Dear Paulo

Letters from Those Who Dare Teach

Sonia Nieto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317261537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Dear Paulo: Letters from Those Who Dare Teach is a heartfelt response from teachers, academics, and community workers to the work of the internationally renowned educator and author Paulo Freire. From newly minted teachers terrified of facing their first day in the classroom to seasoned academics whose work has largely been inspired by Freire, this collection, accompanied by photographs of Freire with some of the letter writers, is both a loving memorial and a call to action to work for social justice, praxis, and democracy, ideals envisioned and brilliantly articulated by Paulo.

Part 1: Beginnings

We must dare so that we can continue to teach for a long time under conditions that we know well: low salaries, lack of respect, and the ever-present risk of becoming prey to cynicism. We must dare to learn how to dare in order to say no to the bureaucratization of the mind to which we are exposed every day.

—Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach (1998c), p. 3.

Whether we teach preschoolers or doctoral students, the word beginnings brings forth images of the first days of school: backpacks and books, crayons and art supplies, exciting ideas and new discoveries, falling leaves and crisp weather. These are, of course, idealized images that are sometimes far from the reality of the first days experienced by many. For some, the first day of school means returning to decrepit schools with no materials, little excitement, and ill-prepared teachers. For older students, it may mean boring lectures and what Paulo Freire (1970) called “banking education.” In spite of the reality, the idea of beginnings is enticing because it promises hope in the face of the cynicism to which Freire refers above. It is fitting, then, that we begin this book of letters to Paulo with letters about beginnings, not only the first day of school but also the first day of teaching and a new way to “read the class.”

In her letter, Mary Cowhey responds to the themes of each of the letters Paulo wrote in his book Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach (1998c). She illustrates, through her musings and stories, what it means to “read the class,” and, in the end, what it means to be a critical and loving teacher of young children. Following is Mary Ginley’s poignant reflection of her “thirty-nine first days,” reflections that underline her commitment to teaching after so many years.

Mary Cowhey

Reading the Class

There is something mysterious, something called “vocation,” that explains why so many teachers persist with so much devotion in spite of the immoral salaries they receive. Not only do they remain, but they fulfill as best they can their commitment. And do it with love.

—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (1998a), p. 126.

October 17, 2000

Dear Paulo,

When I first read “I do not have the truth; this book contains truths, and my dream is that those truths challenge or question the positions taken by the book’s readers” (Freire, 1998c, p. 47), I thought about a question my class of first- and second-graders struggled with for most of last year: “How do you find the truth in history?” It started with a discussion about Columbus after I had read two different books, one portraying Columbus in pure, simple, and heroic terms and the other portraying him in a less flattering light as an invader and thief. When I asked students which version they thought was more accurate, they chose the latter, a book entitled Encounter by Jane Yolen (1992). When I asked them how they could find out which was truer, they said they could read more books.

I told them that most of the other books about Columbus in our school library would fall into the heroic category. Would that convince them that the heroic one was true? They said they would ask a teacher. I told them that from now until they graduate, they will have at least ten more teachers. What if all of the other teachers said Columbus was a hero? Would that make me a liar? They said no, that other teachers might not know this other story.

Eventually we got around to the idea of primary source documents, including journals, letters, and eyewitness accounts, but then a student raised the idea that people could lie in their letters or journals. She suggested interviewing people who were there, but another student pointed out that they could change the story to make themselves look better in it, because no one wants to look bad (this was before they realized that the people they wanted to interview were long dead).

They puzzled over this question all year, returning to it again and again. Many times I was tempted to cut to the chase, to say, “Look, kids, it’s all about multiple perspectives,” but I bit my tongue and let them sort it out. Eventually, Julius Lester, a well-known writer of children’s books and professor at the local university, came to visit us, and the students asked him about this question. He said, “There are many truths in history.” He talked with the students about different ways he pursues the truth in his historical writing.

Paulo, I like how you encourage questioning. As a child I was a good and well-behaved student. The one thing I consistently got into trouble for was questioning and contradicting my teachers. My father was a teacher, and he thought that this behavioral flaw of mine was particularly outrageous. Luckily, the questioning voice was never successfully silenced. I liked the quotation from the foreword: “What? Why? How? To what end? For whom? Against whom? By whom? In favor of whom? In favor of what? These are questions that provoke literacy learners to focus on the substantiveness of things, that is, their reasons for being, their purpose, the way they are done, and so on” (Macedo and Araújo Freire, quoted in the foreword, p. xi).

One of my very best questioners is a second-grader named Jimmy. Jimmy is great at philosophy and logic; he also has a reading disability. He has such a passion for learning that he single-handedly started a fad within our classroom culture to “do research.”

Jimmy came up to me breathlessly on the first day of school this year, saying, “Ms. Cowhey, you know how last year in first grade we learned there was slavery and there was even slavery in Puerto Rico? Well, I was in Puerto Rico this summer to visit my cousins and I got a coin, a real old Spanish coin, like from the time of slavery, and I lost it in my house, but I’m gonna find it and bring it in so you could see it because I think maybe someone coulda used it to buy a slave in them days!”

A few days later Jimmy found the coin (a museum facsimile) and brought it in. Our student teacher brought him to the library, and he took out a couple of books on coins. I observed how he interested other students in the project, inviting them to sit beside him as he studied the pictures. When he found one that resembled his coin, he asked the partner to read the caption to him. He listened closely, then continued studying in this manner.

The next day I observed two first-grade girls (who had been hiding out in the classroom library playing house during quiet reading time the day before) carrying a huge stack of nature encyclopedias to their table. Michelle dropped her books with a dramatic sigh. “Oh, I have so much research to do! Look at all these books I have to read!” Her friend, Angelina, dropped her stack and imitated the sigh. “Me too! We have to do so much research today. Well, we better get started!”

Another boy brought in two foreign coins and requested to go to the library to get more books with which to research his coins. Three other students joined him. In the midst of this, there was Jimmy the trend-setter, dutifully replacing the forty-year-old set of nature encyclopedias on the shelves in numerical order, scouring the class for missing volumes like a worried shepherd, or squinting through a magnifying glass to count the legs on an insect a classmate had brought in from the playground and flipping through the pages of a Peterson’s field guide to identify it.

Reading about the first day of school, I thought back to my very first day of teaching a first day of school. I remember I showed my lesson plans to a more experienced first-grade teacher for her advice. She glanced at my plan, which included a morning meeting, a math lesson to introduce materials and assess students, a read-aloud of Santiago, a shared reading of I Went Walking with a dramatization and introduction of the pocket chart, an introduction of the ABC center, reading aloud a chapter of My Father’s Dragon after lunch, a discussion of student goals, a choice time period after gym, and some quiet reading at the end of the day. She cackled and said, “You’re not really thinking you’re going to teach the first day, are you?” I was so mad and embarrassed that I wanted to cry. My face burned. She walked out of my room, still laughing at me. I went back to taping up Romare Bearden artwork from an old calendar over the coat hooks and thought, “Damn straight I’m going to teach the first day!”

At the end of the first day, I was in tears. I loved my class and had, in fact, begun to teach, but I had one student who troubled me greatly. From my home visit a couple of days earlier, I knew that he had been abused as a young child and had been placed in foster care and then adopted earlier that summer. He was a bright boy who moved and talked constantly. He was physically very aggressive with other children and demanded constant attention. I felt overwhelmed by my inability to work with this child. I thought, “They knew this boy in kindergarten. They know I am a brand new, inexperienced teacher. Why did they assign such a challenging student to a novice?” I quickly learned that it wasn’t an accident or an oversight. The most difficult students had been deliberately placed in the classes of the two new first-grade teachers, neither of whom was involved in making the class assignments.

The principal observed and was very concerned but didn’t want to force the issue with the other teachers by reassigning him to another class where the teachers were clearly reluctant to accept him. The guidance counselor told me that she was sure it would work out. I asked his adoptive parents, two moms, to come in so we could talk. At first his parents said they thought he would do better if he sat at his own desk, in rows, and did work sheets. I said that I didn’t teach that way. I explained that while he was strong in many academic areas, he was challenged in his social development, the area that would present his greatest challenge in first grade. One of his mothers was skeptical about my teaching methods but began volunteering in my classroom one day a week. That helped, having another adult in the classroom and having her make her own conclusions about the effectiveness of my teaching methods. I quickly recruited more parent volunteers. We worked on some behavior modification and some classroom adaptations. The boy flourished in the class. At the end of first grade, his mother was concerned about his class placement for second grade. I asked her what she would do. She said, “I’m going to recommend to the principal that you loop up to second grade.” I was shocked, but she was serious. I began teaching the multiage looping model the next year [n.b.: “looping” means that a teacher goes up to the next grade with her students], with this wonderful, challenging boy again.

When I read “The best is to tell the learners, in a demonstration of being human and limited, how one feels at the time. It is to speak to them about the very right to fear, which cannot be denied to the educator. Teachers have as much right to fear as the learners do” (Freire, 1998c, p. 48), I thought about the first day of school this year. Sweet little Lucia, a five-year-old first-grader, raised her hand during the morning meeting and said, looking around at everyone, “I feel kind of scared.” Spontaneously, the other students and I began to share how we were feeling at that moment: nervous, excited, apprehensive. Of course, I hadn’t read this letter at the time, but perhaps that exchange, which came about so naturally, illustrates your statement: “The fear of performing on that first day of class … is completely natural” (ibid.).

In my class, I have made it a practice to discuss philosophy. In our first philosophical discussion of the year, regarding the topic of bravery, I asked students if they thought there could be a person who was never afraid. Some students paused to consider this, but Binh shot his hand up quickly. He said yes. I asked him who was never afraid.

“You, teacher, you are never afraid!”

I laughed and said, “Me? I am often brave, but I still get afraid sometimes.”

Binh looked shocked. “You? What are you afraid of, teacher?”

I paused, as my mind flooded with the many fears that haunt me, still vivid memories of violent, frightening times, scrambling to think which one of my many fears would be tame enough to share. (Paulo, what a perfect time that would have been to talk about my first-day fears!) I quickly decided to share my fear of hurricanes, a fear that began when my family got caught in a hurricane while camping. We hadn’t received notice to evacuate until the storm was upon us. The story sparked a torrent of other storm fear stories, mostly related to the terrible storm we had had that year on June 2, which the children still called “the Friday storm.”

More recently we have read aloud Life Doesn’t Frighten Me by Maya Angelou (1996). It had been a gift to Fergus, a second-grader, in celebration of the end of his nearly three-year chemotherapy treatment. We discussed Maya Angelou’s tough talk in the verses and the scary illustrations by Jean-Michel Basquiat. The students discussed the idea that Angelou couldn’t really not be frightened by ghosts and big dogs and sounds in the hall because they are really scary things. They asked a lot of questions: Then why does she say they don’t frighten her? Does she lie on purpose? Is she lying to us? To fool us? Or is she lying to herself? Is she trying to fool herself into feeling brave so she can face those scary things? Then they all thought of their scariest image and illustrated it for a Life Doesn’t Frighten Me book of our own. At one point I wondered if this was too scary for the children. I have fixed your line—“In reality, facing a fear is the first step in turning it into courage” (Freire, 1998c, p. 48)—on a post-it and stuck that to the lesson I do on fear. It must be said.

You write about reading the class. I guess I jump the gun. Part of how I address my fear about the first day of school is to face it, as you suggest. I spend the week before the first day of school visiting my students’ homes, meeting the students and their families. I can’t wait for the first day of school, and so I...