Education and expectations

Lauren at Feministe talks about being a single teenage mom, getting through college, and becoming a teacher herself. You should read it.

When I was student teaching this past semester, battling my Basic students’ resistance to the educational process, I finally asked my students why some of them hadn’t opted for that alternative school from which I secretly graduated. It was a more organic layout, just a few hours a day, individual work toward short-term goals. For those who needed a more structured day, it wasn’t an option. But the rest of them. The rest of them considered it a cop-out. This surprised me. I figured that many of them would be attracted to an easy way out with the same ends as attending eight hours of high school a day. I wondered what they would think of me if I dropped the teacherly facade and was honest about my high school experience.

At one point I raised the risk level and revealed that I had been no model student in high school, that I thought many of them had what it takes to get through a four-year college, especially if I could do so. They laughed at me, accusing me of being some goody-two-shoes that had no idea about the difficulties of their lives. I didn’t tell them about the teenage pregnancy, or the criminal record, or the drugs, or the stay in juvenile hall, or the two trips to rehab, the years in AA. Sure, I don’t know the poverty, but I do know the expectations of failure. What I did say was that I was not a model student, that I had a past that was comparable to their present, and that I was within weeks of my degree. You can do it, I said. Trust me.

A while ago Mark posted about the fact that physicists come from quite diverse backgrounds, but a supportive environment is a common thread. Like Mark, I didn’t grow up in a high-powered intellectual environment, although it was basically middle-class; most of my family worked for U.S. Steel, my father was the first person in his family to get a college degree (my mother never did), and my parents divorced before I entered first grade. Graduated from a large public high school, got through college and grad school on fellowships. But I did receive support from all over, which is crucial to believing enough in yourself to ever try something as impractical as becoming a professor of theoretical physics.

My friends at Project Exploration specialize in taking underprivileged children and turning them on to learning by getting them interested in science. Roughly speaking, none of the kids who work with them would have expected to attend college, and all of them eventually do. One of the stories I’ve heard Gabe Lyon tell is the reaction of a group of inner-city kids to taking a long train ride out to Montana to dig for dinosaurs. All sorts of things to be excited about — train, dinosaurs, field trip. But here’s what they can’t get over: stars in the sky! Not something their familiar with from their everyday lives in Chicago.

Nobody pops out of the womb in possession of a complete skill set appropriate to tackling life’s challenges. A lot of kids in our country grow up in environments where looking at the stars, literally and figuratively, is not encouraged. Here’s hoping we find new ways to convince them that they can do it.