Why I Teach

As other college students learned to play racket ball or joined a sorority, I was driven by a need to leave campus and get into the city, that city being Philadelphia.  Part of the pull to the people was probably a longing to make up for lost time, a longing to understand who America was, to know the people I had been so loosely connected to living as an ex-patriot in Europe for most of my childhood.  And so I made daily treks my junior and senior years of college from my nice little women's college in Bryn Mawr to the University of Pennsylvania located in the heart of downtown Philadelphia.  From there, I often continued on to a church in the heart of one of the worst ghettoes in North Philadelphia or one of several schools.

I had entered college with a plan to change the world, to become a lawyer in the World Peace Court some day and develop legislation to bring peace to the Middle East or to West Africa. I wanted to give back to a world that had given me so much.  However, the more I became acquainted with the Black children of inner-city Philadelphia, the more I realized that teaching could allow me to make an impact on the nation and eventually the world.  Teaching was something I had fought all my life. My parents and cousins and uncles are all teachers.  I didn't want a teacher's salary.  I didn't want the long hours of correcting homework.  I didn't want the headaches of parent conferences.  I didn't want the early-morning meetings. 

However, one look into these kids' faces and I knew I had so much to learn from them and so much to give.  Their experience was so different from mine.  They had never left their small neighborhoods.  They had never met anyone from Europe ("You're from where?" they would ask time and time again.).  They had never met anyone who had attended college.  Many had never owned their own books - not a comic book, not a novel, not a textbook.  Most could not see any connection between the high school diploma their parents had earned and professional success because most of their parents had no professional success.  In the face of all that they did not have, there was still a sense of community in the inner-city that wooed me back each week. 

I am a Black woman who grew up in the White world of a private international school.  There were students from more than twenty nations at my school, but no African-Americans and no teachers of color. Although I had wonderful Caucasian adoptive parents who had brought our family to Europe in part to save our family from racial persecution, taken me on trips across the continent and exposed me to literature and the arts, a part of me was still longing for more. I had watched the Black community from a distance.  I had studied the history of the United States, knew the facts about slavery and about the Civil Rights Movement, recognized the popular Black singers who had made it to MTV Europe...but knowing the facts wasn't enough.  I wanted to belong.

I continued to invent reasons to walk the mile and take the two trains it required to get into Philly from Bryn Mawr.  For a while I took classes at the University of Pennsylvania so I could justify my visits (and also earn a free train card).  At night after class, I would slip away to Bible studies or youth meetings at local Black churches for a reason to stay in town.  I even volunteered in a literacy center for adult women who were just learning to read.  I played with their children and often stopped on the way to catch a pick-up basketball game on a neighborhood court.  I couldn't get enough of this community who looked like me.

However, I was constantly reminded that I was not "one of them." It wasn't anything anyone said to me.  It was more the realization that I was privileged and had been all my life.  Somehow it wasn't fair that I had been able to travel and meet famous people.  It wasn't fair that my school had a computer lab and textbooks for everyone and even multiple classroom sets of novels. The more I immersed myself in the culture of North and West Philadelphia, the more I realized that life for Black people in America was not the same as life for the White students who attended school in Bryn Mawr.  Black people in these urban communities did not have the same opportunities or resources, especially not in schools.  "Separate but equal" was merely theoretical jargon that had no basis in the reality of these people's every day life.  The inequities were glaring, from the upkeep of playgrounds to the quality and experience of the teachers.

One of the schools I visited regularly was an elementary school in the heart of North Philadelphia.  The school serviced an all-Black community in which 40% of the students had no running water or electricity.  There were more than one thousand students and over one hundred teachers but no copy machine (this was 1992).  There was an empty classroom on the second floor with a mimeograph machine that teachers were expected to use if they wanted to make copies (Yes, I said a mimeograph machine). Most teachers spent their own money and made copies at Kinko's. Teachers who wanted their students to have books had to buy those books themselves, so many worked part-time for local bookstores.  In a high school I visited, a couple of miles due south, the students had no textbooks.  This meant they also had no homework.  A student who was enrolled in an AP English class informed me one day during my visit that he had never read an entire novel from cover to cover because his school didn't have enough books for everyone to have one.  How would he or the others in his class possibly pass the AP exam?

Those years of two hour voyages into the heart of Philadelphia should be a distant memory for me now that I am fourteen years into my teaching career and thousands of miles away.  However, it is the memory of the faces, the hunger in their eyes for learning, for opportunity that keeps me on this path to educate.  Most of my career has been in poor schools with large African American populations where parents are over-employed, unemployed, underemployed, on drugs or simply missing-in-action.  Although every school since has had a copy machine, far too many of these schools do not have adequate supplies to meet the needs of their students, far too many English classrooms have incomplete novel sets, far too many schools do not have AP programs and, if they do, students are being asked to take those exams without having been adequately prepared because the materials are not available.

Fourteen years later, I am still wooed by the African American inner-city community.  Whether there are five African American students or five hundred in my school, I have made a pledge to do what I can to provide them with some of the experiences I had as a student.  Although many of them will never have the opportunity to travel to Europe, I am sure to bring in my Europe Box once a year to let students put on my wooden shoes and see my pictures with the queen and other dignitaries.  My students may not be able to physically travel to England but they hear of my 8^th grade trip to Stratford-on-Avon and our visit to the Globe Theatre, and of course I have to add the part about British Airways going on strike forcing our entire 8^th grade class to spend 24 hours in a 5-star hotel with a pool and a disco. I am sure to let them hear what Dutch and French and Spanish sound like (they are always amazed to hear a Black woman speak a language other than English).

No matter how much I want to be part of inner-city African American community, I will always be an outsider.  It does not matter that I married an African American man or that I adopted an African American girl after having two boys of my own.  There is something in me that knows I am different.  I had advantages that my peers who grew up in America will never have.  I speak a language my students and their parents don't always understand.  To my chagrin, my African American students constantly remind me that I "talk White" - their way of saying that I am not from the city, not from the "hood".  And yet I continue to teach them, to reach out, to invest in them as my parents invested in me.

Thousands of us teaching in poor schools across the nation teach without adequate numbers of textbooks.  We spend our personal money to purchase student materials and to round-out a classroom set of novels.  We buy our own copy paper and stock our cabinets with writing paper and pencils so our students never have an excuse not to be engaged.  We watch the paint peel off our walls and wonder if that chair will hold up for just one more day.  We hope our bank account will stay in the black just long enough so we can purchase those dictionaries we saw on E-Bay last week.

The choice to teach is not always easy, and life does not always seem fair for our students or for us as we struggle to meet standards without the necessary support systems.  There are times when I just want to give up, to throw in the towel and do something that makes more money, that's not so time-consuming or emotionally draining, and then I remember that 17 year-old Black boy in Philadelphia who was so jealous that I had read not one, but ten novels in my senior year, books provided not by my family but by the school I attended.  I remember the things I do have that will not put a dent in my checkbook, the things I have that I can give away for free - my experiences and my education.  This I can pass on, hoping each day that my students will grab on to something I have shared that will drive them, woo them, even, into a lifelong pursuit to belong to a new community, a community where learning will equate to personal and professional success, a community where dreams can become a reality.