to copy, and another kid shouted, “Mane, Jew, you wrong for that!” Thankfully, I had been warned by other teachers in Jackson that the kids call each other “Jew” every chance they get. But it didn’t change the fact that I had a lot of cultural oddities to adjust to.
I remember the last time I saw one of my friend’s moms before moving to Mississippi, invoking the memory of the dead Civil Rights trio that was two thirds Jewish, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, she warned me not to tell anyone that I was Jewish “down there.” I didn’t listen to her, mostly because I needed to find a way to get the kids to stop saying “Jew.” They generally respected the analogy I gave them, where it was about as weird and discomfiting to me for them to call each other Jew as it would be to them were I to call a white friend of mine “Negro.” Surprisingly to my friend’s mother, telling my students that I was Jewish got a generally positive response, because, in the words of one student, “He ain’t white, he Jewish!” At the same time, it raised the specter of purposeful anti-semitism from students which I encountered several times.
Needless to say, it is always difficult being the cultural minority. I’m obviously very different from my students, the vast majority of whom are black, southern, and under-educated. While this difference served as fodder for jokes the kids made about me, I also exaggerated my unusual qualities to keep them a little off-balance and waiting for the next weird thing I would say or do.
Not every one of my students viewed me as strange. The kids who grew up in larger northern cities but ended up in Jackson because of family ties often sought me out to talk about how much they disliked Jackson, sensing a kinship in us city folk. I appreciated this chance to commiserate every time. What I didn’t appreciate were the half-dozen times that white people I interacted with-friends of friends, taxi drivers, waiters, etc.-made thinly veiled racist comments to me about black people. They sensed a racially based kinship that most certainly was not there.
It’s hard to explain what it was like to be a teacher. Every single day, I had incredibly fun moments. At a certain point early my first semester, I gave up on writing down all the hilarious quotes I heard each and every day. Yet almost as reliably, I experienced something infuriating. A kid would demonstrate that they saw no relation between their current failure to behave or do their work and the likelihood of their not going to college or having a middle- or upper-class career. Kids who I failed because they never showed up to class told me that when they were lawyers they would sue me, without any recognition of the unlikelihood of that ever happening.
On the other hand, when the students were perfect, the administration would find a way to trample over teachers’ instructional time. For example, within a ten-day period in late March and early April, there were three strong examples of administrative incompetence. All of these were less than four weeks before the state tests and the two middle-of-the-day assemblies were previously unannounced to teachers. First, there was the pre-prom assembly, where a former coach of “all the best models in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut” named “Mr. Johnny” brought up student models to demonstrate the appropriate way to walk while at prom. He then advertised extensively for a prom dress store. Second, there was the day the network was down, and the office didn’t have printed schedules of any of the 1,300 enrolled students. So the fifty times that parents showed up to get their kids out of school, the intercom buzzed the entire school with only one or two names. Third was the 9th and 10th grade boy’s assembly, where several former professional athletes and coaches gave an hour-long “come to Jesus” talk to the children, making myself and the couple of non-religious kids I knew in the audience very uncomfortable. With this serving as an example of what can happen unannounced on any given day, I often find myself asking, “With an administration like this, why bother planning ahead?”
As I write this, I am making plans to leave Mississippi and move back to New York. And I am looking for opportunities in public service that don’t involve me running a classroom. As my departure nears, I increasingly feel guilty about both these facts. I love almost all of my students. There’s something about taking care of someone, even when he or she will act like a goofball if you give them the slightest opening, that makes it impossible to not care. I worry that too many of my kids aren’t going to graduate, or aren’t going to apply to the right colleges, or are going to get into trouble because I won’t be there to help them. And I wonder if I actually would be able to avert some of these tragedies if I decided to stay.
I’m also a bit stricken with guilt over the fact that I took a girls’ soccer team that lacked any discipline or structure and helped turn them into the best team in Jackson Public Schools. The day I told my soccer girls that I wasn’t coming back was not an easy one, and while they still talk to me every chance they get and are currently begging me to organize spring tryouts before I leave, most of them have expressed their extreme disappointment with me for not staying.
Leaving is what I need to do for my own future. My family and friends are back in New York, and also, well, it is New York. But Mississippi has affected me in ways I can’t really articulate. Mississippi forced me to grow up. Moving somewhere without friends, starting a job that is incredibly stressful and demanding, and living in a place as culturally distant from New York as Jackson was almost too much to handle for 21-year-old-me. Yet somewhere along the line, I became accustomed to my life here. While I’ve only aged two years, I feel like I’ve had a decade’s worth of experience. Mississippi hasn’t only distorted my accent-as my father is all too quick to point out-but has transformed who I am as a person. I will never be able to look at the different cultural landscapes back home, whether the liberal Jewish Upper West Side or Dominican-flavored Washington Heights, without comparing them to the black and white southern cultures I’ve been surrounded by for the past two years. More importantly, I wonder when it will no longer be instinctive for me to address every woman I talk to as “ma’am.”
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