I wanted to be a high school teacher since I was 14.
I resolutely decided this during the winter break of my freshman year, and by winter break the following year I knew the
university and teaching certification program I wanted to attend: The University of Texas - Austin's UTeach Liberal Arts Program. Anyone invested in my success knew this about me, "Tara wants to be a teacher. Classic Virgo."
So when I quit my first official paying gig as a teacher after 4 months and decided to pursue a graduate degree in something that has nothing to do with education, everyone was shocked (myself included). It seems apropos that my first blog post should address my "drastic" transition.
THE EDUCATION SYSTEM There are so many things wrong with the American education system, especially in Texas, that we're all aware of, ranging from lack of resources and staffing, censorship, shootings, over-testing, refusal to fail students… the list goes on and on. I had calculated for most of these things, and honestly, it didn't seem that much different from the military, but there was one thing that I was completely unaware of and unprepared for. When I found myself struggling with it I had no idea what it was, what exactly I was feeling, and why the other teachers around me weren't experiencing it. It wasn't until I started reading Mikki Kendall's book, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot, that I understood what had happened. White Feminism. I felt oppressed. No one else felt this because they were either unaffected or complicit.
WHAT IT WAS: WHITE FEMINISM White feminism is synonymous with mainstream feminism, in her book Kendall describes the ways in which mainstream feminism is paradoxically exclusive and only calls for solidarity in the interest of improving middle-class White women's lives at the expense of others.¹ Indeed White women do experience oppression due to sexism, but they still experience the privilege of their Whiteness and maintain power over women AND men of color because race always trumps other identity markers. While White feminists are aware of intersectionality and frequently use the term, many fail to fully understand that this means we all have different needs, are our own subject matter experts regarding them, and have formed our own version of feminism to address said needs.
Kendall suggests that in order for feminism to account for the complexity of all women, solidarity is not the answer, equal partnerships are, and this means embracing the notion that "some places are not meant for you."¹ How exactly does this work in education when teachers are predominantly White and female who subscribe to mainstream feminism, making them complicit in certain forms of oppression? It doesn't. And in response, a trend of Black teachers, especially females, leaving predominantly White staffed schools develops.
I began to feel it before school had even started. At our first English Department Professional Development (PD) meeting, the school's Equity, Diversity, and Inclusivity Committee was highlighted to encourage teachers to join. The committee was initially headed by a White female teacher from our department who was integral in the committee's founding but had since stepped down from leading it once the group had solid footing to allow a person of color to take over. And just as I thought, "This school was the right choice," the department head, a White woman, interjected that if people thought a White woman shouldn't be the head of a diversity and inclusion team then those people don't know what diversity and inclusion are. At first, I couldn't quite put my finger on why this statement didn't sit right with my soul, so I did what most marginalized people do - played it off and waited for something more overt to happen.
WHAT I WAS FEELING: OPPRESSED
A lot of people consider themselves allies, most of which are self-proclaimed. I considered myself an ally of the LGBQTIA+ community since I was 10 until I finally started researching the spectrum of queerness, gender identity, and sexual orientation and realized at the age of 27 that what I felt wasn't allyship but camaraderie, I was a member of the community! But that's a different story, the point is that many of us claim we stand with others without fully understanding them because it takes effort and emotional investment on the part of the privileged.¹ As a result, the ego of an ally is often fragile and doesn't handle being challenged well, often citing "what they've done for ____" to cajole themselves instead of listening to the marginalized.
The second nine-week grading period started and I had been running on E since the 2ⁿᵈ week of school for a variety of reasons despite consistently reaching out for support. I'd finally worked out a unit plan after accepting that I was never going to get one from my professional learning community (PLC), despite addressing this issue with my department head weeks ago, when I received an email that turned into a phone call from the counselor of one of my Advanced students who wanted to drop to regular English. To be honest, I wasn't surprised. In my day, a lot of students signed up for Advanced/Pre-AP and dropped to regular at the beginning of the 2ⁿᵈ grading period after assessing the difficulty and workload. But I was surprised that a counselor was essentially requesting that I fight to keep a student in Advanced when the number of students enrolled in Advanced classes significantly outnumbered those in Academic (i.e. regular) classes. Their numbers weren't hurting, and the conversation was not framed at gauging why the student wasn't doing well but rather what I wasn't doing well. This student was bright, but had a fixed mindset and expected to do well because regular English was child's play, and when that wasn't the case they became overwhelmed and procrastinated. When they finally turned in their major essays they were pretty good and showed potential but would receive a failing grade due to late points. Since I taught both Advanced and Academic English, I saw how little we challenged Academic students - I couldn't believe some of the things we counted as grades - and understood why the jump to Advanced was so stark. If they wanted to stay in Advanced they needed to change their outlook, come to tutorials, and ideally make friends in class who were actively engaged.
Some of my students simply were not cognitively ready for Advanced, their development of formal operations wasn't strong enough yet, others simply didn't care enough about the class and expected the leniency they'd gotten used to during and post-pandemic, and others just needed to work harder if they wanted to do well. I explained this to all of my classes before starting the new unit, reminding them that now that they should have the basics down the pace of the class was going to be faster. Now was the time to decide if this meant they needed the pacing and scaffolding of a regular class, needed to hunker down and dedicate more time and effort to the class, or acknowledge that they just didn't care for Advanced English. Either option was fine but it needed to be their choice because they are the ones in charge of their learning. After class, the student thanked me for giving them agency (a topic we had covered in the previous unit) and I explained that I believed they could be successful in Advanced if that was what they wanted to do, but they decided they still wanted to drop because it was taking away from a vocational class they genuinely wanted to pursue once they graduated. After recounting all this to their counselor, she was not happy. She told me, politely of course, that I was being exclusive and how hard it can be for an African-American student. In fact, this particular student had never taken an Advanced class before and the counselor had worked very hard to convince them to sign up. It is important to note that this counselor was not Black (or a person of color that I could tell from her name and thumbnail photo), and Black students only make up 5% of the school. The more Black students you can get in an Advanced class, the better your numbers look, never mind how much harder it is for them and how demoralizing it can be to be surrounded by White and Asian students consistently outperforming them. I should know, that was me in high school. It is also significant to note that it is uncommon for a counselor to request a teacher go out of their way to keep a student from leaving Advanced. At the end of the phone call, she said I was the educator and would trust whatever I recommended, I repeated that it is the student's decision. A few days later I was sitting down with my department head to discuss why I was excluding students in the classroom… By the end of that conversation it was decided that I wasn't doing enough to differentiate for my students and the counselor had the student's best interest at heart because it wasn't about numbers and race, after all this counselor had done so much to break down barriers for students of color. And while I was hired because my department head loved that I spoke my mind, I should just listen and do what everyone else in my PLC was doing for my first year; never mind that everyone in the PLC was doing something different, on different schedules, and few teachers shared their slides. That was the first time I fought back tears in front of a colleague because I viscerally felt the shift: I had fallen out of favor with my department head because I was no longer the "good girl."
WHY NO ONE ELSE FELT IT: NICE FEMINISTS
I am not a nice feminist. "There are people in feminist circles who are nice, who are diplomatic, with soothing ways and the warm personality that enables them to put up with other people's [nonsense] without complaining… I'm the feminist people call when being sweet isn't enough… who walks into a meeting and says, 'Hey, you're [messing] up and here's how,' and nice feminists feign shock at my harsh words."¹ In my experience, nice feminists are usually White, White-passing/adjacent, and sometimes Asian. I believe this is the case because White and several Asian cultures value indirect and emotionally restrained communication styles as opposed to Black and Latinx cultures which value directness and emotional expression. Bearing in mind that the Intercultural Conflict Style Inventory measures individuals along continuums so there is a lot of range on the spectrum, it is noted that cultural groups have a preferred style.²
Each conflict resolution style has its pros and cons with none being inherently better than another; however, patriarchal White America undoubtedly prefers that women are near the median of direct and indirectness while landing somewhere in the emotionally restrained area. As a result, it is favorable to have a discussion or accommodation conflict resolution style, and while White feminists say they reject the patriarchy and therefore should embrace all conflict resolution styles (i.e. engagement and dynamic) more often than not they do not because they have yet to fully root out internalized patriarchal notions and their own racial biases. What this looks like in education, is hiring a Black teacher because they "love that they speak their mind" but only as it serves their agenda. A nice feminist uses preferred conflict styles or opts out of confrontation altogether, and fits the "patriarchy's preset mold of a 'good girl,'" self-sacrificing and "seemingly willing to be directed;" they are more likely to be "offered more resources by teachers, employers, or other people with power to effect positive change in her life."¹ This is not to say that all nice feminists are necessarily "good girls" but are often perceived this way and benefit more than their counterparts who use a less preferred conflict style and are more invested in maintaining their true-self at the expense of being liked. I think I always try to be a nice feminist when entering a new space to counteract the Angry Black Woman archetype, but when I find that it doesn't offer me any more protection or resources than being myself I say to heck with it. I often wonder if it's because Black girls/women are rarely viewed as innocent and therefore exploitation is a given. Whatever the case may be, as soon as I put my foot down, challenge an idea, or stand firmly for what I believe the resources (however minute) are rescinded, and cold-shoulders ice me out.
There are so many examples I can cite from my time at the school but the goal of this post isn't to be an exposé. I'm not writing this to reform education or to badmouth my previous colleagues. I'm writing this for catharsis and to explain the change in my career path because this experience largely informs the line of research I want to pursue.
On that note, I will say that since day one I had been creating almost all of my own lessons, instructional materials, and 90% of my assessments with very minimal guidance from my PLCs. Normally, first-year teachers are spoon-fed slides, lessons, and materials to tweak to their style so they can get the hang of classroom management, figure out an efficient way to grade, work and personal life balance, IEPs and ARDs, and the countless miscellaneous tasks that come with being a teacher. However, neither of my PLCs wanted to use the textbook or the district-provided curriculum so units were created by pulling from past experiences and new ideas without formally crafting unit plans with identified TEKS/skills, uniformity in how skills would be taught, and pre-established teaching materials. All the teachers on both my PLCs, with the exception of myself and one other, were veteran teachers, so they had a repertoire of previous lessons/materials to create their lessons the day of or a day or two in advance usually sharing after the fact, if they shared at all, which was typically too late for me because I was one of the few teachers on my teams who had both preps on both days so I usually wound up ahead of everyone else. I observed classes during my planning period, had spoken with other teachers on my team, my mentor teacher, teachers on different teams, teachers in different subjects, teachers in different schools, teachers in different districts, my PLC leads, my department head, my department assistant principal, and my principal about how much work I was constantly doing and that if we weren't going to utilize created resources I needed more structure so I could prepare my own with more lead time and know that I was preparing my students adequately. I was literally doing more work than a friend of mine who was a PLC lead for the same grade level at another school in the same district!
Teachers outside of the English department or in different schools were shocked and wanted to help but couldn't; and within the English department, I received mixed responses with some saying I should at least have X, Y, or Z and encouraging me to talk to people I had already talked to, some not understanding what I meant by structure, some who recommended finding time to plan with one or two teachers in my PLC separately from everyone else, some who completely agreed with me but refused to vocalize their concerns wanting to avoid confrontation, and some saying that the first year is always this hard. I tried very hard to straddle the line between being a nice feminist and being myself but soon enough teachers stopped dropping in to check on me, stopped responding to my requests for clarity or any comment I made, but always had time to listen to or check-in on the other new White teachers on the team. Once I sat by myself during a school-wide PD meeting because I thought it would be better to physically isolate myself than be socially isolated at a crowded table. Only my neighbor teacher, a cohort buddy of mine who taught World Geography, and a complete stranger from the math department stopped by to check on me. It almost made me feel seen until the math teacher, a White woman, confused me with the art teacher, a Black woman I looked nothing like; this was the third time I had been confused for her despite never having stood next to each other to specifically avoid the other-race effect. I fought back tears and left school early that day so I could cry in the comfort of my home while lamenting to my distressed and confused White boyfriend about how I hated being a Black woman and my life would be so much easier if people could at the very least tell me apart from a woman I've only seen twice.
WOULD YOU EVER GO BACK TO SECONDARY EDUCATION? No. By the time I got out of there in December, I was 20-30 LBs heavier with back pain from the rapid weight gain, my relationship was on life support, my autoimmunity issue was wreaking havoc on my body due to all the stress, and I was deep in a major depressive episode. I've kept all the notes, cards, and gifts I've received from students at various schools. I frequently miss teaching. I think about the students who cried when I left, students who told me they wanted to become a teacher because of me, students who weren't even mine that just loved seeing a person of color on the staff and sometimes it almost makes me want to look at available teaching positions. I really loved teaching. But I really hate how I was treated and the latent White savior complex still pervasive in the education system, harming the students of color they think they're protecting. To all my friends who have stayed and continue to fight the good fight, I commend you and hope you continue to do so for as long as it serves you.
I have decided that there is another way I can serve myself while serving others.
References
¹Kendall, M. (2020). Hood Feminism: Notes from the women that a movement forgot. Penguin Books.
²ICS Inventory, LLC. (n.d.). The intercultural conflict style Inventory (ICS) improves communication and conflict resolution across cultures. https://icsinventory.com/ics-inventory/the-ics-improves-communication-conflict-resolution-across-cultures
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