Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

stopped the other day. Another bad name someone had ever called
me was Spic but I don't really care because I know the person is
playing with me and when he gets on my nerves I call him
Hamburger Helper. His name is Rajick."
"How is Manny getting called a spic like Daniel getting called a
faggot?" I asked.
Silence. "It's not," Shabazz suggested, ''being gay is totally different
than being Latino."
True. My lesson plan, I realized, was deeply flawed. It was also
designed to manipulate how my students thought. I wanted to make
them more liberal-minded - I wanted to make them think like me.
I remembered my discomfort when my supervisor had announced
that our goal should be not only to teach our students writing, but to
make them ''better people."
I.. II
A Union soldier serving in the South said of the freedman,
"Human or not, there he is in our midst, millions strong; and if he is
not educated mentally and morally, he will make us trouble."
We do not trust children to find their own morality. Too often we
educate them only so that they will not make us trouble. We want to
use their voices in our commercials.
When I argue with my students, I often have the sensation that I
am actually arguing with people other than them. I think I hear the
voices of their fathers, or the voices of their gym teachers. They
speak in slightly mutilated catch phrases. I speak cautiously, with
the suspicion that my students will repeat my words back to their
fathers and gym teachers. This is how children become foot soldiers
in conflicts between adults.
Jill III
"Okay, then just tell me this," I said to my students, "what is so
bad about being gay? What was so bad about your teacher, for
example. Why did you throw your markers at him?"
"If teachers are gay it is really bad because they can take you into
a room and try to touch you," Manny answered.
I stared at Manny, "I could take you into a room and touch you.
Anyone could."
He stared back, daring me to. I had gotten into all the wrong territory,
I had dropped the third person. He shook his head, "No." I
was beginning to worry about losing my job.
"What else, what else is so bad about it?"
"God made men to be with women, so it's against God," said
Marissalee.
Oh, no. I hadn't anticipated this. Students were agreeing, the room
was getting noisy. I imagined that flash point was creeping up on me.
I was destined to leave this room with Magic Marker on my face or
having, like another teacher, tried to throw a kid out the window.
"Yeah," said Shabazz, "and on that TV show the one man is gay
and he dropped a quarter so that the other man would pick it up and
then he could look at his butt."
I didn't understand the crime in this, but it was clear that my students
were moved. "Yeah, yeah!" They were all agreeing and laughing
and remembering more stories about gay people they had seen on TV.
How had I gotten myself into this? I had intended to teach writing.
K,.
During my first year of teaching, I found that I said, "Quiet!" more
than anything else.
I often heard other teachers using terms like "classroom management,"
"reinforcement," and "discipline." Surprisingly, "empowerment"
was also popular. Teachers misused that term all the time.
They developed "empowering" exercises like letting the students
draft their own rules, but the rules were always the same. True
empowerment of students, I realized very quickly, necessarily means
a certain disempowerment of teachers.
Teachers habitually abuse their power by wrongly defining words.
There is a sign in the math classroom where I used to work that says,
"Caring means learning the terms and remembering them." Other
signs in that school reminded me of the chapters of Brinskerhoff's
1864 Advice to Freedmen: "Be Industrious," "Be Economical," "Be
Temperate," and "Be Soldiers." II