Attitude Adjustment

“Americana,” the woman said in a stage whisper after she entered the classroom and saw me standing at the front table. As she walked toward a seat at the back of the lab, others already seated nodded and smiled at her, whether to acknowledge her presence or to show they shared her dismay, I couldn’t tell.

Here we go again, was all I was thinking. The class roster had only Hispanic surnames on it and I knew from the start that this particular group of students had been traveling together through their academic program for quite some time. They had taken all of their course work with bilingual teachers prior to being assigned to me, the dreaded English teacher. In order to complete their two-year diploma, they had to pass six credits of college English. And to their horror, the pre-college class to prepare them was to be taught in English by an instructor who knew very little Spanish.

“Yes,” I said to the group. “’Americana’ is certainly me.” A nervous giggling rippled through the room at my pronouncement. They knew I‘d heard the comment their classmate shot in my direction but they did not expect me to address it.

And there had been times early in my teaching career when I would not have been so bold as to point out differences between me and my students. I would have politely pretended not to hear the comments. I would have ignored the distrust I saw in the eyes looking back at my Caucasian self, the eyes that assumed they knew all about me, and what they understood about me was not what they wanted or liked, but was what they were used to. Another white woman teacher.

“I am to be your teacher for this reading and writing course because I do not speak Spanish. When the Dean first asked me to take this class and work with day care professionals like you, I thought she was nuts. Loca.” (I twirled my index finger in a circle at the side of my head in the universal gesture for crazy.) “But she said I would be good for you, so here I am.” The Dean was an Hispanic woman herself and had taught a couple of courses to this cohort group of Early Childhood Program students. They knew and trusted her. I hoped it gave me some credibility.

I went on, “You will have to communicate with me in whatever English you know, and I will do my best to help you improve your speaking and writing, wherever you are starting from.”

The students looked at each other with mixtures of chagrin and resignation. One brave woman said, “But teacher, you will know that some of us do not espeak the English very good.”

“Of course you don’t,“ I answered. “That’s why you’re in this class.  I’ll teach you some English and you teach me some Spanish. Wait until you hear how awful I am at rolling my rs.” This elicited a few smiles, and I saw some of the students relax their postures a bit.

At this start of a new semester at the urban two-year college where I teach, I was on familiar ground. This classroom full of students was my fifth group of Early Childhood Program students.  These groups consisted primarily of child daycare employees, all women, most of whom had families, worked full-time days and attended school in the evening. With each new group, communication was awkward and sometimes frustrating at first, but as we got to know each other and function as a team, what was at first difficult and embarrassing became less difficult and often hilarious.

Familiarity breeds comfort and I knew we were going to be okay when students began to risk asking questions. One day, a student wanted to know what bling was, and when I asked for someone in the room to explain the term to the questioner, no one could.  I was surprised that no one had ever heard the word and they were equally surprised when I told them it meant lots of expensive, shiny jewelry.  I don’t think they fully believed my definition until I brought in an article from a women’s magazine that had an article titled something like “What Bling You’ll Be Wearing This Summer.” The article was accompanied by pages of glittering gold chains and chunky brass bracelets. Another time I was asked to explain mohawk. Trying to come up with a frame of reference, at first all I could think of was the movie Last of the Mohicans, but I didn’t think that would work as background knowledge for this group. So I asked, “When did you hear or see this word?”

“My son, he wants one. But I don’t know what is this so I say ‘no,’” Paola said, tinges of sadness and curiosity in her voice.

“It’s a hairstyle. I think what he’s asking you is if he can get his hair cut in the style called ‘mohawk,’” I answered, and what followed was my pathetic attempt at trying to describe what it looks like, which included a (politically incorrect, I am certain) referral  to American Indians in cowboy movies. Now this was an image they could conjure, and several women uttered “Ah!” in sudden recognition and they rubbed their hands front to back in the center of their heads, as if smoothing the narrow swath of hair down the middle of a shaved scalp.

Had they been able to see me, the Native Americans I worked with several years prior would have nodded knowingly at my antics. I used to be a counselor for a group of pre-college students from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. From these students I learned something about hair: hair is sacred to the person on whose head it grows. I learned this by being at the receiving end of a very, very angry look thrown at me by one young man whose braid I playfully yanked one afternoon. We had been on a field trip to a local gym and I wanted him to know that it was time to stop shooting pool and return to the bus for the ride back to school. The youth’s flash of anger settled quickly into a mere dark cloud over his features after he whirled around and saw that it was me, his teacher, performing this forbidden act. A much more informed colleague told me later that it was only the respect the student had for me that kept me from getting my nose punched, or worse. My student recognized ignorance when he saw it, and never indicated to me that day or any other that I had violated his person. He forgave me, but it took me quite a while to forgive myself. Ignorance is humiliating.

I often wondered throughout my first few semesters at the college why I had not been better prepared to identify and deal with the barriers that exist between teacher and student because of culture and race. Certainly my education included lectures on cultural sensitivity and discussions about the need for inclusive curriculum. Diversity as a topic in my own college course work was a subject with which I was quite familiar, but the familiarity was of an intellectual nature. As a teacher in a technical college in a big city which has more than its share of racial tensions, theory met reality in some very uncomfortable encounters. It was definitely learn by doing, hands-on, in the trenches, by-the-seat-of-my-pants kinds of learning. I realize now that what I have experienced over the course of over twenty years of teaching adults could not have been taught to me out of a textbook.

How, for example, could I have anticipated the arrival of Peaches, a dark-skinned woman of thirty-something who literally bounced into my classroom one weekday wearing a very large boom box on her shoulder, denim shorts and a holey crop-top? Her large, gold, loopy earrings swayed against her smooth neck and her whole persona screamed “bad attitude” as she strutted to the end of the second row of desks and sat down. The other African-American women in the class exchanged knowing looks, raising their eyebrows to each other and then narrowing their eyes when they looked at her. Peaches played it off as if she was oblivious to their reaction to her outrageous entrance.  I played it the same way by continuing my lesson with a nod in her direction to acknowledge her presence. Everyone was welcome in my classroom, my attitude said. At least that’s what I hoped my actions showed.

It took several subsequent classes for the other students to take Peaches and her long brown legs and inappropriate clothing in their stride. But when they and I discovered she was an academically bright woman, the charged cloud that Peaches created and brought with her everywhere, gradually lessened. She was tolerated and, when she passed first one GED exam and then another quick on its heels, she was admired. Many students who’d yet to take their first exam began to ask her about the tests. Were they hard? What sorts of questions were asked? And Peaches obliged them with answers and opened up with some personal history. She’d come to us fresh out of jail and drug rehab, and she confidently revealed her plan to go on to study at the university to become a lawyer and then a judge. There was stunned silence in the room for a moment, and then one of her classmates quietly said, “Well, girl, good for you,” and that was the day Peaches became a member of the class.

It was during this year of teaching GED at a downtown campus that I also met Pedro, who, at first glance, looked like someone I’d cross the street to avoid if I saw him walking toward me. He was a bandana-wearing Hispanic young man in his early twenties, and one of the few men in the class. Like Peaches, he was very bright and like her, he told me he was recently released from incarceration. (Our school was located directly across the street from the county courthouse and jail!) Pedro was lean, muscular and carried himself in a way that showed he felt easy in his own skin. Handsome despite a knife scar across one cheek, he attracted attention in his tight t-shirt and jeans. It didn’t take long to learn there was a gentle man with an aptitude for literature and science residing under that powerful, scary appearance. Pedro proved to be a magnetic personality in the classroom. People were drawn to his quiet kindness, evident when he addressed me or spoke with his fellow classmates. His was a soft voice that always carried a tone of respect. He naturally gravitated toward the other two men in the room, and one of them, a laid-off white man in his fifties named Tom, became one of his allies in the fight to conquer the GED math exam. The two men would probably never have met except on the level playing field offered by an academic setting.

And what I have discovered is that leveling the playing field is essential to teaching and learning in the adult basic education classroom. Semester after semester as I enter a classroom on the first day of school, I make it a point to give a substantial piece of my personal history to those people who have spent their money and, more importantly, given over their time to a stranger who doesn’t look like anyone in their family or anyone in their neighborhood. If I am an unknown quantity, students’ anxieties toward education are not. I’ve come to see my first task on these opening days to be one of removing the top couple of rows of bricks in the wall that has been erected between teachers and students.

The reasons for the wall are myriad, but this wall stands primarily by virtue of the imbalances of power. For many adults who have returned to an educational institution, often after an absence of years, the hope of success is equal to the fear of failure. As the teacher, I assess, evaluate, diagnose, assign. But most importantly, I see my role as a partner and my relationship with each student as a partnership. True partnership involves equality, and this idea of having a teacher who comes to partner rather than to bestow is a concept that is foreign to many adults returning to school. As adult basic ed teachers will attest, mature people can easily slip into elementary school behaviors when they set themselves into desks in a room with a chalkboard. (“Do you give a lot of homework?” “Will we ever get out early?” “Are you an easy or a hard instructor?”)

So, to establish balance, to level the playing field, I start to talk, grown-up to grown-up. Like my students, I have experienced hardships in my life, and some of these I share. They are surprised to learn that I worked my way through college, that it took me many years to complete my degrees and that I continued to go to school even after I married, had children, divorced and lost my job. They listen when I tell them that along the way I’ve lost a house to bankruptcy and a parent and sibling to cancer. I don’t embellish; there is no need. As I list some of the facts of my life, the professionally dressed and academically accomplished woman they saw–but didn’t really see–when they entered the room, starts to disappear. By the time I am finished introducing myself, they know I am a grandmother, quilter, wife, gardener, writer, and seasoned teacher. In other words, a real person with whom it may be possible to form a relationship. By example, I issue an invitation to the table, around which the height of the chairs is equal.

So, it was a new semester and I was labeled “Americana.” I moved out from behind the front table to stand directly before the first row of seated students. I looked out at this new group of beautiful faces: Dominicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Columbians, Mexicans. I knew that there were more similarities between us than any of us could have guessed. I knew this, but these women didn’t know it yet. I began to talk