Black Bored (originally published 2002)

 Roots

There are discussions in education, recently, centered on the notion that black youth  are “apathetic” and have not achieved academically at the same rate as their white counterparts.  There have been many successes that have been rarely documented and are frequently lost in the conversation about what is missing.  As I sit in my classroom during African Heritage Month watching Part One of Roots (25^th Anniversary) and only eight students are here with me, I too wonder what can be done to change how students relate to their own power and success in school.  Oh, make that seven, one just left!  

The entire system, in my estimation, is designed for them to be apathetic.  If they were more concerned about what was being done in schools, students would question some of the practices, rules, and methods of today’s school system.  There are at least two problems directly impacting black students:  “Diversity” and “Visibility”.  As the only teacher of colour in a school full of students of colour, what affects them affects me.  What do I mean when I say Diversity and Visibility?  Diversity means to provide students with as many experiences and/or opportunities for success to ensure they leave high school with the tools necessary to make them strong and confident learners, workers, citizens etc.  Visibility refers to their ability to not only recognize their own experiences as unique but also feel comfortable about including them as rightfully part a Canadian experience.  

My own public school education is a reflection of the same issues I have observed in students during my years at the front of the classroom.  I can safely say that I never learned to read proficiently until I was in my twenties.  When I was in grade two there was a switch in reading pedagogy and I never quite caught on.  From a very early age I was lost in the classroom.  Poor reading and math skills made me a middle of the road student at best.  By junior high school I had developed a number of survival skills in order to hide my deficiencies.  I could do just enough to stay afloat but never too much to be outstanding in any way and very often, I calculated for doing only just enough.  I also never took responsibility for the choice that underachieving represented.  The teacher would never need to call on me for an answer because I was the student the teacher never saw.  I could make myself invisible in the classroom.  When I meet teachers who taught me in high school and they say that I was a good student, I laugh!  I cannot see how they could remember that I was even in the room.  At my high school reunion, a teacher asked if I was still going to high school even though I had graduated twelve years previously.  

In high school I developed great social skills.  It became my training ground for my athletic skill as well as the artful talent of hanging out, LIME'N!  In fact the only reason I went to school every day was because I would not be able to play sports if I did not.  No one was more disconnected from what was going on in the classroom than me.  Consciously and unconsciously, I was more than just invisible.  I was no existent.  I never read a book.  I never did homework and studying for exams amounted to doing everything the night before.  The consequences of my procrastination and apathy did not become apparent until my senior year when I was being recruited for an athletic scholarship by over eighty-five American universities.  Just imagine the disgrace of being offered a scholarship from Syracuse University ($150,000 over four years) and then getting a letter saying that I was not the kind of student that Syracuse was looking for.  The scary part was the truth of that statement.  They were right.  I had no skills to help me survive at the university level even though I knew that was where I wanted and needed to be in order to fulfill my true potential.  I always thought that I was just stupid and unable to do scholarly work, another great excuse for underachieving.  It really was my excuse and it was easier to blame everyone else.  What I will call, "my second chance" came when a 'clerical error' indicated that I was accepted to the dormitories of Howard University 

(Washington D.C.).  Now, Howard was where my father went to school and I only applied there because I thought they would feel sorry for the daughter of an alumnus.  My mother saw this as my chance to get a university education.  I wrote the SAT for the third time and followed every lead that Howard gave me.  In January of 1988, at 21 years old, I started at Howard as a freshman in the Liberal Arts Department with a major in Physical Education (Sociology of Sport and a minor in Secondary Education).  Although my attending Howard University appeared to be by accident, once there I discovered the experience was exactly what I needed in order for me to begin to earn my way toward not only academic success but to a better understanding of who I was as a person of colour, I was completed enfolded.    Howard University, one of the more than 150 Historically Black Colleges and Universities spread through the east coast of the United States, was the perfect environment for a student like me.  I could stop the impact of the history I lived every day I was on campus.  Although Howard does not use an Afrocentric curriculum, they are able to feed your mind, body and soul with the importance of success at this level from an approach that was a perfect fit - your responsibility is not only to you, it's important for all of us!  This overstanding has not only impacted students who choose this institution it’s impacted the African Diaspora.  The expectation is not about what you learn but more about how you learn and who you ‘be’ as a result of the learning.  Howard is the place that I learned 'why to learn' and I learned about my power as a person from black communities.  I had a responsibility that was beyond me.  I had failed so much before that it was time to prove to myself that I could be smarter than I had been in the past and smarter than I had ever given myself credit for being.  Being in an all black environment was so stimulating and inspiring that I could not help but to do well.  In my first year I did have some trouble adjusting which was reflected in my 3.0 GPA, but by second year I was holding a strong 3.5 and moving closer to 3.8.  I became an avid reader and I sucked up information like a sponge.  It gave me the attitude that there were so many things that I had missed, I needed to make up for lost time.  Homework and studying became second nature.  Other students were coming to me when they had questions in class.  I was actually being recognized for my intellect and I felt POWERFUL!  When one of my professors took me under her wing as her assistant, I felt EMPOWERED.  I had come a long way from my days at Gloucester High School.  

After my years at Howard, becoming a teacher was not an easy journey but it was clear to me that it was the next logical step.  I wanted and still want to be able to show students that they do not have to sit in the back of the classroom and fail.  That knowledge and learning can make them stronger people.  It’s not just a phrase on a bumper sticker.  I learned the importance of having high expectations for myself because it produced results in a way I had never experienced before.  There was nothing for me to fear! 

These are some of the experiences and expectations I bring into the classroom:  high expectations = high results and the new 3Rs (Relationship, Rigour, and Relevance).  Teaching is one of those professions that is ideal for people who know how to work well on their own.  The whole nature of the school system is isolationist in practice and theory.  A teacher works alone in a classroom following a curriculum that is merely a guideline for what can be done in that classroom.  As long as the students in the room meet the expectations and/or outcomes at the end of the year, the teacher has done their job of guiding them toward who they can see themselves being.  Unfortunately, the process of learning is never as flat as the paper the curriculum is written on.  The curriculum does not factor in some of the distinctions that exist across the country, school districts, or classrooms.  Because that curriculum is so flat, it does not inspire or empower students, especially students from diverse backgrounds, to move beyond the outcomes and expectations.  Motivation of black youth has traditionally been a problem that the curriculum has failed to address.  We do not use a curriculum that is rich in diverse experiences and because of that, the experiences of anyone who is not white are not reflected in the classroom.  When students cannot take ownership of what takes place in the classroom or see themselves’ reflected in the textbooks, stories, or materials used, they become DISCONNECTED from the entire process.  A disconnected student is not an active participant in their learning but passively contributes nothing to the entire process.  An example of this is in the Grade 10 history course.  This course is a requirement for graduation under the new and old curricula.  It looks at Canadian history from 1900 to present.  A group of students from a community group that advises our school board (Community Council for Ethno cultural Equity or CCEE) described the course as “boring”.  One of the reasons they gave for this was their experiences were either absent or negative in the course curriculum.  This is just one example of what students of colour have to deal with in high schools all over the country and in a variety of subject areas.  Perhaps because they are invisible, black students can not see ownership in the course and it therefore becomes easier to do poorly.  The school system has done very little to guarantee that this group of students get a fair opportunity to experience diversity in education.  The lack of visibility in the curriculum has been detrimental to the success of Black students because as long as they never see the great things that Black people have done not only in Canada but in the World, they will continue to believe that they belong to a group who has contributed nothing.  

In response to the comments from this group of students, the board decided to make some changes to the course in order to better reflect the diversity that is truly part of the Canadian experience.  For one month during the summer I worked along side two other teachers haggling over what needed to be included as well as excluded.  Because of the time constraints of a semester system, it was not possible to include everything.  The argument put forward at that point was, how do we make teachers use this?  When the door is closed and a teacher stands alone at the front of the room, will they do something different from what they have been doing for years?  New teachers coming into the profession, will they be comfortable enough to tackle the issues of teaching an “Inclusive” curriculum?  

As the only teacher of colour at my school, my work environment becomes a place where every day I have to negotiate the pitfalls of what W.E.B. duBois entitled the “Double Consciousness”.  Between my co-workers and the students, I am constantly treading a thin line between the “Eurocentric” and the “Afrocentric”.  The Eurocentric is necessary for survival.  It goes against my nature but I hold on to it like a life preserver.  It’s my friend from eight thirty to three everyday.  I struggle to discover its secrets.  I try to open it like a walnut but find that I do not always have the right tools.  Afrocentricity is my true nature but I’m forced, at times, to hide it like an ugly child.  Every now and then I bring it out but most often it stays hidden.  I know that if people get a chance to see it, they would see its beauty like I do.  I always feel like I have to educate those around me before I let them see my Afrocentric brilliance, in order to prepare them to discover its beauty but alas, most often, they do not see it.  Everyday my exhausting job is to not only teach what is in the curriculum but what’s not in there as well.  

When I stand at the front of my classroom, I see exactly where I use to sit, how I struggled as a student to maintain my own dreams and the dreams of my educated immigrant parents.  My parents told us that education was the 'great equalizer' in Canadian society.  That with a good education, white people would have no other choice but to give us a fair shot.  

As I look at the faces of my students I also realize that I am not very much different from them.  I too am underachieving in my professional life.  Since becoming a teacher I have failed to keep up with my own professional development and therefore remain overworked and underpaid.  I am very involved in other aspects of school life: coaching several teams, mentorship programs, Anti-racist and Ethno cultural Equity training for teachers, University partnerships, Black History month events, the development of an annual Black Youth conference, community engagement projects, curriculum development etc.  The reality is that I cannot be a classroom teacher for my entire career but I do not see a place for myself in this system.  After our Black history month assembly a student approached me to tell me how much he enjoyed it.  He said that there has been something that he’s wanted to tell me for two years.  He said: “Miss!  You are wasting your talents being a teacher.  Why don’t you find something else to do?”  He meant this truly as a complement (I think) and as I rode the bus home that day, I really considered what he said.  In many ways he is correct but what really bothered me was that he was a black student in one of my classes who was doing very poorly.  At twenty years old he is still in high school.  

• Have I failed to reach him because I am limited by the tools that I am given?  
• Do white teachers carry the feeling of having to save all the white students at our school?  
• What kind of teacher would I be if I just stayed on the margins of my school environment and tried to climb to the top of the educational bureaucracy?  
• Am I part of the problem?
• Is this the only way?
• Is this a way at all?
• Am I just making this all up?
• What if I fail?

On long days when I think that I have almost had enough, these are the questions that I consider.  

In my second year at this school the message that was sent to me by administration was that they do not know how to solve the problems for students of colour and their academic success in the public school system.  My principal at the time called me into a meeting to ask ME what WE should do about the problem of leadership among black students at the school.  As well, she thought that I should take a greater leadership role on staff.  My first reaction was to look around the room and wonder why the entire staff was not there.  Why should it be my issue only?  After discussing it for a few minutes, she asked me why I was not more active on staff.  

My answer unfortunately was, “I don’t know!” 

I am Black Bored!