a speech to new teachers

from the Teach For America - South Louisiana orientation that wrapped up this week...120 new teachers for SLA!

Hello.

Nine years ago, when I was sitting where you're sitting right now, I felt like a huge fraud. After a week of icebreakers and workshops and job fairs and getting lost on the way to…well, everywhere, after seeing how impressive and confident everyone around me looked, I felt mediocre, unprepared, and dreadfully homesick. It almost made it worse that my new colleagues and I had been personally thanked by a string of important people simply for our presence in their state, as if we were superheroes who represented the last hope of some crumbling Gotham. Maybe it was just that being from a long line of Yankees, I didn't know how to handle a warm welcome back then. But I think there was more to it, to my discomfort with this undeserved hero's welcome we received. I don't know if any of you have a similar feeling right now, but if you do, I'd like to suggest that it might actually a good thing.

So, doubt and guilt hovered over me throughout institute, even as I worked through half the night trying to become the pedagogical superhero I thought the people back in Baton Rouge expected me to be. It grew when I returned to Baton Rouge and learned that my English degree would be put to use teaching special education science. And when I showed up to Glen Oaks High School with my beautiful handmade posters and meticulous lesson plans to learn that I had neither classroom nor students, I thought that maybe I had been found out, maybe this was a sign from the universe, a sign that I ought to just go home. I collected such signs from the universe throughout my first month teaching. I did what was asked of me, sitting in the back of another teacher's classroom and making sure the SPED kids didn't disrupt class. And it was about a month in to this most self-indulgent of existences that I was finally able to set aside those doubts. Trying to ease my mind, my principal finally leveled with me: "Look. These kids can't learn science. We'd be lucky if they learned to spell science. But, the law says we have to let them be in the room."

Thinking about what it meant to be on the receiving end of messages like that for the better part of one's life led to my first moment of clarity as a teacher. My current insecurities notwithstanding, I realized that from the moment I was born, I had been receiving messages about how the world saw me: everyone assumed that I would succeed, that I could learn quickly and well, that I would go to college, that I deserved to live a long and reasonably comfortable life.

And from the moment they were born, the students I was supposed to be teaching had also received messages about how the world saw them: they were uneducable, a drain on society, a problem needing to be fixed; they learned that the world would be more surprised to see them graduate from high school than to hear that they had died young and violently or been sent to prison.

Here's what I learned in that moment: this is not about me. And I will say it to you: this is not about you. No matter how many community leaders shake your hand and treat you like a hero, do not be lulled into believing that this is about you. No matter how many signs seem to point to "you suck, go home kid," resist this tendency to see the world in terms of yourself.

Because if this is about you, then every insult—and there will be many—will eat at you, will be an affront, rather than a symptom of what you're working to alleviate. If this is about you, you will become bitter, because you will expect a reward for your hard work. You will come to resent Louisiana and Teach For America and public education for asking you to do work that you will see as thankless and fruitless. Faced with failure, you will protect your ego by looking for explanations outside yourself. You might blame the system, your principal, your roommates, your program director, your textbook, the broken copy machine—anything but you. You may even take up the most convenient and insidious mantra of the frustrated new teacher by blaming parents who "just don't value education." Worst of all, thinking in this way, you will come to resent your students, for, focused on your own discomfort and discouragement, you will see them as nothing more than an obstacle standing between you and your success.

Take a moment now, please, to revel in the absurdity of that. Tell yourself that this will never be you.

In the coming months, remember this moment and let it shield you from ever subscribing to those poisonous and destructive myths. Accept now that you will sometimes fail, that you will even more often feel like a failure, and that this is nobody's fault. Moreover, fixing it is nobody's job but yours. And you must fix it, however you can and no matter how hard that is to do.

Another thing I learned from my principal that day was that my kids were right to resist their teachers, to mistrust me. If—having spent the majority of their lives in a system that told them repeatedly that they were impossibly stupid—they still enjoyed school, still obeyed the people who sent them those messages, well I think that would have been fairly stupid. Their resistance was so far from personal insult, I realized; it was, in fact, evidence of their brilliance. I realized that it would be my job to tell them this a thousand times, and more importantly, to devise ways to let them see it for themselves, and while we were at it, to prove to anyone who doubted them that they were indeed the proud owners of brilliant young minds; to demonstrate that they could learn science; that they deserved to learn science; and that to fail to teach them science--or anything else, for any reason—was, simply put, a crime.

****

Okay: so if this were a movie, we would now cut to a musical montage with scenes of me jumping around the front of the classroom using revolutionary teaching methods, while students fall, slowly but surely, under my spell, until they finally realize that I am the best thing that has ever happened to them. The scene would culminate at a ceremony in which I am named Best Teacher Ever by the President of the United States, and my students and I would, in slow-motion, jump up and down and hug each other with tears in our eyes, and the credits would roll and the audience would cheer.

But here's the thing about that: I hate those movies. I really do. For one thing, they're all about the glorious teacher and her heroic efforts, and as I've already told you: this can not be about us. I feel like half the disappointments of new teachers can be traced back to dreams borne of those movies, to a desire to be Jaime Escalante or to inspire a Dead Poets' Society. I imagine teachers across the country standing at the front of their classrooms daydreaming about whether they'd rather be played by Michelle Pfeiffer or Hillary Swank, and being disappointed when all that happens is that their students learn.

Worse yet, I can't stand the fact that the students are the antagonists in these movies. The teachers save them from themselves and their families and their communities and their cultures. They teach the unteachable children, tame the dangerous minds, redeem the irredeemable thugs. They're not teachers; they're demigods—and what a dangerous set of assumptions that breeds. It's a set of assumptions that brushes up against the old tales of White Man's Burden far too closely for me to want anything to do with it—in that movie world, students and their families are hopeless, aimless, worthless until a charismatic outsider comes along, savior-style, and gives their pitiful lives meaning.

So please, let's take another moment right now to revel in the absurdity of such arrogance. Bathe yourself in disbelief that we ever swallowed such stuff.

And now choose: for the next two years, you can either indulge your own Stand and Deliver fantasy, or you can become a great teacher. But know this: the two are incompatible. A great teacher would make a lousy movie star. He's relentlessly in the background. When you walk into his classroom, he's not in front, jumping up on the desk with barbaric yawps or shredding textbooks. He's not blowing children's' minds. No: his students are in front, blowing his mind. He orchestrates, he choreographs, he works insane hours behind the scenes, but he never, ever stars in that show. We all need to learn, and relearn, and cultivate that humility. This is the Zen of teaching: it is not about me.

So to return to this moment, to your vivid present and my nine years' past, it's worth noting that all this is a pretty big shift from our recent lives as college students. Those four years were entirely about us—I was bathed in praise for my brilliant essays, you for your incisive comments in class, she for her meticulous lab work. That constant recognition can be a great source of energy. And it's one you can no longer count on. I don't know whether I expected to be celebrated and praised as a teacher, but I certainly wasn't, and this forced me to learn a second lesson: that the communities of South Louisiana have far more to offer to me than I could ever offer them. That Louisiana doesn't need saving, by me or anybody. On the contrary, it can save you if you let it. During what will perhaps be the hardest thing you do in your life—it remains so in mine—this state can give you the energy, joy, and reward you will so desperately need.

Now, you'll meet lots of people who haven't let that happen, and you'll come to recognize them almost instantly. They like to focus on how this place differs from whatever better places they've lived or been. They're quick to remind anyone who will listen that there's no good movie theater here, that the folks in the coffee shops don't know how to make a real macchiato, that we're #12 on the Forbes list of America's most violent cities, 2^nd in new cases of HIV, that over 1/4 of adults in BR lack literacy skills, and that the Mexican food here is mediocre at best. Oh--and that the air smells funny sometimes because of the paper mill across the river. They seem to revel in the fact that their students lose relatives to violence at a staggering rate, as if this is somehow evidence of their own street cred as a quote-unquote "inner city teacher." It's just like in the movies.

Now, you'd be wrong not to notice these things, and I'm certainly not asking you to don rose-colored glasses during your time here. The mistake that these unhappy people make is that they notice only these things, and that's a recipe for hopelessness and cynicism, neither of which makes a very good teacher. Louisiana is magic, and I genuinely hope you'll be open to that magic. You won't always see it unless you look for it, and you won't look for it if you fall prey to the illusion that you are here to save this state. Don't get me wrong: our public education system is a source of unutterable injustice, and I am glad that you have come to join the thousands of others who are determined to change that, who have already made progress in that direction. But that doesn't erase the fact that this place is magic, and that to be welcomed to this place, as we all have been—whether it was at birth or a just few days ago—is a gift. The communities in which we teach and live are vibrant places in which poverty is only one factor, one that we too often let blind us to the many others: Sunday afternoons, when every other front porch is crowded with people. Tailgating at Southern and LSU where strangers will ply you with the best food you've ever tasted.

Shoot—once, up on Plank Road, a hard-looking guy in a custom car noticed me admiring his rims, and then saw my out of state plates. He rolled down his window at the red light and said, "Welcome to the Dirty South. Do you like cookies?" He dug in the grocery bag next to him, opened a bag of Chips Ahoy, ate one, and passed a handful out the window to me. I mean, that just does not happen where I'm from, and that's what I revel in about this place. That's also what I think about whenever those closed-off-to-magic people talk about the menacing ghettos in which they star in their imaginary movies.

Church congregations greet heathenish strangers like me without reserve. Festivals celebrate everything worth celebrating and plenty that you might think isn't. My neighbors know my name and turn my water back on when I forget to pay my bill. Tangerine trees drop fruit while my family back home shovels snow. Just yesterday, my students groaned when I told them there were only five minutes left in class—they wanted to learn more about Gandhi—because here, as everywhere, kids are born to learn.

Please notice these things. Seek out your students when you're not teaching. Watch them be kids. Explore your town. Speak to people. Look deeply at this place that has welcomed you, and work to understand just what it is you've been offered. Don't presume to know about it; but do undertake to learn about it.

*****

As for the rest of my first year teaching, it was more the stuff of dull memoir than music montage. We did succeed. I screwed up a lot. I felt tired all the time. I often felt angry and frustrated. I laughed like a twelve-year old more often than I had since I was a twelve-year-old. I loved my students so much it hurts my heart to even say it out loud. By the end of the year, they outscored the general ed kids on the science portion of the standardized test.

And as vindicated as I felt on their behalf, I can't say that it did much for them. It might have, but in the scheme of things, the science portion of standardized test was just a miniscule step towards the kind of vindication they really deserved. In subsequent years we took many more little steps, and I hope that those steps added up to something—I choose to believe that they did, but I also know that I need to do more this year, and next year, and the year after that. And I will tell you this: I have never been named teacher of the year, and Hollywood has yet to seek the rights to my story. I do keep a collection of nice notes from my program director, and my mom tells me she's proud of me. But lacking much else in the way of awards and honors, I am instead energized by what I keep learning. I came here, as I suspect many of you do, already knowing about hard work, but not understanding much beyond that. What I'm learning, and what empowers me more than anything else—what I hope you learn, because it will empower you—is humility, is how to be a gracious guest in a phenomenal community. Once you learn this—and perhaps you already have—you will be freed from the doubt you might be feeling right now, from the need for recognition or thanks, from the burden of preconceived notions about the kids you teach and their families. Then, you will be ready to become a great teacher. You will also see that two years from now you will not be finished with what you've just started, but you will be fortified to continue with more skill, more passion and more joy.

So I was right, nine years ago, to think that it didn't make sense for me to be thanked for coming here. And if it doesn't quite sit right with you either, then I'd say you're on the right track. Perhaps you already sense that South Louisiana will give you more than you could ever hope to give it. I hope that you accept those gifts. Your students will shine beyond all the stereotypes and self-fulfilling prophesies, because I know you will expect them to, and I trust that you will put your hard work in behind the scenes and shine the spotlight on them. In the end, when you stand where I now stand, looking at a new group of talented individuals sitting where you now sit, you will feel as lucky as I do to have been invited to this place and to be entrusted with its children. You will know, as I do, that our work as corps members and alumni of Teach For America, our work of guiding students toward significant academic gains, is nothing like heroism—it is merely the rent, to borrow from Shirley Chisholm, that we each pay for the privilege of living in this incredible place.

Thank you.