Lost in Translation

*The following entry is a glimpse into the themes my uncle and I will be addressing in an upcoming co-authored article this summer*

“I’m tired of these white teachers not knowing how to talk to and teach us Black and Latino students.”

This quote comes from the open response section of an anonymous climate survey that my school gave our students yesterday. In his book “The Trouble With Black Boys,” education scholar Pedro Noguera discusses a similar study in California where researchers found that while students of color tend to want to do well in school, they feel that their teachers do not care about them or their success. The issue of cultural dissonance between teachers and students of color has gained so much attention in recent years that even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has commented publicly on the need for teachers to be more responsive to students of different backgrounds and a dire need for the recruitment of more teachers of color.

In the past I have heard teachers complain that I have an unfair advantage teaching students of color because I am a Latino male. While I have no doubt that these parts of my identity don’t hurt my ability to connect with students of color and engage them in learning, I find the underlying assumptions in the argument absolutely FALSE and insulting. The connotations present in assertions like this are twofold: firstly they imply that a white female is unable to connect with students of color and secondly they make it appear as if my students like me more and work harder for me simply because I’m a Latino man. In my experience as a student and educator I have seen many white teachers that were great at connecting with their students and I’ve also seen many teachers of color who were unable to do so in any meaningful way. Furthermore, to imply that I am successful because I’m male and Brown reduces my abilities to facets of my identity rather than my actual gifts as an orator and motivator. I believe that these positions obscure the reality that teachers struggle to acknowledge which is that they need to put in work in order to connect with ALL kids regardless of their ethnic, racial, class, gender, or sexual identities. Suffice it to say that out of the three teachers to positively influence my life the most, two of them were white, and all three were women.

I don’t remember Mrs. Earle, Mrs. Scott, and Mrs. Campitelli simply because of the concepts they taught me; I remember them because they took the time to get to know me and showed me who they were as people. It was evident in the way they spoke and in how they delivered the material that they loved the subjects they taught and they loved the students they taught. It was the mix of these that allowed me to recognize their humanity and earned them my respect as a student and a person. When each of these teachers spoke, the students could tell that they were being genuine. Whether they were talking about the content or something else, I never got the sense that they were being disingenuous. I believe that one of the major problems in education today is personality and performance. Education programs around the country and certification supplements, like Teach For America, work to help teachers deliver content but not how to truly perform it. There are few, if any programs, that have some kind of performance and personality workshop embedded in their curriculum. I had a teacher once tell me that she doesn’t like speaking in front of people which seems highly problematic given that our job requires us to be in front of a group of people teaching them all day!

Recently, “Teach Like A Champion” by Doug Lemov has been trumpeted as the “bible” of education. The book is filled with techniques for the classroom aimed at increasing engagement and accountability. While there are some amazing things in the book, I feel that it fails to capture the human connection necessary to truly encompass the teacher student relationship. My problem with what I have seen come out of the implementation of techniques from Lemov is the way teachers have embraced it is as a program; a – one step –  two step – three step way of executing teaching that leaves no room for personality and flair (or what my uncle and I like to call it: SABOR). I have seen teachers in many schools who are awesome passionate people in their day to day lives but robotic and utterly disengaging drones in the classroom. Latinos and Blacks come from an oral tradition that is all encompassing and promotes a sense of community. Most classrooms I’ve seen look like a Catholic Mass where every word and move is predictable and the congregation frequently dozes off.

When my uncle was leaving his research job and taking a substantial pay cut to become a high school teacher at his alma mater his co worker gave him some sound advice: “be yourself and have no fear, kids are like wolves and they can smell it on you.” As teachers around the country begin to implement “Teach Like a Champion” strategies they must keep in mind that these need to be incorporated into your personality and not worn as a mask over who you are. When done incorrectly, the teacher voice and persona can come off as extremely condescending and disingenuous (both of which kids, and especially urban youth of color, are not particularly fond of). As a student of color and as a teacher of color I can sniff out a fake presenter as soon as they open their mouth. As a kid, once I noticed that a presenter or teacher was not being themselves I was completely disconnected from anything they had to say. If someone is not being personal and by proxy personally connected to what they are saying, then why should I? Just as personality and delivery needs to have a flow, so does behavior management.   

We no longer expect teachers to have uniform instructional deliveries for their kids because we recognize that kids learn differently, yet we expect all kids to adhere to the same rules and penalties for their behavior. This seems strikingly hypocritical. When I got in trouble with Mrs. Scott, Mrs. Earle, and Mrs. Campitelli I was given the same initial punishment as the rest of the class, but then I was approached differently afterwards because they were aware of the personal baggage I was bringing to school with me on a daily basis. Mrs. Earle was aware of the surgeries my mother and I had undergone in the same year and occasionally asked how my mom was doing. Mrs. Scott knew about my godson and cousin being born with down syndrome and  heart problems so she would frequently check in with me about his progress. Mrs. Campitelli had seen my emotional ups and downs throughout high school and was very understanding of the plan that my school counselor had put in place for me. What I am trying to get at is that my teachers knew me as a person and I never felt like I was being treated like another cog in the machine. I was not given “special treatment” or granted lowered expectations, instead I was given a personalized version of the system that worked for the majority of students. Finding a way to systematize education is great but at the end of the day we work with people and so we need to be trained to empathize with and engage them. If done correctly, this can create a sense of trust with students that can translate to academic success when channeled correctly (my students).

By looking at relationship building in this light, teachers can stop trying to resign themselves as never being able to be me (after all, there’s no curler, tanner, or amount of salsa lessons that can convert someone to me) and aspire to be a child’s Mrs. Earle, Mrs. Scott, or Mrs. Campitelli. Cultural differences, as far as I can see, are currently more of an excuse to disengage and instead need to be seen as just another hurdle to conquer in our individual quests to be great teachers. The discussion needs to shift from “we can’t connect with them like ‘these’ teachers” to “let’s find a way to connect with ALL students” because I’ve yet to hear one of my white students say “I don’t trust or like your teaching because you’re Latino and you don’t know how to talk to or teach us”…