My Culture-My Community

Whenever I am given an assignment like this I immediately panic with thoughts like “What in the world am supposed to write about?” I don’t even know what is meant by “culture;” I had to look it up so I’d be on the same page as everyone else. For the record, it’s “the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.” Or, alternately, “the attitudes and behavior characteristic of a particular social group,” or “society, way of life, lifestyle; customs, traditions, heritage, habits, ways, mores, values.” Just what I thought; it’s impossibly broad and compounded by a slippery, quicksilver habit of changing, depending on how and when you look at it. So I’m back where I started, what to do? I think, for the purposes of this blog I’m going to define culture as that which is without myself that has had an influence on how I relate to the world, what I expect from it, and so on.

As we are social creatures, I suppose we’re most affected by the people we’ve spent the most time with. Who am I as an individual and as a professional? In a way I think it goes back to the experience of noticing how we carry ourselves differently according to the company we keep. You know, it shows up when friends from your different worlds collide, and though you might get along great with each of them separately, together there’s a quandary as to who you should be. I think this phenomenon points out the symbiotic affect people have when they are together, and speaks to the importance of knowing who we are for our students in the classroom. I’m not suggesting we put on an act for our students and deny them, and ourselves, who we really are; rather, I believe by knowing ourselves we can be what is best, and most appropriate to the environment of the school.

One thing I’ve noticed is how my initial reaction of panic is so predictable, where does it come from? I’ve always done well in school, why do I panic so over assignments? I suspect that my upbringing in a middle class household might shed some light. My parents were from working class backgrounds and had clawed their way up a couple of rungs of the ladder and landed in the world of the desk job. Our family didn’t lack for what we needed, but there wasn’t much left over for extras. Sometimes things were tight, and I think a feeling that the slightest mistake might send us back down the ladder must have percolated into my thinking process. When faced with a new situation, my initial reaction is not to see the opportunity, but look for the risk. My parents emphasized the importance of following the rules, not making waves, keeping my head down. I can remember being called to the principal’s office in High School, and my bafflement as to what I must have done wrong. Nothing. He just wanted to give me some kind of certificate for good scholarship or something (note- I don’t remember the award, just the feeling I had been caught.) I couldn’t believe he even knew who I was; I don’t think I had said two sentences to him in four years. What I’m getting at is that in examining my automatic negative reaction, I’m made aware that my students from the inner city likely have similar negative reactions, though of a more intense variety. Add to their troubles the issues of poverty, race, systemic discrimination, substance abuse, broken homes, and more; issues I’ve not dealt with, and it’s easy to see how school might not come easy to these kids.

I’m from the Southern middle class; I grew up in a brand new suburb on the edge of Richmond, Virginia. One block from our house was a highway (the city line,) and down the street in the opposite direction was woodland in which I spent my formative years playing “Huck Finn.” I built rafts and forts, caught crawdads, and poked dead possums with sticks. When I was young, about second grade, I brought home a friend from school, Darnell, an African-American. I didn’t think anything about it; he was just my friend. My Mom welcomed Darnell, as she would any visitor, but after a few play dates I began to notice a kind of awkward stiffness in the way our parents interacted when we dropped him home. No one said anything to me, but eventually the message got through that our friendship wasn’t approved of, and we eventually stopped playing together. I missed Darnell, at first. But I had lots of other friends to play with that no one objected to. I think there couldn’t have been more than three or four African Americans in our whole school, and none in my neighborhood; that’s a pretty small gene pool to pick your friends from. What could that have felt like for Darnell? I can’t know. But as an artistic and un-athletic kid, I had some experience of feeling the outsider, considered weird, picked last.

I was tormented or ignored through most of school, and my Mom encouraged our family to consider ourselves outsiders to Virginia. We had moved to Richmond from the great “Northern” city of Baltimore, and she always considered herself (and her progeny) better than native Southerners. To her it seemed all “those women” were either members of the Daughters of the Confederacy, or believed in ghosts. My parents weren’t highly educated, but they loved to read and we had hundreds of books. In contrast, our next-door neighbors hardly had any books; reading was something you had to do for work or school. If you wanted to have fun, you got a six-pack, a bag of peanuts, and sat in a lawn chair in the front yard and listened to the stock car races on the radio. My parents would ballroom dance for fun. So you could say we didn’t really fit into our neighborhood. At least our family was politically conservative, like every other family we knew. It wasn’t until I went to art school that I began to meet people with radically different perspectives and experiences than me. Art school an eye opener in so many ways, we were taught to embrace differences, and question the status quo. Later, while attending an artist-colony-school deep in the Smokey Mountains (all white) I was fortunate have the experience of living in a non-competitive community, where we were valued for our individual talents that we were able to share with others. The sense of well being and belonging in such a setting cannot be underestimated. The confidence and happiness I gained there made it possible for me to move to New York City with only a few hundred dollars, and no friends there to help me learn the ropes.

Up to that point in my life I had had almost no direct experience with people of other ethnicity or nation of origin. I was so lily white, my grandmother was a descendant of the Mayflower pilgrims; I had no frame of reference to contrast with my life as a white, American, middle class, male. New York was a shock. Everything I had taken for granted was flipped upside down. There, I slowly realized that simply by virtue of my skin color, nationality, and gender I had advantages that others didn’t. Get a cab? No problem (once someone taught me how. I was from the suburbs, after all!) Get an apartment? OK! I noticed that being male carried unspoken connotations, like on dark nights when women would cross to the other side of the street rather than meet up with me on the sidewalk. My girlfriend at the time was a social activist, and it was through conversations with her about invisible privilege I grudgingly came to see that our society was deeply, and systemically, racist and sexist. It was hard to see at first, especially since I was living hand to mouth, with no insurance, and didn’t feel particularly privileged. But at every turn I saw people with fewer choices than I.

My experiences growing up led me to believe that in our country, if you followed the rules and did your best you’d be rewarded, but now I know that this is sadly not reality for so many. I see the benefits that come from parents who prepared me for a lifetime of reading. I see the confidence and joy that come from being accepted and valued. I see the ease that being part of the dominant culture brings to daily living. I see the peace of mind that a safety net of friends, family, and unseen privilege can provide. This probing of my cultural influences serves to remind me that as a teacher I have an especially critical part to play in the lives of my students. Our possibilities, our choices in life depend upon much more than our own will. I intend to approach teaching with the sensitivity that how my students see life may be radically different from how I grew up seeing it, or even how I see it now. I still believe that hard work and dedication is necessary to succeed, but that’s tempered by the knowledge that there is more to the equation. One of my jobs as a teacher, more important than subject matter, is to open children up to the possibility that they carry within them. We need children to understand that they can reach their potential despite what messages may be transmitted by the subtext of our culture. My varied experiences have given me a glimpse into some of the issues that face students of urban schools and allow me to approach teaching there with a measure of empathy and understanding. I know that in the classroom, students will see me through their own lens of experience, just as I see them through mine. From my religion I carry the belief in the inherent dignity and worth of every individual, and I strive to maintain that ideal in all aspects of my life, especially the classroom. I think this belief will go a long way in helping me to be the best teacher I can be.