Today I began my 40 hour school observation required for admittance into Bloomsburg University’s College of Education. I walked into my small city, racially diverse, mostly free and reduced lunch high school placement this morning with a name of a teacher and a packet of observation worksheets that I need to complete by the end of the week.
I had driven past the school several times in the last few years. It is a daunting building that mirrors the standard, though less colorful, picture of a school building you might see in a children’s book. The school’s outdoor facilities are fenced in and mostly concrete. The inside of the building is old, but neatly kept. The lockers and walls would probably be at the top of my list to upgrade in the school.
The first classroom I walked into surprised me. The mismatched desks were lined up in rows across most of the room. However, a third of the room was dedicated to the teacher’s desks, lectern, and storage. The disproportionality between the teacher and student dedicated areas neatly summarized the amount of attention given to the students during the class period. The class had several nonwhite students, and the students spread out across the classroom, most of them isolated. The two students in front of me spent the entire class period working together on homework for another class. The teacher spent the first few minutes of class giving directions for an independent seat work assignment. He moved once from the behind his desk to circulate the room.
The bell rang, and a new group of students entered the room. The class was almost entirely white this time, and had the same teacher for the same class doing the same assignment as the first period class. When they walked into the room, they clustered together in their seating. They immediately got to work, and remained working after the teacher left the school for the day. The community dynamics were astonishing. The students wore mostly athletic gear and high-end shoes, clothing, and purses scattered the classroom. From a classroom management standpoint, the only difference between the two classes was the teacher’s inability or lack of effort in building a community with his diverse first class period. I wrote a list of the way I would change the physical environment to foster an effective learning environment.
The next classroom I observed exemplified each of my suggested changes. The teacher was focused and responsive to students in each of the periods I observed over the next several hours. I completed most of my observation worksheets, and I had the opportunity to interview the teacher at the end of her classes for the day.
My critiques of the second teacher lie not with her teaching style or classroom management, but with fundamental assumptions of American traditional schooling. For example, she was teaching her student about the Cold War. A topic she defined for the students was Communism. She described Communism as a system in which people are told by the government what they will learn, what they will do for a career based on tests, and have no say in the process. She said that this system would bore her because it traps people and forces them to do things they do not want to do. I looked around the classroom and immediately thought of the fact that her description fits American students pretty well. As a white teacher living on the outskirts of the city, she has no idea how much her privilege is leaking into the lecture. She doesn’t make the connection that the school’s handbook lists three tracts the students can follow for graduation. I wonder if the students made the connection.
A class or two later, she began instruction on the Holocaust, a subject the students seemed especially intrigued by. She produced a poster of the Nuremberg Laws that systematically criminalized Jewishness on the basis of Aryan heritage. In the spirit of American Exceptionalism and flying in the face of the supposed purpose of social studies, she never once asked the class if America would ever impose similar laws. An opportunity to impact the students with a discussion on Japanese interment camps on the American West coast would have invited critical thinking upon the realization that the democratic United States treated the Japanese in an eerily similar manner as Nazi Germany treated the Jews. The opportunities for in depth conversation were missed and another class of students remain unaware of the applications of social studies curriculum to life in America.
I left the school and changed into more comfortable clothes before finding the nearest coffee shop to sit and read another chunk of Nikhil Goyal’s book Schools on Trial. The book is a refreshing debrief from the experiences I had in the public school. As an aspiring advocate for school reform on the systematic level, Goyal’s research and observations, especially with an eye to the minorities of society, reflect and improve my vision of what school could become. As I read, I searched the names of reformers and free/democratic schools he mentioned. Much like the schools mentioned in the book, I want to spend my summer directing my own learning in pursuit of my life aspirations.
Now, as I sit and reflect on the events of this Monday, I am refreshed with a hope that I can play a part in reforming (or completely redesigning) public education as we know it. For now, I have to play the games of the education system that produces compliant servants of capitalism in order to gain the experience necessary to authoritatively subvert the system. I sincerely hope that I will remain focused on this goal and not become seduced by the comfort of being a fixture of the education machine. Until then, I am focused on preparing for my time in the system. I will write lessons for my future classes that center students as much as possible within the narrow framework of learning outcomes. I will learn from the mistakes and successes of the teachers I observe.