I'm an ndn. I am a teacher.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: Throughout my undergraduate coursework and field experience, I have been “the other.” But, to a feminist teacher, what can “the other” be in a profession that dominated by women?

The “other” is obviously something unusual: A nonwhite teacher.

It is impossible to deny the whitewashed education that I, and millions of other students receive each and every day in the United States educational system. It is broken, fractured, and frankly, more similar to an author-inserted fanfiction that real history and background.

I learned that Columbus DISCOVERED America, as if it hadn’t existed beforehand.

I learned that subsequent settlers SAVED the “savage” people from buckskin and tradition by stealing their land and forcing them to move, slaughtering millions in the process.

I learned that black people now have the exact same “shot” at life as white people do: And everyone else, well they aren’t really part of the equation. 

I learned everything about my history is being used as a tactic to teach children to dress up in brownface. To create some sort of bizarre, pan-indian culture so the stereotypes prevail.

So what does this mean for my students? My nonwhite students? My latin@ students, my students from Africa, my black students, my Desi students? What does this mean for them?

This means, that in the classrooms where I work, the population comes close to 80% latin@ and black, and I celebrate each and every day the color of my student’s skin and the languages they use. They share, day in and day out, the struggles the encounter, and they challenge my white students to reexamine their thinking and their ideas about their classmates.

This means I encourage them to speak Spanish, AAVE, and codeswitch between what is comfortable and what is new. I teach formal English as what it is: A second language.

This means I will share with them my own experiences. I will use Bod’ewadmimwen in class and encourage them to pick up the words and use them.

I know too well, there is little to celebrate when you are a nonwhite kid in an American school. So what do I do? I create an atmosphere of safety and celebration. Life is a party, and too many of us are not on the guest list. Not many of us are considered important enough to have our voices heard.

I see this reflected in the materials I am expected to teach. My 7th and 8th graders have reading lists populated by white males. Rarely does some other person make an appearance.

Even in the anthologies, when students study “the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass”, students don’t READ anything but a butchered, shortened version from a white editor.

We clutch to the “classics” so intently that we ignore the beauty of coming-of-age through the voice of Arnold Spirit in Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian.

I know most of my kids will never read Zora Neale Hurston in high school.

I know these children are punished for using AAVE in their everyday lives.

I have seen my students bashed for speaking  Spanish in the classroom to communicate with other Spanish speakers.

My history, and the histories of my kids, has changed me. The whitewashing has altered my intent. It has transformed the way I teach.

I made it through the racism, the whitewashing, the “colorblind” system that so many of my own teachers asserted we had, and I have come through it with a ferocity I never imagined.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, except to say that I hope Education, as a whole, is changing.  I hope the white teachers I had have retired, and I hope the new ones understand their privileged place in society and try to see themselves from the eyes of their students.

I hope no other child has to don warpaint and a paper warbonnet to “celebrate” Thanksgiving.

I hope we stop celebrating genocide through Columbus day.

I hope no one ever shuts one of my black students down for saying, in absolute truth, “you don’t know me.”

I hope I NEVER hear another colleague tell me that “[student] is the wrong skin color to care about his education.”

I hope, as educators with the best interests of our kids in mind, we can dismantle the institutionally oppressive system that forces poor kids to quit school and keeps them in cyclical poverty that lasts for generations.

If you don’t face the world through the eyes of someone with less privilege than you, you don’t understand a thing about the people you are supposed to be teaching. You are forcing their lives in a direction of frustration and failure.

It’s no wonder we lose so many kids: They give up, they drop out. And why?

Often, because they never had an accomplishment or an acknowledgement worthy of celebration.

Let’s start celebrating students for the things they cannot change.

Let’s start celebrating the REAL history.

Who are some great first year teacher blogs to follow on Tumblr?

Rather than teach 8th grade again next year I'm moving to 7th.

I found out this morning about the switch and have since experienced the strangest mix of emotions. Long story short: the 7th grade team this year has become toxic so they need to mix them up and interject some positivity. (And probably force some folks out.) The team was also very weak in the language arts department and based on the strength of my instruction he wants to move me down to partner with another ELA teacher who they can’t get to retire. Which means I’ll be carrying the load a bit.

It’s also a gift of sorts since my principal doesn’t want me to have to deal with the mess that is the current 7th grade group so early in my career.

So while I’m devastated to leave a few of my teammates behind (one is moving with me), and to give up all of the fun stuff that comes with teaching 8th graders, I’m also really flattered and a little excited.

Cue the weird mix of smiling and sobbing here.