When I decided to "become a teacher"

I feel like the decision to "become a teacher" should be this big fight against society's values. Then I look at my decision to go into teaching, and it fails in comparison to the epic internal battles and huge convincing arguments with family and loved ones that I hear others speak of. My journey has not been quite as thrilling.

In fact, I went through undergrad with a million and one different careers that I was interested in. Every week I would come to a brilliant discovery of a new career that was just SO perfect. I'd throw myself into it heart and soul until the next brilliant discovery occurred. Come spring of my last year, I decided money was nice but I needed just enough to maintain my student lifestyle, something fun, not corporate or boring. Somehow, that brought me back to teaching-- a career I had long been interested in and often told I'd be good at. I know, I know... it's not easy by any means and I will have to work my butt off to be a good teacher. And, I still hold on to the idealistic thought of summer vacation. I am determined to put in an 85 hr week in June to have one month off. It will happen.

But the epic fights to convince my family that teaching was in fact a career never happened. My family, loved ones, college classmates and even high school dropout friends all knew I would be a teacher before I had even realized it myself (it was kind of like one of those "coming out of the closet" announcements that is wayy too obvious to be shocking). I'm not going to say that everyone is fully supporting me-- most of my friends could care less what I was doing, as long as I was happy doing it. My parents are thrilled that I am off my "I want to be a flight attendant" kick and that I will have a respectable career. I feel like the decision to "become a teacher" was so much more intense for others. Did I do something wrong?

Okay, now on to the readings.
The Delpit article really stuck out in my mind. She is one of those writers that I simply cannot agree with on many points, yet completely agree with on other points. I fundamentaly dislike the way Delpit finds a way to explain everything as a race issue. On a personal level, I believe that people try to "pull the race card" more often then appropriate. When Delpit is telling the story of the 3 year old black boy with "a little crush on a white girl" I would not see the pre-school teacher's comment about lust in any way realtional to race. It may very well be an inadequate description for a 3 year old, but does the fact that he is black really have anything to do with it? Her assumptions of a "black college professor as just a maid in an exlusive high rise" is also a stretch. I think class in this case would play an obvious role in any preliminary judgement. Not to mention when I first read "black college professor" I immediately thought "male college professor"-- the maid comment threw me off enough to require a re-read.

On the other hand, Delpit's discussion of child story-telling was incredibly fascinating. It is so interesting that children from different cultural backgrounds would have such different story-telling styles-- and even more interesting that the perticular style is favored by like cultures even when narrated by one person, without dilect.

And on a completly different note, isn't entirely ironic that the young Irish American teacher treated her new black student as so alien? Is she blind to her own history? Maybe it's idealistic of me, but it seems she would have more power and intent to give those students from "the projects" the best shot at education that she could offer.


Reply to last week's blog:
"Religious differences" in Northern Ireland is very much a psuedoname for race/class struggle. The tricky part is that both races are white and neither class is entirely dominant.

In simpliest terms possible, and I mean super lamen terms: Ireland was a land of Celtic/Catholic villages, farmers for the most part (ie your stereotypical Ireland). The British Crown converted to Protestantism and sent colonies of "proper Protestants" to Ireland to "teach them how to be more British" (ie less barbaric).

So, Catholics = Native Americans,
Protestants = John Smith.

Eventually the two grew into equal size populations, but the Protestants being more proper British citizens had political power. Thus the power struggle.

That's the history, ironically the history everyone in Northern Ireland is trying to forget. Education is tricky becuase the history itself is SO entirely different depending on the culture you hear it from. Catholics have a different truth than Protestants. It's hard for a teacher, obviously trained in one of these cultures of divided schooling (almost all teaching schools are Protestant), to be able to teach without bias. That is, if they can even decide on an unbias history. The general response is to not teach the history. It's just too complicated.

How fustrating is that?!