I took a break today (shocking I know!) and watched the movie "Freedom Writers" with Hilary Swank. It's a teaching movie I've been avoiding for several years now because I worried that it would portray a one-side-of-hopeful perspective. And in a lot of ways it did. But it didn't just have wins, it had losses. And those moments of failure are what made it real. They're also what made me stop the movie several times just to process what I'm getting myself into.
When you work in the lowest income urban public schools you expect the violence and drugs, homelessness and gangs, rape culture, home violence, home abuse and neglection. But I think it's easy to forget how all of that generates fear in every. single. person. in that classroom. It's a culture of war and fear that starts at birth for many and is not contained to schools and is not contained to one race or class or geography. It's wide spread and in many ways ubiquitous in our public school system.
Some of the best teachers, in reality not just in their film portrayals, are those who make their goal as a teacher to break this culture for their students. Not just in the classroom, but as a pattern and a life choice that their students make to no longer participate actively or passively in the war they are living. And to fight against it with peace. As a teacher the freedom to run your classroom that is required to facilitate this type of growth is rarely given. You have to bend some rules, make up new lesson plans and ideas, try things that are not in anyway part of the sanctioned curriculum. I think "Freedom Writers" made a strong portrayal for the resistance you can meet here as a teacher. Swank's character had to fight constantly for control of her classroom with other teachers, school administrators, district administrators and the school board. This resistance is real in many ways for the reasons the film laid out: taking on this goal and accomplishing it means taking risks and actions that are not replicable with any student body, and therefore don't fit the idea of a national education system.
The resistance is rooted in this concept of the greatest good for the greatest number over the greatest amount of time (which, yes is a sustainability concept from Gifford Pinchot, but I'm an Environmental Science major, what do you want from me?). Utilitarianism. Wherein you write off some students so that the majority of students can succeed. You write off some students? You give up on them as individuals? As human beings? As organisms? If even once in my life I had been on the receiving end of that apathy I would have broken completely in two. And that's what a centralized education system tells us to do. Write the curriculum that will teach the greatest number and ignore the 5% that don't understand because they're purely kinesthetic learners and you used verbal and written language to explain the concept.
How can we be this nation, and support a concept like that for our children? How can we be any nation, any identity, any collection of people and passively support a system that doesn't give teachers the freedom to run their own classrooms? But then how can we know that teachers are using their autonomy "correctly"? And what is "correctly"? Do you define it? Do I? Do we? That really was the aspect of the film that I felt was best executed. The Department Head was a well intentioned woman with a modern and well accepted pedagogy standing in the way of something that I feel is morally correct. If I was apathetic to the thing she opposed would it be okay? If I was against the thing she opposed (agreed with her) would it be heroic? And who among us gets to decide the morality of a pedagogy or goal a teacher might hold?
And this is why I'm terrified and positively anxious to be a teacher. I love these questions and the policy debate surrounding them. I love being in the classroom with these students trying to undertake these goals. I know there will be so many obstacles in my way, more than I can ever imagine. But it's exciting to see that kind of path and purpose laid out before you. So scared or not, I think I'm ready.
Too bad (not even) that I have a year in Germany between now and when I start my grad school!
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