Though it has been brutally hot in New York for the past few days, it is still double-dutch season in Aftaschoo, and everyone wants to be outside. Ropes, it would seem, are not readily available; my favorite student has twenty feet of wire-bare phone cord whose use she metes out imperiously to her classmates. The favorite chant goes like this:
Strawberry, strawberry, cream on top
Tell me the name of yo' sweetheart:
Is it A -- B -- C -- D...
Phone cord does not have the heft of a "real" jump rope, so usually that verse ends early in the alphabet as someone gets caught in the slow-flying strands. The next verses go like this:
How many babies will you have?
One -- two -- three -- four...
How many bottles (or Pampers) will you have?
One -- two -- three -- four...
Where will you get married at?
House -- church -- toi-let-bowl!
When I am jumping (which is never long, because white girls can't jump), I refuse to jump for the "babies" verse. "You not gonna have any babies?" asks my favorite student.
"I have other things I want to do," I tell her. "Like writing a book." She looks crestfallen. Her mother is nearing the final months of pregnancy, and my girl has been talking excitedly about it since the beginning of our program in September.
The past few weeks in Aftaschoo have been balmier than the weather itself. Despite my early difficulties, I have really enjoyed working in the program, enough so that I can't imagine a time when I won't take three hours out of an afternoon to play with a bunch of kids. Every now and again I consider going to teacher's college. The thought makes me happy. I enjoy being a part of a teaching community; I feel like I'm really getting something done here. Plus, you always have some small loved one to gossip about with other people who share your sense of purpose. The one thing I'd change, I think, is that I'd like to be playing some sort of support role for teachers, rather than cleaning up around the edges of the work they do with homework help. I don't know if such a job exists, but I think it's what I'd like to do. Sometimes I want to be the principal instead, because the one we have is such an as$hole.
But I can't, I'm not going to teacher's college, I have to resist it, and here's why:
1) First of all, it would ruin my best routine from high school. For those of you who weren't aware, my grandmother was college counselor at my high school and my mother was her assistant. She had also been a teacher and student there herself. (My father, grandfather, and stepmother also worked at the college next door at various times, and I have two aunts who are also in one way or another connected to academe.) So when people asked me what I was going to do in college, I got to roll my eyes and groan that no matter what I did people would expect me to show up in another four years, diploma in hand, asking for a job.
Despite the joke, I really felt that was the expectation. I felt pressured to go into primary academia, and that feeling lingers today. I still can't shake that old aphorism "those who can, do; those who can't, teach;" although I loved them dearly, I always had the feeling that my high school teachers were either writers manque, or historians manque, or something like. I want to aim higher, which leads me to my second point:
2) I do want to write books. I don't know much about publishing, but it doesn't seem compatible with teaching below college level. Would publishers look askance at me if I spent my days pounding the Playdough with first-graders and then tried to pound out a few novellas in the summer? Is a summer really enough time to pitch and write a book? My continuing desire for a writing career also raises another issue:
3) The more I work with little kids, the more I feel I am atrophying. I can feel my neural pathways being rewritten to incorporate Herculean patience, simplify and slow my speech, and accommodate being around thinkers who haven't yet gotten it into their precious little heads that 3x4 is the same thing as 4x3. I have seen this happen to other people, so I know I'm not alone; I know a few early-childhood workers in particular who seem to be stuck in perpetual nursery-talk mode. I don't want to be that woman. I love my complex snooty brain!
4) Moreover, I still can't handle being a full-time nurturer. I am a tomboy and a feminist and I want to be out in the field fighting with the boys, not bringing up babies.(Well, I guess I conceive of education as activist outreach anyway, so I'm bound to gravitate more towards extending the minds of those who are about to become citizens of the larger democracy...)
5) Speaking of which, I have practical and ethical concerns about working for the government/Board of Ed. Sometimes as I find myself telling a child to take off his hat or not to get a drink of water, I snap to, and I think, I swear to god once I leave this job I will never again be an instrument in the oppression of a minor. I know too much about the history of public education to participate unthinkingly in it. I'm not sure how I'd deal with standards when I feel so strongly that everyone learns at her own pace. I also don't know how politically open I could be before I'd get fired, and at present, while I am young and foolish, it's proving hard for me to shut up about my ideals.
6) Finally, I know where I would want to go to teacher's college. Pacific Oaks is where my best teachers went; I credit it with much of the success of my elementary school. (I am sitting here salivating over its course catalog... among other things, they have a sociolinguistics course, which is something I've been dying to study for a while now.) The problem is, Pacific Oaks is back in Pasadena, and I ain't movin'. (Also, at second glance, it appears to be elementary-only, and I do think I'm aiming to work with the taller, pimply, gun-totin' kind of students.)
Right then. Anyone who can disabuse me of my hangups wins the satisfaction of knowing they've gotten one more warm body into the teacher-hungry public school system.
Posted by Gus at May 04, 2001 10:01 AM