Chapter 16: Below Standard

ADSS Presents Genesis

My transition into teaching was like going from being a participant in a system I subconsciously hated, to being an active participant in it. While I didn’t particularly enjoy my education experience as a student, I would eventually need a job. Much like my indecision with religion, I also found myself completely lost when it came to my career after college. I thought about going to India or Hati, both had major crises going on at the time, and I considered volunteering with the Red Cross. Domestically, I searched for jobs that had to do with service, but knew I was immature and my job options were already limited being a recent college grad with little work experience.

I ended up finding City Year. It’s a tutoring program for students across the country. They give recent high school and college graduates a chance for a service year. It’s still around today. I was between picking DC and Philadelphia, and ended up choosing Philly because it was closer to where I grew up. I did that for a year and loved it. Well, maybe not the program exactly, there’s a lot of cult like rules it had, but I loved the students. The opportunity to be in a community of other people like me, finding their way as young adults, helped build connection.

The light freedom it allowed me to be a young person in a major city. I wasn’t at home with myself, at least to the extent I am now, but I was learning about myself through that work, and I appreciated it.

As the end of the City Year year ended, there was the question of what comes next. Because of my positive experience, I felt I had a calling to become a teacher. I remember in high school, one of my teachers said I would make for a good one (Slight context, this was the same teacher who also said I was in my own world, and he loved it). I decided to apply to an alternative certification program in Boston, and was accepted. It was fairly similar to City Year, except this program prepared some of it’s participants to be teachers at “no-excuse” charter schools. I saw it as another opportunity at stable living away from home as I figured out my career. My views on charter vs public schools would change over time, but more on that in a bit.

The program was called MATCH and I lived in Jamaica Plain, Boston. At this point in my life, I felt I had started to find community with the people I met in City Year the year prior. I met someone that year that would end up becoming my girlfriend. She was choosing to do Teach for America in Milwaukee, so we did that first year long distance. Unlike City Year though, MATCH was mainly college graduates, and there was a lot less racial diversity than City Year. At first, I didn’t mind. I thought of my high school experiences and felt fairly comfortable navigating spaces when I was in the minority. Things slowly changed.

Many of the other MATCH tutors went to college at small liberal arts schools in the Northeast. I went to a PWI in Baltimore, which mainly housed lots of New Yorkers who knew how to drink. The social environments which I was trained to be around were drastically different from this group. I tried to be “one of the boys” but there came a point, similar to when I was in middle school and recognizing in myself that I didn’t want to be a follower, when I just stopped.

I remember being at a party. The tutoring corps lived together in these eight person co-ed apartments, so each floor of these 3-story buildings would have a unique personality that matched it’s members. Folks would gather together to hang out. At one of these parties, in a small modern apartment, filled with about twenty-five people, all recently out of school. It felt like everyone was arguing about nothing, passionately.

I remember being there, and then feeling this creeping feeling that I needed to leave. I tried to play it off. Laugh with the group. Act normal, act normal. But eventually, without saying a word to anyone, I left and went to my apartment and just decompressed. This was the first time I wondered if I had social anxiety.

I’m still not sure if I do. But I remember that party and the feeling vividly. I’m not sure what triggered the feeling, folks were generally kind. I sometimes just feel completely out of place. Instead of looking into that feeling, and that night, more, I just began to self-isolate a bit. This feeling was amplified during the latter part of the program.

While I was a tutor, I wasn’t knowledgeable. I got through college by continuing to show up, and doing what was needed to pass. My grades were average, but like I said before, I have never been a star student. The peers I had at MATCH were the good students. I was the kid who flicked paperballs in the back of the classroom.

A few of the tutors would work alongside a teacher to help them prepare materials. A few people also left the program mid-year when they realized it wasn’t for them. There was a void in one of these roles, and as a person who was preparing to be a math teacher, a poor choice I’ll explain later, I was asked if I would fill the role.

At first I said no. I didn’t want to do the extra work and felt totally comfortable with how things were going at the time. There was a woman who ran operations for the school that I deeply admired; her family was from Africa, she’d gone to an Ivy League school and she commanded so much respect, I just thought very highly of her. She came up to me one day during bus duty to talk to me about filling the role.

There was a small bus circle outside of the school. It had spent the fall months being constructed and paved, and this was one of it’s first days in use. I liked how it looked from the front doors of the school. Behind the parking lot, were pine trees to keep us nestled. It reminded me of the elementary schools of my childhood. Back then, I was introduced to the bussing issues of the 1970’s in Boston, and the after effects of white communities resistant to Brown v Board. I often wondered how their bus system evolved to the one in front of me, as I feigned directing traffic, in my neon yellow vest.

She basically told me to do it for the kids. I later accepted.

My first time meeting with the 7th grade math teacher and the other tutor for a planning meeting.

We all sat next to one another, in the glossy plastic chairs, I, the awkward new dynamic introduced.

It was like being thrown into an calculus class while I was still learning how to add. It wasn’t the math that was so out of my depth, though I would have issues with that too, it was the speed at which they talked and made decisions. I didn’t have the self-respect to ask them to slow down at the time. My role was to select, edit, and solve the math problems from a bank they had, then print out for the other tutors to use with their students. It was always a treat when the problem bank came with answers. I am not a math person. You’ll notice that I’m writing a book. This tells you more than enough how my mind works when it comes to the left brain, right brain split.

As one of the few African Americans in a room full of other peers, recently out of college, tutoring students using a packet of problems I created, it became a heavy responsibility to not be that “dumb black kid”. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t avoid it. Many days, the other tutors would look at the answers in the packet and see that they’re wrong. Then would look at me, and say without saying, “You want to teach math?”

I would tuck my chin inside my neck on those days.

This gets to why I chose to teach math in the first place. It was really, what I thought was, the lesser of two evils. ELA or Math. Well, I didn’t really read. When I write I barely follow any typical grammar rules, don’t know basic grammar rules, and would not want to try to explain grammar rules. Plus, I don’t know why your interpretation of that chapter is wrong. And I definitely don’t want to explain why. Math, on the other hand, at least had right and wrong. Hopefully less grading. No reading. Decision made!

I like many others, have struggled to understand concepts in math throughout my years in school. The first F I had, came in a math class, in high school. I had gone from the general education class, where I had received straight A’s the year before, to the honors group, where by second semester, I received an F. I checked out completely from that class. It was like all energy sapped away when in that room. It was outside of the normal high school for some reason. One of those small, one room, extension buildings. Dark yellow lights, no windows.

I would stay after school for tutoring. I had a pretty teacher. I wanted her to like me. But we just did not click. I missed the days when it felt like I had a teacher that cared about me. I felt this one letting me slip through the cracks. I wasn’t self-aware enough to disconnect myself from my performance in school. I thought the letter grades meant something about me as a person. A measure of my worth.

After about the first month of school, I knew I was out of my depth. The content required prior knowledge I didn’t have. My father was adamant that I take the class over the general education track. I didn’t feel I was prepared, but I didn’t speak up for myself. In that class, I felt I could not conceptualize the math in a way where where it was at all memorable. I didn’t always see the logic to it. If things were supposed to build from one another, I didn’t see how.

I’ve heard, over the years, how one’s ability at math, just represents their ability to stick with problems. I often gave up on problems that were too hard for me. Over never tried at all. The fear of failure, pulled me down, taking a chance, always just out of reach.

I struggled through the last part of that year at MATCH. As you may or may not know, teachers normally have to get certified to teach. To get certified, you normally have to get tested. We all went to take the Massachusetts teacher certification test on the same weekend. When I got my first round score back, I saw I didn’t pass. The passing score was a 250. I scored a 248. Those two points felt like they extended my year in Boston. It felt like time stretched over the entire city, yet over me, there was a cloud. I stuck out in my further isolation as the year turned to spring.

I told one person. The others found out through word of mouth. Luckily no one put me down for it. Without anyone ever acknowledging it, it reinforced the idea to the others, that black people weren’t that smart. They expected to see me fail. Or I expected to see myself fail, and succeeded in that failure.

I don’t know if I was ever meant to teach math. Though, what I can say with clarity is that standardized test do not capture the creative thinking that I think I was, and many others are, innately born with. Answering sets of questions will never capture our abilities, the metrics attempt to quantify the intangible. I look back and wish I didn’t internalize the failure I felt like I was.

In some ways, my life’s purpose has turned into a mission to prove just how wrong tests have been about me since I was a child.

I took the test again, maybe a month later. During that time I couldn’t student teach like my peers were doing. I passed the second time around. I didn’t see the score. I purchased a study book and practiced the entire time.

The complexities of testing are manifold. Who is the test made for? Teachers should of course have knowledge of their content area to teach it. Being skilled at a subject doesn’t necessarily mean you are meant to teach it. I’m not sure what the answer is. All I know is, my path into teaching was based on finding a job that would provide a stable paycheck. Out of college, with my philosophy degree, I wasn’t sure what options I had.

The planner people will say, that’s why you don’t get a degree in a useless major. I should have been more practical. But I’ve never regretted learning what I thought was interesting. My question has always been, why are people forced to choose? It’s like, if a person choosing to learn about something less practical, they are less valuable. Yet, we all indulge in the arts in some kind of way. We explore ideas, find interests, we enjoy when folks can take us away, through creativity. Those folks drive the cultural fabric, woven throughout the world.

There are definitely times when it benefits to be practical. I can also reflect on situations when I’ve gained by being wholly impractical. Those miscalculations have made me a much more resilient person than others. There was something within me, pulling towards my dreams. While I didn’t yet know how to stand, I was learning that I could fall, and get back up.

By the time I entered the classroom the first time, I knew that I had the ability to bounce back. A trait I would use later on in life.