Wasted Potential Space

I’m student teaching in an inner city high school. I’ve aced every one of my undergrad biology classes and I’m a walking fountain of knowledge. I can lecture for hours on sexlinked traits, sodium-potassium pumps, and heterogeneous blah blah blah. But the students are intimidating (one of them follows me around the room with his eyes and mumbles threats under his voice) and the “real” teacher is unsupportive and disappears every day to the teachers’ lounge. At least that’s where I think she is; she is never anywhere to be found.
That experience was enough to make me reconsider the teaching profession. The following summer I received a call several days before the school year would begin, offering me a job “teaching high school seniors who had not passed the ISTEP exam”, no contract, so no strings attached. If I didn’t like it, I could give two weeks notice and head back to Parkview Hospital. The class was called FOCUS. But focus on what exactly? The answer to that question seemed very vague.
I was hired on a Thursday and at the end of the staff meeting I attended on Friday, I was handed a key to my first classroom. School would start on Monday and everyone seemed to be in a frenzy to get started so I took my key and set off alone in search of my room. After wandering down deserted halls, I found C110 and turned the key, opened the door, and walked into a deserted classroom. I sat at the desk and looked around the room. I would start teaching in a few days and I still wasn’t clear on what it was I’d be teaching! There were some file cabinets in the room so I decided to look for clues. I spent the day searching through all the drawers and found papers with titles like: How to Conduct Yourself at a Job Interview and: How to Resist Peer Pressure. I dug through the desk drawers and found personal items from the previous teacher who had been abruptly fired because of his ineffectiveness.
I thought of how bored to death I would be if I were to teach some equally bored teenagers what to wear to a job interview and I put myself in their place. If I wanted more than anything else to get my diploma and get out of high school, what would I want someone to teach me? The skills I needed to reach that goal. The things I didn’t know that made me feel stupid and an outsider. And I would like to be taught not by “someone who knows” but by a real person who relates to me on more of an equal level. I immediately set to work compiling materials that would help me do that. I found some remedial math books, English writing exercises, and other tools I could use. I spent the weekend planning and acquiring more materials. By Monday I was ready. I was very apprehensive though. I looked back on my student teaching experience and again regretted not following through with my first inclination: to stand at the front of the biology class and drop that heavy textbook into the garbage can, then encourage my students to do the same. I wanted to teach biology in a way that was relevant to my students' lives. To sit around lab tables examining crustaceans and bacterial colonies. But I was not willing to creatively challenge the status quo. Now I felt just like Martha did in her poem, “Stripping”. Instead of “hiding behind my lectern in my two-piece gray suit of armor” like I had during my student teacher episode, I was going to “walk, stripped of armor and lecture notes among (my) students, anticipating being caressed or cut”. What if ALL of my new students were like Mr. Shifty Eyes?
I worked at that job for two years and it was the best job I ever had. I had an assistant who I loved, a black woman who taught me a lot about her culture and the culture of many of my students. Our classroom was filled with laughter and personal stories that our students related. We built relationships with them that we still have to this day. We did hands-on math exercises outside on warm spring days and wrote essays about relevant issues, such as, how 911 affected their lives personally. Almost every one of our students went on to graduate and we celebrated that with them.
While I’d like to say I figured it all out for myself, I have to admit I searched out other teachers who were also teaching FOCUS. We “pooled our resources” and “created an intermediate arena” over the phone and via intraschool mail, sharing materials and ideas. Welch says that “it’s through such potential spaces that teachers form the voices of critique and possibility they need to address in both their classrooms and institutions”. I used these potential spaces to improve what went on in my classroom but when the time came to face the “institutions” who wanted to eliminate FOCUS classes we were all strangely silent, accepting the verdict handed down from “up top”. Money was tight and any nonessential classes were eliminated.
I subbed at that high school the following fall. During my lunch break, I went to my old classroom. I looked through the window and there was a young woman sitting at my old desk. I opened the door, walked in, and saw students sitting around idly, some even on the desks. The classroom was now being used for Inschool Suspension. These were the students who had not, would not, pass the ISTEP test. The learning had stopped; the dialog was over. They would spend the rest of their lives sitting on the curb just like they were sitting on their desks.
Teachers and their students today desperately need potential spaces that “support not only individual changes in particular classrooms, but also collective challenges to institutional structures”. If we had used our potential space for institutional change, those same students would have been engaged in challenging, meaningful, activities that would’ve made them active members of our culture.