Do I Like My Students ?

After a year of substitute teaching, I have had to look deeply into myself and ask the question "Do I like my students ?"

I am going to try to be as honest as possible in answering this.

When I began substitute teaching, I had a particular vision in my mind of what teaching should be like. This vision had been formed by my having attended an elite private school many years ago, having attended an Ivy-League College, having been to graduate school at one of the more prestigious campuses of the University of California, and also having taught a course at a community college.

I am Caucasian. I live in a very Black area. For decades, most of my friends have been Black. For a long time, due to the nature of my work (journalism, photography) I knew very few whites other than my wife.

In America, race is always buried somewhere in any interaction. That is simply the peculiar nature of our society. I must tell you that an acquaintance of mine who taught at a junior college, who is a militant Black, and who got into teaching at junior college years ago at the urging of the Black Panthers, once told me at her home that my wife and I were the only whites she had ever invited to her home and that we were the only whites who didn't treat her as though somehow she was "different."

And I must tell you that for years I worked as a volunteer with the county probation department, always with African-American parolees who had gotten out of prison and who needed help (jobs, a place to stay, etc.) as they reentered society. And I also worked for about six months at a county juvenile hall until I realized that the people at the hall didn't care anything about actually helping the kids, but were simply warehousing them until they were released or sent to California Youth Authority.

That brings me to the answer to the question I raised at the beginning of this blog entry, "Do I like my students ?"

As I teach, I find a student here and a student there who has a respectful attitude and who genuinely wants to accomplish something in school. I like this kind of student very much. In this situation, race matters very little to me, though I also have to admit that because I know more about African-American culture and the things African-Americans have to endure in America, I tend to like the African-American students more than the others.

The kind of student who is lazy, who not care about learning, and who just wants to listen to his or her iPod all day I do not like. This kind of student I simply tolerate.

That brings is to the question about how much responsibility an individual should bear when they have only been subejcted to one kind of life and one set of values and know almost nothing about others. I'll have lots more to say about that as this blog progresses.

I am off this afternoon to a hearing at juvenile hall concerning sentencing of one of the students I picked out during the school year as being especially worthwhile. The young man is 16. He got involved with the wrong friends, drove a car, got scared by the police, and crashed the car into two others in a vain effort to escape. I will find out more about his situation and let you know in another blog. But his mother called last night, asking for a letter to give to the judge.

It seems that the young man's sentence can go one of two ways. Either he can be sentenced to prison, which in this case would be the California Youth Authority, well-known as being a hotbed of corruption, sexual abuse and horror; or he can be sentrenced to probation, strict supervision, and wearing an ankle-bracelet so his whereabouts is always known. If he receives the probation sentence, he will return to school. I have offered to ride herd on his schoolwork once or twice a week in the school library after the end of the day.