Who's In My Classroom?. Tim Fredrick
He continued, “I want to invite you to tutoring. I tutor Tuesdays and Thursdays and plenty of students come in. It does get crowded sometimes, so I can’t always guarantee I’ll be able to help you on the particular topic you’re struggling with. But I’ll try.”
I tried to read his face, wondering what the catch was. The tutoring sessions weren’t news to me, but I never expected him to reach out and invite me. Most teachers only pay attention to the students who look like they care. My geometry teacher always told us, “I’m not even going to bother with kids who do not want to help themselves.” This teacher obviously had a different approach.
—Youth Communication writer Neha Basnet, from “How I Conquered Physics, with Unexpected Help”
My First Lesson in Listening to Students
In the fall of 1992, I was a 24-year-old doctoral student in New York City. Like many of my classmates, I struggled to balance the demands of my courses with the need to support myself. Rather than look for work as an adjunct professor or a researcher, I took a job with a nonprofit organization helping to run an after-school program at a junior high school in East Harlem. Since I was pursuing my degree in developmental psychology, I figured, “What better way to learn about development than by working directly with developing youth?”
I had grown up in the northeast section of the Bronx, so it wasn't as though I was raised in a wealthy suburb of the city. But East Harlem seemed like a completely different world to me. We were in the midst of the crack and heroin epidemic of the early 1990s that hit East Harlem extremely hard. Unfortunately, the neighborhood became synonymous to some people with drugs and crime.
When I told friends about my new job, I could see the concern on their faces. “Are you sure you want to work there?” they asked. “You know that's not a safe neighborhood, right? It's like a war zone over there.”
As I prepared for my first day of work, I tried to mentally prepare for the “war zone” that would soon be my new place of work. Since I was working with an after-school program, I arrived right before the students were dismissed. Before I even entered the school building, I noticed several adults with orange buckets. They were walking around the schoolyard picking up things. I was curious, so I moved a bit closer and asked what they were doing. They said that they were removing needles before the students could be dismissed into the yard.
I was stunned. I tried not to react, but I felt defeated even before I met my students. If that's what these children had to deal with every day, I thought, how could I possibly relate to them? As I walked to what would become my classroom, I felt sad for the students. While they were entering the room, I was thinking about their schoolyard and the challenges they faced each day just to get to school.
With a combination of anxiety mixed with ignorance and arrogance, I introduced myself, sat down with my students and asked them what they thought about their school and their neighborhood. I thought I knew how they would answer and expected their answers to lead perfectly into the motivational speech that I already rehearsed in my head. I was going to tell them the one about if they did well in school, they could go to a good college, get a job, “escape” their neighborhood, and have a better life.
But that’s not how the conversation went. One student answered by saying that her neighborhood was loud. Almost without fully listening to the rest of her sentence, I was already hearing her say that being loud was bad and that she didn't like where she lived. As I began to feel sorry for her and what she had to endure, she continued, “But it's not a bad thing. They play music from my country and it reminds me of home. It helps me to sleep at night. I really love it here.”
“I love it here too,” another student shared. “This is my home. It's my favorite place in the city.”
I have no idea what my face revealed at the time, but inside I was stunned. How could a place that people described as a “war zone” bring such comfort to my students? How could they love a place that I thought they would want to escape from?
I often think about that time because it reminds me of how my beliefs and expectations about students can influence how I teach them, what I think they're capable of, and how much I engage them intellectually. Most importantly, it reminds me of the value of getting to know my students.
At the same time I was beginning my work in East Harlem, the staff of Youth Communication was refining an award-winning journalism program in which public high school students learn to write powerful personal essays about the challenges in their lives. The teen writers commit to a rigorous process in which they write more than a dozen drafts under the tutelage of full-time professional editors before their stories get published. The writers come from a wide range of backgrounds, including youth living in foster care or homeless shelters. And the writers attend a wide range of schools, from the most struggling neighborhood schools to elite public and private schools. All of the student examples in this book are from their stories.
The stories show aspects of their lives unseen by all but their most trusted teachers. But like my East Harlem students, when the teens write about tough circumstances they don't dwell on the negative. Rather, as you will see, they focus on how they manage those challenges and even overcome them. Sometimes, of course, what we mistakenly see as a sad challenge, the writers see as an important part of who they are. Like the occasional conversations when students really open up in our classrooms, the stories are a valuable window into their lives. They show the stressors that we may not be aware of; they show what is valuable and important to them; and they show how teens use resourcefulness, creativity, and resilience to overcome challenges and achieve their goals. In short, they offer the kind of information that would help all teachers be more effective, but that too few of us have access to.
One goal of this book is to help equip teachers and school leaders with skills and strategies that will enable them to hear students’ voices and to integrate their experiences into instruction. Fortunately, on that first day in East Harlem, I heard those voices. I asked my students to tell me about how they experience their neighborhood before I started imposing my stereotypes on them. Had I read some of the stories by teens at Youth Communication before that first day, I would have had a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the complexity of my students’ thoughts and feelings.
For example, Roberta Nin Feliz, 16, describes her rough Bronx neighborhood very differently than I would have imagined it before my experience in East Harlem:
At the entrance of my building, there are a few things you might smell: weed, urine, or food. But once you are inside, smelling the various scents of everyone's cooking is as pleasant as discovering an extra dollar in your pocket. Their cooking always smells bien sazonao (well-seasoned.) When you walk past apartment doors, you can usually hear the women of the building bochinchando (gossiping). The women usually gossip about the neighbor's daughter who got pregnant or the neighbor's son who sells drugs on the second floor. They can point things out better than even the most detailed forensic scientist.
Of course, Roberta is not oblivious to the problems in her neighborhood. But for her they exist in a larger context. In another part of her story, she writes:
If you travel two blocks east from my block, you will come across a parking lot where men come to pee. As soon as it gets a little dark, the alcoholics and crackheads scatter to the gate and relieve themselves. It is bad enough that I have to avoid dog poop, I also have to avoid disgusting men's urine.
But the most distinctive trait about my neighborhood is the smiles. Everywhere you look there is always someone smiling. On the same block where a 19-year-old kid died, you can find children playing hopscotch. The single mothers smile, the crackheads smile, the unemployed men smile, the dealers smile, the addicts smile, everyone smiles. Every corner you turn, you are guaranteed to always come across a smile.
The complexities and contradictions of her neighborhood have also helped Roberta to become a sophisticated observer who has learned to avoid the kinds of stereotypes that are often applied to her:
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