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Beliefs Without Consequences

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I’m currently reading Grace Lee Boggs’s autobiography Living for Change. Grace Lee Boggs is an activist in Detroit. She and her husband Jimmy Boggs were important organizers in the 1960s during the unrest in Detroit caused by the Civil Rights Movement and Ms. Boggs stays active today.

In her autobiography, she has an entire chapter on her husband. The chapter is an amazing look at how a political-minded person with a heart for love can create real change. She writes:

…Jimmy was always taking care of others. If he looked out the window and saw someone trying to start his car, he was out there like a flash offering his help. He filled out income tax forms for people in the community and for his coworkers, white and black. They trusted him more than they trusted H&R Block and brought their friends and relatives to him. I especially recall Mike, an old Italian retiree with a throat ailment that made him barely audible. Playing the numbers was Mike’s only recreation. One year, after Jimmy had done his taxes, Mike concluded that Jimmy had the inside dope on which number would come out each day. Jimmy didn’t want to disillusion Mike because having someone to talk to every day obviously meant so much to him. So every evening until Mike died, he would call and they would go through the ritual of Jimmy telling him what number had come out that day and giving him a number to play tomorrow.

Jimmy was especially caring toward young people and elders. We watched three generations of young people grow up on Field Street, where we lived for more than thirty years. He called them “my girls” and “my boys,” kept track of how they were doing in school, and was always ready to help them with their homework or with advice about a summer job or how to get a student loan.

Today, I was registered to take the English certification exam in Michigan so that I would be able to teach English there. But I slept through the exam. I slept through the exam.

I was making plans to go out tonight when the Zimmerman verdict came in.

And it’s just… what am I doing? What am I doing that it’s okay that I slept through an exam? What am I doing that it’s okay that I spend my weekends trying not to think about anyone but myself?

TFA really pushes us to create a sense of urgency in the classroom. If my students feel that every lesson I teach is the most important thing they have ever learned, then they will be hooked. That’s the goal. And I guess I’m coming to the realization that my life lacks any sense of urgency. I slept through an exam this morning. Who does that? If I really believe that the world needs changing, then what am I doing about it?

Grace Lee Boggs writes elsewhere:

I never ceased to envy and marvel at the fluency with which Jimmy wrote and the speed with which his pen would travel from the left side of the page to the right. When he came home from work, he would lie down on his stomach on the living room floor with a yellow pad and start writing. He would wake up mornings and dash off letters to the editor before breakfast.

That’s the kind of urgency I want. I’m tired of beliefs without consequences.

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That Racism Over There, or, the Fetishization of Racism

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It’s weird being in a city where there are so many publications reporting on so many different stories. Back home, I can literally read every news source for local news in any given day. That’s virtually impossible in a place like Chicago.

Today, one of our mentors directed some of my peers to an online blog’s report of an alleged crime committed on July 4th. The blog reported that a black 18-year-old man allegedly stole a woman’s phone. It identified this 18-year-old as a student who graduated at my mentor’s school. The article is very slanted and, well, racist, portraying the recent graduate as a thug. Certainly, stealing is wrong and, if he did in fact steal the phone, he should be reasonably punished. But this article judged this young man by this one, albeit very dumb, action, and attempted to paint a picture of the young man as someone with a history of problem behavior. And the comments are worse–there are literally too many comments to count of the “there goes the neighborhood because of those people” type. (I didn’t post the original article here because I’m so ashamed by its bad journalism that I can’t bear to signal boost it.)

In my CMA group, we had a moment of righteous anger while one member of our group read the article and the comments. And while it felt good to have an example of relatively clear right and wrong in front of me, it also made me a little uncomfortable. I’m not completely sure why, but I think it has to do with the privilege it gives me. By observing and noting someone’s blatant racism, I get to distance myself from racism. I get to feel better about myself. What I’m actually feeling when I think about the young man’s trial is not empathy for the hate he is experiencing but rather relief that I am not as racist as those people.

One of my favorite writers, Ta-Nehisi Coates, writes about how most racist people are good people because Coates interprets racism broadly. It is not restricted to anonymous comments on a blog. It also occurs every time I make an unwarranted assumption about someone based on their race or when I’m complicit in someone else’s racism.

In some ways, then, observing the kind of bigoted racism that is so easy to find on the Internet is a form of fetishization for me. It enables me to experience relief about my own insecurities. It allows me to box racism in and other it, pushing it far away from me. It’s terrible that this young man has to endure the kind of racism that has been aimed at him, but racism is not fixed by a room full of college graduates groaning over anonymous comments. It’s fixed by every single person examining personal assumptions, biases, prejudices, and, yes, racism.

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The Long Game

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Tomorrow I’m teaching equations with variables on both sides. My CMA (corps member adviser) has asked me to redo my lesson plan. She is concerned that my current plan limits creativity and devolves math to rote memorization. She’s absolutely right.

I’m having a lot of issues walking the line between wanting to make concepts as easy as possible for my students and letting them develop their own logic and creativity. I have a list of fifty objectives I was asked to make a good faith effort to get through in 19 instructional days (each with 100 minutes of instruction), and it’s immensely tempting to boil down each objective to steps to be memorized and speed through two or three a day.

But, also, my students are all enrichment, meaning that all twenty-five of them are going to be getting Algebra in the fall. And so one of my visions for the class is that, above all else, students will be able to think critically–to work difficult problems out that they haven’t seen before just by knowing how math works. If my students leave me with that ability, they will be in really good shape to succeed in Algebra next year.

My CMA calls this playing the long game. Obviously, achieving mastery on my objectives is important, but if I keep my class challenging (providing the right kind of support, of course), I can teach my students that math is much more than a rote skill. And that, in the long game, is more important.