I am amazed that in an age where we claim to be about higher human values, we let a kid with a jacket and a hoodie sit in the back of a room out of touch with others when the fact is he could be the next great American filmmaker or novelist. That riles me. That is what drives me.
I think of the others in this blog community and to a person I would say that, push come to shove, they would give remarkably similar reasons for strapping on the CI armor each year knowing that they are about to get the snot beaten out of them and take some very heavy blows professionally but who do it anyway for the sake of that kid in the back row.
At East High in Denver I once had a class on the first day with the white kids in the front near me, the Latinos on the sides where they didn’t have to make eye contact, and the blacks (where else?) back in the back. After a month, it was reversed. The blacks and Latinos, mainly the blacks, had gotten the decoder switch from me and were all in the front ready to rock a story. The bewildered white kids who had been given the keys to the school by all the white people running it were trying to figure out what the heck was going on. I liked that. A little payback.
That was a great battlefield victory for me and an exanple of why I teach this way. It’s not just because it’s the best way to teach that I have found, it’s because if more people don’t pick up on the social justice piece in the U.S. there’s gonna be some stuff happening. A lot of us could give a rip about teaching. We are social activists. Dig it.