Teaching While Black

A New Voice on Race and Education in New York City

Pamela Lewis

• Publisher: Empire State Editions
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780823271412, 9780823271405
• eBook ISBN: 9780823271429
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Biographies

Teaching should never be color-blind. In a world where many believe the best approach toward eradicating racism is to feign ignorance of our palpable physical differences, a few have led the movement toward convincing fellow educators not only to consider race but to use it as the very basis of their teaching. This is what education activist and writer Pamela Lewis has set upon to do in her compelling book, Teaching While Black: A New Voice on Race and Education in New York City. As the title suggests, embracing blackness in the classroom can be threatening to many and thus challenging to carry out in the present school system.Unapologetic and gritty, Teaching While Black offers an insightful, honest portrayal of Lewis's turbulent eleven-year relationship within the New York City public school system and her fight to survive in a profession that has undervalued her worth and her understanding of how children of color learn best. Tracing her educational journey with its roots in the North Bronx, Lewis paints a vivid, intimate picture of her battle to be heard in a system struggling to unlock the minds of the children it serves, while stifling the voices of teachers of color who hold the key. The reader gains full access to a perspective that has been virtually ignored since the No Child Left Behind Act, through which questions surrounding increased resignation rates by teachers of color and failing test scores can be answered. Teaching While Black is both a deeply personal narrative of a black woman's real-life experiences and a clarion call for culturally responsive teaching. Lewis fearlessly addresses the reality of toxic school culture head-on and gives readers an inside look at the inert bureaucracy, heavy-handed administrators, and ineffective approach to pedagogy that prevent inner-city kids from learning. At the heart of Lewis's moving narrative is her passion. Each chapter delves deeper into the author's conscious uncoupling from the current trends in public education that diminish proven remedies for academic underachievement, as observed from her own experiences as a teacher of students of color. Teaching While Black summons everyone to re-examine what good teaching looks like. Through a powerful vision, together with practical ideas and strategies for teachers navigating very difficult waters, Lewis delivers hope for the future of teaching and learning in inner-city schools.

1

Is This Love?

This is a love story. Thankfully, I’m still alive to tell it and, dare I say, proud to still be standing. I cannot say the same for large numbers of my colleagues, many of whom have left us, and the children, all alone.

I’m not talking about white flight. Sisters and brothers, not that we had too many to begin with in this profession, are leaving their communities to teach in others that are easier to deal with. Many are leaving the profession entirely. The focus has always been on white teachers who leave, particularly those in programs that grant free degrees. It is often assumed by members of the black community that these white teachers lack the commitment, the love, or the ache in their soul to make things better because these children are not their people. We are not surprised when they leave to teach in schools with white walls and white children. We are more angered when it is we who abandon our own. When a teacher of color leaves her children, we are bewildered. We do not understand how one can care so deeply and still flee. We do not consider the possibility that having these qualities is reason enough to walk away. There is such a thing as loving so hard it hurts.

Many who stay also run the risk of going numb. Over the years, I’ve met teachers who have grown so desensitized to the side effects of poverty and systemic dysfunction that they utter atrocities like, “Look, I’m going to be paid whether you learn or not.”

I’m sure that just as many doctors, lawyers, and police officers have lost feeling in more than simply their fingers and toes. We’ve all heard of the doctor with the horrendous bedside manner, the one who feels no guilt for saying, “Tina, your mother has only a few weeks to live,” never once looking up from his paperwork. Or the lawyer who knows that his client is guilty but defends him anyway because the check is fat enough. And police officers? Growing up in public housing, I’ve seen more cops who don’t care than cops who do.

So let us not be so quick to judge teachers who find themselves in that place. Consider this a “Dear John” letter of sorts. I could just leave with no explanation. But when you’ve put your all into something or someone, even when you fall out of love, you feel obliged to—at the very least—explain why.

My love affair with teaching started just over a decade ago. And as with all relationships, time zipped by like the Road Runner in the desert, leaving a dust cloud and me, looking like a bewildered Wile E. Coyote. It’s as if I blinked while sitting in my Fordham dorm room reading my letter of acceptance to the New York City Teaching Fellowship, and now here I am writing these words in my apartment, enjoying a glass of merlot and a much-needed summer vacation. Actually, when I got that letter, I was home in my mother’s apartment in Co-op City, a large cooperative housing development in the North Bronx. As my wonderful colleague Ms. Lake informed me after my first month of teaching: “Ms. Lewis, there are two things in life that will rob a woman of her memory: teaching and pregnancy.” Let me begin again.

It was spring and I was graduating from Fordham University. As if my mom weren’t proud enough of me already, my following in her footsteps by becoming a teacher was the icing on my graduation cake. She was beside herself as she ran up the hall to my bedroom clutching the letter that she had decided not to open in order to avoid another reprimand from me, her only child, who abhorred her intrusive ways. Though Fordham’s campus was only a brief bus ride away, I had decided to live in the dorm for my last two years just to free myself of her.

My mother, usually so serious, was giddier than I had ever seen her. Here I was, a child of a single mother, a child who’d spent most of her life in the projects and had a father who had been in prison since she was a teenager and wasn’t getting out until she probably had at least one child of her own, yet she had finished college—a pretty good one at that—and was graduating with a degree in English literature. When my mother introduces herself these days, she somehow manages to squeeze in that fact: “Hi, I’m Ms. Lewis, and my daughter, Pamela, is a Fordham graduate.”

You’d think my mom had X-ray vision the way she danced around my boyfriend, Trey, and me with the good news. How did she know it wasn’t a rejection letter? I myself had no such faith. I’d never planned on being a teacher. I’d applied to the fellowship program only because everyone was doing it, scared that we wouldn’t get gigs after graduation upon hearing horror stories from magna cum laude graduates remaining unemployed for months, sometimes years, after graduation.

The New York City Teaching Fellowship is a program designed to produce a new kind of teacher for the city’s neediest schools. Established in 2000, it hires primarily recent college graduates, along with people seeking to change careers. After an intensive summer training program, fellows spend two years working toward a master’s degree while teaching during the day. They are assigned to schools in poor neighborhoods, mostly in Brooklyn and the Bronx, to teach such subjects as math, science, and English as a second language, as well as special education.

Currently, more than 8,700 fellows are teaching in the city’s public schools, making up 12 percent of all New York public school teachers, and earning a starting salary of about $48,000. Unlike similar programs, in which many teachers leave after obtaining a free master’s degree, the Teaching Fellowship program has a high retention rate. Among new teachers, 87 percent go on to teach after their second year, and more than half continue teaching after the fifth year. I knew I desperately wanted to help my people and my community, but teaching had never been an option. Even before college, when asked if I would follow in my mother’s footsteps, I always said no, not in a million years. I had no younger brothers or sisters and was the definition of a spoiled brat. Applying to the fellowship program was just something I’d been advised to do by other students, fearful of what could happen to us after we stepped outside of Fordham’s pristine walls, and of course, by my mother. If WASPy young men were terrified of being unemployed, I definitely had something to worry about.

“Open it, Pam! I know you got in! Who wouldn’t want you?”

Secretly, I agreed with her. I was a shoo-in, I thought, given the other applicants I had competed against. The application process had had several parts, including an essay, a demonstration lesson in which we had to pretend we were teaching a class, and a group interview. The lesson was a sure shot because a colleague of my mother’s had taught me how to “tap out” one-syllable CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words like cat or dig, a method used in the acclaimed Wilson Reading System for special-education students.

“Cuh-Ah-Puh . . . cop,” I said and gestured each phonetic sound by tapping my fingers against my thumb. The interviewers oohed and aahed.

It all came down to the group interview. Present were several men and women from various walks of life, most of them, like me, soon to graduate from college. They came from colleges more esteemed than Fordham, and most of them were white and from backgrounds far more impressive than my own. I was the only person of color, something I’d grown used to as an English major at Fordham.

There I had gotten four years of practice not only of being the oddball but of owning this distinction and using it to my advantage. As a freshman, being the token black made me feel inadequate for the first time in my life. Luckily, I eventually found my way and realized that many of these white students were far more intimidated by me than I could ever be by them.

Many had never seen an educated sister from the ’hood. Some came from towns where there were no black people in sight. Some had black friends, but not my type of black. I was unforgivingly urban in both my choice of language as well as in my attire, meaning I said it like I meant it and had no qualms about using words like dope or wack while eloquently expressing my views about Plato’s Republic, laissez-faire economics, or early feminist tropology in Victorian literature.

My wardrobe consisted of myriad Nike Air Max 95 sneakers; expensive designer jeans and T-shirts from Iceberg, Armani, Versace, and Dolce and Gabbana; Vanson motorcycle leathers, despite the fact that I had no license to drive either a motorcycle or a car; and the best urban accessory of all: a mean mug, as a result of which the typical pickup line that men created for us girls was, “Smile, shorty, you need some sunshine in your life?”

I must have been interesting to look at as I walked around the college’s Rose Hill campus alongside white students with bed head, wearing Fordham hoodies, running shorts, and flip-flops. Rather than assimilate, I learned that my difference was my strength. And here I was once again being put to the test to show just how “special” I was.

Who would have thought that getting a public school education would be to my advantage? As I listened to the answers of many of my competitors, I had to keep from chuckling. Clearly they had no idea what they were getting into. (I’d one day eat these words because clearly I had no idea what I was getting into either.) But regardless of how ill equipped I may have been, I was leaps and bounds ahead of these blessed individuals who came from communities where dysfunction did not exist, where expectations were high and systems organized.

Growing up in public school and in public housing, a.k.a. the projects, I knew better. I knew I’d encounter difficult parents, indifferent children, and incompetent administrators. When the group was asked a “What would you do?” question about how we’d respond if the mentor assigned to us to help during our first year failed to show up for the first two weeks of class, my answer, the one that I’m sure got me the fellowship, was again different.

“Isn’t it in the contract that we sign?” a white girl with ginger-colored hair had asked. “All teaching fellows are required by law to have a mentor that visits them and advises them on what...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Is This Love?
• 2. The Honeymoon Song
• 3. Love Don't Live Here Anymore
• 4. I'm Lookinf for a New Love, Baby
• 5. Caught Out There
• 6. The Thrill Is Gone
• Epilogue: The Greatest Love of All