I once heard a motivational speaker say that the two most important days of your life were: One, the day you were born, and two, the day you realized why you were born... In my case, I'm still working on fully understanding the latter, but I'm pretty sure I'm headed in the right direction. I teach in a Title-One (majority of student body is considered low income) school just outside of Atlanta. For those out there not akin to public education terminology Title-I would be defined and viewed as poor, low-income, marginalized, undeniably in need of support and resources. And although many of my kids are from low-income neighborhoods, have a certain "swag" in their walk, and speak with a youthful maturity that tends to mask their chronological age. They are still just babies (for the most part), still in need of warm gestures, of adult reassurance and acceptance...
I am sincerely proud of them when they say and/or do something amazing, and I cry for them when I see how quickly some of them move from public school's main form of punishment: out-of school suspencion to the more deafining silence that is state incarceration. However, this blog is not a sad one, but more about how grateful I am to be in a position to affect lives in a productive way. How good it feels when one of my kids transfers back to my school and yells out "Heyyyyyyyy Ms. V!" from clear down the hall and comes running to give me a hug. It's about rousing in their spirits a will to not allow anyone's label be the defining factor of who they are.
Low-income, single parent home, title-1, urban, education gap, unkempt, special ed, inner city... or whatever society and myself included do erroneously attempted to define them by...
You see, although I'm paid to teach them Literacy, Science, Social Studies etc. My goal in teaching them goes beyond the four rooms of my classroom, its more about helping them find their own consciousness, their own intellectual threshold, their own voice, so that they can remove themselves from the social boxes us adults sometimes try to place them in... because, in truth, there was never a box there to begin with :-)
Kua...
