Yeah, so the past few weeks have been crazy. Like, good crazy. Classes have started, and my freshmen are busy formulating ideas for 3,500-word research-based essays, which many of them innocently think will be the hardest thing they ever do. My Fridays at Rikers are settling down as we acclimate to the wonderful but unpredictable new reality that, with the bail reform, there are a lot fewer people being housed there. The Tuesday night reentry workshop at Restoration Plaza has been really positive and fun, with a solid handful of talented regulars contributing and my amazing godsister, a sophomore at St. John’s, helping out as part of a documentary project for one of her classes. The partnership between my college the Youth Shelter of Westchester is going strong, and a long-term project has finally come to fruition, as this week my college sent a cohort of seven students to the Westchester County Jail for the first time as part of a semester-long pilot project providing tutoring support for incarcerated people in their high school equivalency training program. In my roughly 20 years of teaching, I don’t think I’ve ever felt more like a teacher.
This has had me thinking this week about how much my thinking has evolved about what it means to be a teacher since teaching within and around the carceral apparatus. Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed—perhaps the most transformational educational text I’ve ever ingested—posits the teacher not as a giver of knowledge but as a co-creator:
“A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional education. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain that knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators.”
I guess what I’m saying is that, the further I get along in my life as a teacher and advocate, the more I realize myself as a student of the world. In my conversations with my godsister after our Tuesday workshop, she recently said something that stuck with me: “Some people just know how to do school.” She was talking about herself in comparison to some of the people she’s worked with on the inside, people whose intelligence she sensed but who just couldn’t sublimate themselves to the imposed structure of the educational system. I think it stuck with me particularly because I’ve never felt like I understood how to do school—not in grade school, when my primary concern was my own safety in my low-income public school; not in junior high, when I was bussed to the higher-income school district as part of the city council’s short-lived social equity program; not in high school when I desperately tried to find a way of avoiding what seemed like my destiny at the plastic factory while retaining a pronounced laziness that I justified as anti-intellectualism; not for much of college, which I thought of primarily as a way of having some fun running in circles (literally, on a track scholarship) and avoiding my destiny at the factory for a couple of years until I flunked out. Only I didn’t flunk out, and somewhere between my junior and senior year I figured out the great gift of an education I’d been given, without even consciously knowing it. Even after that, when I finally started doing the work that is generally the difference between an A and a C, I felt like an interloper.
Looking back at this trajectory, through a move to a strange city that has become my home, a low-residency MFA that has given me the educational flag signifying my worth as a teacher, a teaching life in two college departments that have been characterized by struggles for legitimacy within their respective colleges, and now a compulsion to lead workshops with people who have been deemed unfit for common society, I’m coming to terms with a basic fact about myself: I’m most comfortable teaching in situations and environments that are indifferent or even hostile to my presence as a teacher. I’m comfortable in these situations precisely because they remind me that my primary directive as a teacher is to co-learn with my students, to create a world together in an uncomforting space. I hope this doesn’t sound too self-righteous, but I think this is a calling for which I’m particularly suited: Intellectual co-creation as social revolution.
This past Thursday, while we were having the Youth Shelter boys and men on our campus, their counselor, a native Bahamian, told me, “In my country, teachers are right up there with judges.” Perhaps I don’t hold up many of our American judges in particular esteem, but I will indulge myself here in this: The best of our teachers, the ones using the shared space between our minds to co-create a renewed social reality, are the ones who might reinvent justice, and eventually remake this broken world.
I also want to acknowledge those students at my college who are beginning their own journeys into our carceral apparatus through our partnership with the Westchester County Jail. I want to respect both their privacy and the sanctity of their own stories so I won’t go into specifics about them, but I do know that some of them, as part of their internships with the college, are required to read this newsletter, so I’ll end with this bit of advice for them: Always be a teacher second and a learner first, and always go where you don’t belong.
Because that’s where we’re needed most.
This post comes from my newsletter, Dispatches from the Carceral Apparatus. If you want to subscribe, you can here: