5 posts tagged “mississippi teacher corps”

So teaching at Humphreys County Junior High School and High School have both gone pretty well these first few days. Like most first-year teachers fresh from college, I was nervous going in but was not nearly as nervous as I thought I would have been. A number of things contributed to this including my previous training in the Mission Hill Summer Program in Boston and my summer teaching with Teacher Corps in June and July. I'm no stranger to the classroom, "tough" kids, or academic rigor so things have been fine on that front.

I've been surprised by how difficult it actually has been to remember kids' names though. Of course certain kids get their name remembered ASAP because I have to continuously remind them to stay on task or continuously call on them to stop them from talking/drifting off. However, I still don't know the overwhelming majority of my kids' names. Of course, this morning is starting off only the third day of school and I've only seen two of my classes once (2nd and 3rd period 8th grade history) but in time those things should improve. Some people would say that you shouldn't start doing anything serious until you know all your kids names but will over 120 of them and lots of material to cover that's far easier said than done.

I think my best moment so far came when I was going to Super Value yesterday with Karl, my fellow first year and current housing savior (yeah...still not secure). I was a little nervous about going out and about Belzoni now since school has commenced and a lot more residents, especially kids, know me. As I was walking from the parking lot to the store with Karl and talking about this, from my right I hear a young female voice yell, "Hey, Mr. Amutah!" I turned and saw one of the 8th graders in my homeroom/first period class with her mother waving to me. I was stunned, excited, awkward, and happy all at the same time. This is what I sought: community. The type where teachers aren't geographically detached from their students and they act as an active and visible member (dare I say role model?) for students. I think this is what I've found.

This week I watched the video of a lesson that I taught last week about the various fronts and battles of World War II in addition to the domestic issues facing the United States during this time, especially with regards to women, Blacks, and Japanese-Americans. I think that overall the lesson was an effective one. It was strange noticing that some of my students were not paying attention as often as I had thought. I think that I like this whole camera in the back of the classroom thing though. Maybe I'll do it at various points during the school year to make sure that I stay on top of my students and their engagement. I also noticed idiosyncrasies about myself that were sort of strange. I tend to stand on one side of the classroom and I do rely too much on my notes. I should learn to rely more on the schedule on the board to remember where I'm at rather than going back to my typed lesson plan on my clipboard, I feel. Maybe it'll be different if I had a podium where I could bother squarely face the students AND keep my typed lesson plan in front of me, but I tangent....

Some things that I noticed that I did well include the fact that I interacted well with students (joking and whatnot) but I still maintained my respect level with them. This is something I've been told by numerous observers. The students seem to like and respect me. I'm happy about that. Being a big, Black, unshaven male doesn't hurt (see picture). Having a natural expression that is a pseudo-scowl doesn't hurt either (see picture). I'm going to try to keep this balance going during the school year so the kids feel like I'm someone that they like and enjoy being around but don't get it confused to think that I'm a "peer." I have issues with that statement because I'd rather my class be non-dictatorial (teacher in charge, dispensing knowledge...students obey and have no say in what's being taught, how it's being presented, etc.) but that's another story. I also saw that I had good transitions between the various parts of my lesson plan. It wasn't jerky and didn't seem to come off as unpolished/unrehearsed. I'll take note of that.

In terms of stuff to improve on, I wish I had made the lesson more imaginative. My lesson involved a fair amount of reading straight out of the book and answering questions from there. I think I could have put more into the lesson but it was the third of three that I taught that day and I guess when I was lesson planning I just ran out of creative juice. A poor excuse, I know, and my students deserve more so I'll try to deliver more. I should really stop lesson planning just the day before. It'll be a different story in July but still. Bad habit. Creativity abates with the more lessons one plans in succession, I feel. Another thing I should work on is my speed of talking. Ben told me most first-years do this. Chiazotam, my wonderful significant other, told me this as well. I talk way too fast not only in conversation but when I'm teaching. I need to consciously work on this because students aren't going to be engaged in something they can't hear or understand. After watching myself do this for nearly 50 minutes, I can confidently say: "point taken."

After reading through Reluctant Disciplinarian by Gary Rubenstein, I have come to realize that disciplining students is difficult for particular teachers for myriad different reasons. However, this may be largely contingent upon the teacher's own educational background. Rubenstein, like many TFA and probably MTC participants, did not attend a public school like the one he was placed in. I feel like this is one of the biggest issues with both of these elite post-grad educational programs that recruit the "best and brightest." Many of these programs' participants went to relatively good schools. I'm not saying Exeter and Harvard-Westlake and Stuyvesant but schools where there weren't necessarily large classroom management issues and certainly not schools where there were chronic, immense disciplinary problems and academic underachievement. Therefore, part of the problem is that participants in these programs are put into immensely different environments than the ones they come from and, of course, they get frazzled as any fish out of water does. The issue is how to stay hyrdated as you're that fish out of water (?).

Certain things that Rubenstein advises such as "don't yell at students" or "suppress your reflex to react immediately to every little thing" seem intuitive to me. I can recall teachers who resorted to these tactics but only after my peers and I got on their last nerves. It is much more effective to be the sort of strong, silent type than to be constantly in your students faces laying down the law. By being strong and silent, I feel that you can hit two of the paramount non-academic goals of most teachers: to be respected AND liked. I hope to be both but I also don't want to have classroom management issues in my class so the most learning, critical thinking, and personal exploration as possible can occur. Recalling my experiences with teachers who were the kind of person you rarely saw mad but you knew if they ever were made mad you would not want to be anywhere near them I see what I strive to be. In these sorts of classes, respect (and a bit fear, perhaps, mixed in) guides student behavior. Students don't want to misbehave or underperform for a teacher that they respect and like.

Something I really didn't agree with that Rubenstein harped on was his fifth chapter entitled "Being a Real Teacher." I didn't agree with various statements he made ESPECIALLY "Real teachers dress the part" and "Real teachers use textbooks." I think that an effective teacher can be butt naked and impart knowledge while stimulating critical thought. I also think that there are benefits to "dressing down" at school including blurring the student/teacher line (shoutout to Freire) and letting the students know that you're a real person as well--not some automaton of the district there to teach and assess, assess and teach under the impersonal, dehumanizing "banking" concept of education. I also find it highly problematic that we feel that the way someone dresses is dictated by anything besides their image aspirations, wants with regards to personal comfort, income, and socialization (from advertising, popular culture, or otherwise). As far as teaching from textbooks, I'd rather not. More interesting stuff like this and this and this should ideally be in my classroom and only used as supplements to more audiovisual educational exercises and experiential learning activities which I feel that students would gain more from and be more engaged in. Comparatively, textbooks are wack. Admittedly, it's easier since I'm teaching history but innovative means of instruction are available all over the place.

For my assignment in Professor Monroe's EDSE 500 class I decided to read Conscientizacao: The Awakening of Critical Consciousness in Educational Forums by a second year in the program, Dan Doyle. In his focus paper, Doyle discusses educational philosophy as seen through the eyes of three of the most influential theoretical proponents of education for radical social change in the past century--Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, and Saul Alinsky. Through my work with the Phillips Brooks House Association during college and training that I underwent there in community organizing, I am familiar with Freire and Alinsky and have at least heard of Horton and his Highlander educational facility. PBHA truly did live up to its nickname, "the best course at Harvard," for teaching me about these theorists and activists who have been so important to radical educational philosophy and praxis; I hope to follow in their immense footsteps.

In this focus paper, Doyle begins by discussing how Freire, Horton, and Alinsky dedicated their lives to provoke original thought and critical observation in students and citizens that they encountered. The drive towards "personal and social liberation" was something shared by these three individuals who worked towards their goals in dramatically different settings in the favelas of Brazil, urban slums of Chicago, and rural towns of Tennessee. As an ardent supporter of participatory economic systems, education that trains citizens to become actively involved in social justice movements, and the like I appreciated Doyle's writing. It's good to hear that I'm not the only person in the program who seems to appreciate the work of these authors and actively seeks to re-create a learning environment similar to the ones these figures fostered in their day. The Mississippi Teacher Corps deals with one of the most politically, socially, and economically marginalized populations in the country and I feel like we should offer the students we teach much more than just classroom instruction under the "banking" system of education. We need to help facilitate transformation in our students' minds and their material conditions so that our program is no longer necessary in as few years as possible if the purported democracy of the U.S. government is made into a reality.

The strange thing about all of this is that, as far "left" as my political views are, I understand the rationale of those on the "right" who seek to perpetuate the status quo and thus maintain poverty and stagnated educational environments in places like the Mississippi Delta and Jackson. Don't get me wrong--I don't agree with it and I feel that it is racist and classist among many other things (patriarchal, for instance) but I understand the vested class interest among some in not providing students with the intellectual and practical tools necessary to work towards radical social change. I own a poster that has a picture of W.E.B. Du Bois and a quote from him to the effect of educating the Negro in the South has always been a dangerous enterprise due to the yearning for change to one's predicament that it most likely will foster (when executed correctly). This is the reason why educating slaves was outlawed from Texas to Mississippi to Maryland. A knowledgeable and conscious working class is a working class that seeks social transformation--not one that can be dominated on the farm or in the factories, cubicles, or Sonic's of the U.S. today. For these reasons I ask myself why would the "powers that be" seek to educate social groups that have been dominated through various means for hundreds of years and thus competitively challenge their own sons and daughters not only in the workforce but in the very economic and social relations that distinguish the ignorant from learned, White from Black, wealthy and middle-class from working class?

They don't. That's why I feel like these schools we're going to teach at are doing exactly what they're supposed to for the ruling class--maintain the status quo. Of course at every school there are outliers but, by and large, it is anticipated and expected that most of the students we teach will not go to a four-year college, will not live in material/economic conditions dramatically different from their parents, and will DEFINITELY not become social justice crusaders actively engaged in liberatory fights to revolutionize society and make it more equitable for all economically, socially, and politically. To be honest, I could care less about the first option as I feel as though going to college and becoming your run-of-the-mill, middle-class, nine-to-fiver should NOT be the purpose of an education. There is far too much suffering, oppression, and marginalization along the lines of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, etc. for people to simply enter their jobs/careers and feel as though as long as they vote Democrat and are open-minded they are doing their part to change the world for the better. Not at all. Freire, Horton, and Alinsky were operating in different times but those times were not all too different from today and the need for liberatory education and critical reflection that leads to radical action for social change is just as real today as it has ever been.

The issue is I do not feel that public schools will accomplish this goal. As apparatuses of the state, as my roommate Robert Bland enjoys reminding me, these schools do exist to reproduce class--not to liberate minds. It's always interesting to me that Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia is remembered for many things but not for his exhortation of future generations to have a revolution every 20 or so years so that laws and institutions can be radically changed periodically and citizens who are living under a system that they themselves had no say in choosing can live in their own society--not one that has been handed down to them through successively out-of-touch generations. Clearly, the U.S. has not had a political revolution since 1776. What a drought. I feel that, collectively, people need to band together and work towards dramatic social change as it is in their interests. As Freire and others have said, both oppressor and the oppressed are made human through the pursuit and attainment of justice in interpersonal and institutional relationships. I understand that there are myriad inhibitors to the working class developing class consciousness and, eventually, acting on that class consciousness but we must realize that we are the masses. The working class and middle class that work in various sectors of the U.S. economy maintaining the position of the elite are being exploited. Yeah, we in MTC may have nice apartments, cars with gas, and full stomachs but we must realize that we are small parts of a much larger structure that is NOT invested in the education of those we have devoted our lives to (at least for the next two years, though hopefully much, much longer thereafter). As stated above, why should the U.S. government radically change that structure when it has made the U.S. the richest, most dominant country in the world?

I could go on for months about why this system needs to be changed but suffice it to say that Doyle has said it much more concisely than I ever could. On page 5 of his focus paper he writes, "Not only is true democracy strengthened by education and learning, it is then able to meet the demands of this continued re-evaluation and constant change." Sadly, our educational system and the greater social system in the U.S. is not like the Mississippi Teacher Corps, constantly seeking improvement and taking feedback from its members seriously with an eye towards perpetual reform and innovation. As products of MTC, we young, idealistic (to some degree) beginning educators must be the force that pushes for change. More so than teaching social studies, I want to be in public education to have access to the hundreds of minds that will come into my classroom that are molds of clay to be formed. I don't want to be dominant in this formation, however, and I am sure that my students will change me as well so we have some sort of shared educational experience going on. Hopefully, however, I can instill in my students the belief that another world is possible and they can be active participants in the creation of this new world if they so choose. Their options are much broader than working for "X" corporation and just getting by in life or subsisting off of government programs. Through liberatory education, critical thinking, countless hours of organizing, and coordinated action, social and economic justice is an attainable goal for all.

This was written journal style my first night in Oxford, this past Monday (June 4). Just wanted to offer some background into what's brought me here:

As I sit in my new apartment at the University of Mississippi, I find time to reflect on what has brought me to this remote locale in Oxford, Mississippi to begin what may be the most difficult experience of my life three days before my graduation from Harvard University.

At some point in my upbringing I knew I wanted to be a teacher. I think I was first bit by the teaching bug when I was nine or ten years-old and a student at Patton Joseph Hill Elementary School in Trenton, New Jersey locally known simply as “P.J. Hill.” It was here at a school where bullet holes pierced what should have been safe windows and pre-teen students fought administrators for the lucrative bounty of one dollar that I realized that I would prefer a career in teaching to any other. This was a fleeting thought, however, and between elementary school and college I went through a broad range of careers. Like many inner-city youth, I soon wanted to be a professional basketball player. From that I went on to focusing on becoming a rapper. Through my interest in rap and the music business I developed an interest in entertainment law, largely because around the age of 16 I learned that the top entertainment lawyers in the U.S. made $800 an hour—which would come out to $40,000 a week for a fifty-hour work week. My career was set. I went to Harvard with this career focus in mind.

While at Harvard, I took a few steps towards entering the music business after graduation from college. I went through the “comp”[1] for a spot on the staff of our campus radio station, WHRB, and by the second semester of my sophomore year I was a member of the radio station’s studio engineering department as well as its Black Urban Contemporary (BUC) department spinning rap, dancehall, and R&B from 3-5 a.m. Sunday mornings. I had established contacts in the rap publication industry through my girlfriend and hoped to work during the summer after freshman year for a record company or rap publication in New York City.[2] I also joined up with the nascent student-run record label at Harvard, Veritas Records, named after our Latin motto ve ri tas meaning "truth." I thought that I was firmly on my way to doing everything I needed to do to have a successful career in the music business and I was not altogether wrong.

Due to what was then a side interest in civil rights issues and Black history, I applied for a spot on an Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trip to when I was a freshman. I had never been to the “Deep South” and was excited when I was accepted as one of eight students to go. We had two great chaperones on the trip. One was Gene Corbin, the Executive Director of the Phillips Brooks House Association, a student-run social service and social action organization at Harvard with nearly 80 programs and thousands of student volunteers. Gene used to run a non-profit in Jackson, that we volunteered at while we were in Jackson that week. The other was Claudia Highbaugh, the Chaplain of the Harvard Divinity School who had family from Jackson and a sublime understanding of civil rights history and its relationship to churches; not to mention a much-needed maternal and supportive nature. While we were in Mississippi we did everything from meet Constance Slaughter-Harvey, the first Black woman admitted to the University of Mississippi’s Law School, to visit Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the infamous 1964 kidnappings and murders of three civil rights workers historically referred to collectively by their last name--Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Our conversations with various civil rights leaders and visits to various civil rights landmarks left an indelible mark on me.

On one such occasion and trip, we met with Hollis Watkins who was an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. On the wall of Mr. Waktins’ office were two posters that showed a map of Mississippi by county. One poster showed each county in Mississippi’s racial makeup. The other poster showed how much funding for public education each county in received. The stark racial disparities were shocking. The counties that were more heavily Black invariably received less funding than the counties that were mostly White. It was not until then that I realized that public education and its problems were not only a New Jersey issue between Abbott Districts[3] and more affluent suburban ones—it was a national and even international issue that kept particular races and classes in subjugated states. This revelation’s impact on me cannot be overstated. The education bug once again sunk its teeth into me and this time it was there to stay. I came back to Harvard, changed my concentration (major) from English and American Literature and Languages to African and African American Studies and Government, changed my summer plans from gaining a job in the music industry to working with an educational and recreational PBHA summer program in inner-city Boston, and changed my career focus from entertainment law to urban public education.

Thus, this is an abbreviated breakdown of why I am here now. This is why I am avoiding the immense paychecks and signing bonuses of many of my peers and friends at Harvard. This is why I am missing the last three days of my college career including my class of 2007 photo, an award ceremony and banquet for my academic department, and a Class Day speech by former U.S. President Bill Clinton. This is why I got chills today when I walked into Holly Springs High School in Holly Springs, Mississippi—the site of the Mississippi Teacher Corps’ summer school where I will get my teaching practice before becoming a teacher in Jackson’s public school system in early August. I have come to Mississippi to address the intellectual, emotional, and—if necessary—material needs of people that I care about and love deeply though I have never met. Human beings that, due to their life’s circumstances, are growing up in social and economic situations I feel mirror my own. I am in Mississippi to bring positive and radical social change to the world. But first, I have to put up my shower curtains….