Why Am I Here?

I am here because outstanding teachers have rocked my world. And bad ones have nearly crushed me.

But what do I mean by "good" and "bad"?

If I could answer that question with ease I would not likely find it necessary/desirable to be enrolled in an Critical Pedagogy class at the doctoral level. However, I will try to explain, largely through anecdote with, I hope, some critical thought/understanding enhancing my relating of the key role that educators have played in my existence as a person and as an instructor myself.

* Elementary school--The Bad:
I was a very nervous child. I had no siblings and very limited contact with children my own age. Recess terrified me on multiple levels (games I did not know, voices at volumes not permitted in my home, laughter and pain); it did not take me long to figure out that not completing homework meant I would be punished and forced to stay in for recess. And so I spent more time inside than out. I struggled to concentrate on my lessons, choosing instead to read books from the library shelves, books I was often chastised for checking out because "they are for 4th graders, not you." Teachers yelled at me, red faced, called me names, pulled my hair, which caused me to retreat more solidly into my inner existence and that of the fictions I devoured. I never did learn my times tables.
* Elementary school--The Good:
Mrs. Walker noticed me. She didn't yell at me for not doing my work, nor for daydreaming excessively. She sat with me and asked why I didn't do it. She smiled and said she could tell I was a very smart little girl and she knew I could do it; she said daydreaming is good, but so is homework. Mrs. Walker noticed how I would count out and slowly eat, one at a time, the potato chips she gave us with our worksheets--and so she would slip me some extras. Instead of punishing me, she gave me special privileges--if I did the work she asked of me, I could spend the rest of the class reading whatever book I wanted. As an adult I can look back at those moments with Mrs. Walker and know that she recognized the obvious signs of a troubled home. But rather that reaffirming that negative power relationship, she interrupted it and allowed me to be something different. By the end of the fourth grade, my verbal skills already tested at the level of a high school graduate. I was "moved up" 3 sections and suddenly found myself surrounded by the smart kids who were taught more than they were disciplined.
* High school--The Bad:
I earned nearly straight As and hardly did a thing, so little effort was put into instruction by most of the teachers. It was the 1980s in my rural Pennsylvania "area" school (meaning kids were shipped in from miles around to save money on buildings), and the good kids were drinking while the bad kids smoked weed. The pregnancy rate was the same in my country school as the inner city of Philadelphia. Cigarette burns marred every surface of the bathroom, angry young men forced to be in the school punched holes in the cinder block walls, there was a constant threat of being beat up by girls of a different class or being accidentally caught up in one of the many beatings the boys gave to each other in the hallways. It was a terrifying place. I escaped as much as possible into films, novels, Vogue, and trips to New York City; the fashion I embraced from those media influences (combined with my anorexic frame) earned me the label "punk," which I augmented with a hard stare to protect myself. I remember very little of the instruction from those years, although I do remember writing a pro-gay rights paper for an English teacher who showed revulsion in her face whenever I spoke after that.
* High school--The Good:
Mr. Rosemurgy, who always wore a three-piece suit and a bow tie (NOT clip-on), said my command of grammar was unlike anything he had encountered before. He praised my writing and pushed me to make it even better. The same day that he accused me of cheating because of my insight into the book we were reading, he apologized when he realized that I really did just get it. He gave me extra things to read because he knew I would like them and understand them. He noticed me walking around town one day and told me, in his flamboyant way, that I was missing the world keeping my head down and my shoulders slouched, and a good writer always observes the world around herself. I started walking with my head up. My art teacher, who went by J.R., recognized how low my ego was and entered my 3D sculpture into a state competition--which it won. He taught me and the other misanthropes in his class to value our creative skills and to use them as a means of safely expressing our frustrations. I made a living as a writer and still use art as a way to unlock my soul.
*Undergraduate--The Bad:
So little was bad at Moravian College that the only reason I include this section here, besides my unshakeable need for a parallel structure, is that it is important to me to NOT repeat the mistakes of the two poor instructors I had to endure. One was the journalism professor (which I still find fairly amusing, considering my 15 years in the field after graduating). He favored the men in the class with one exception; regardless of how ass-backwards her answer might be, the young woman who wore a dress and heels to the 7:55 a.m. class everyday was praised. My sweatpants and sorority letters doomed me to a "C." The other was the English instructor who was also co-writing an opera of The Scarlet Letter. Yes. Really. Although not a bad guy, he was utterly inflexible in his instruction and obsessed with that singular text. I dreaded that class and hid out in Siberia just counting down the minutes until I could leave for my job.
*Undergraduate--The Good:
Just about everything. Talk about rocking my world. Prior to Moravian College, I hated school. It was just something to be endured. But at Moravian, virtually every instructor recognized my abilities and challenged me to do better and better each year. David Taylor, one of my favorite English instructors and my self-selected advisor, was so important to me that I still have regular contact with him today. Although I was far from an ideal student (I started college with no study skills and absolutely adored my life in the party-hearty sorority on campus), when I had my first writing class with DT it was as if he saw potential in me that I did not know existed. He forgave my flakiness and praised my skill, hiring me as a tutor in the writing center. He is the reason I had the confidence and ability to get my first full-time writing job a year out of college--at Bloomberg News no less. Caroline Brown, the Oxford-educated Chaucerian, I now know, taught me at a graduate level, pushing me to do research that changed my entire worldview. Even the religion professors profoundly changed me, giving me insight into theology, society, love and faith that had been denied me in my mostly atheist (and definitely troubled) household. In short, my experience at Moravian College shaped me and altered my worldview to open space for me to move so far beyond that to which I was born that it still blows my mind.

“The dialectical nature of critical theory enables the educational researcher to see the school not simply as an arena of indoctrination or socialization or a site of instruction, but also as a cultural terrain that promotes student empowerment and self-transformation” (McLaren, page 62).

Damn straight. And I know from my own experience as a student that the school can transform its inhabitants. I also have had some glorious moments of witnessing transformation in my own students, usually because of my refusal to accept the student's efforts to give up or through my open discussion of gender/class/race issues. But I want more of that. And I want to constantly reflect upon what my actions/words/assignments do or don't do to facilitate empowered and transformed students. I get that it can't always be ideal. But, damn it, I want to do everything I can to make it so.