Assumptions

Intro

I have seen urban life, but only through a key hole: it’s a start but I need to open the door and get a really good look. I am different along a number of dimensions from many of the students I hope to teach. This is by design. I approach urban teaching from a very strong conceptual foundation, the construction of which has been one of the accomplishments of which I am most proud. I am deliberately seeking situations in which my students and I are radical Others, because that is a condition for the maximum construction of meaning, i.e. for maximum learning-education. This may be incredibly naïve.

Beliefs about urban …

… centers

• The environment is stimulating to the point of info-overload, which then gets force-fitted into patterns.

• Even not-so-bright urban dwellers have some degree of street-smarts (that make them potentially good students).

• There is an unending competition for everything, in every aspect of life, across all genders, classes, and races.

• There are extremes of having and needing.

… public schools

• Are physically cruddy; probably smelly.

• Are generally under-resourced, perhaps startlingly so.

• Have little sense of local control; there is a pervasive sense that Others are making decisions that impact me and we.

• There is a preoccupation with safety, psychic dissonance, physical plant, health, and eating that often leaves little time for Maslow’s higher-order niceties.

… teachers

• Are mostly local.

• Are relatively older.

• A core group of younger, dedicated, progressive teachers who want to improve the community they grew up in/near provide the de facto leadership.

• There are lots of clock-punchers just waiting to be pensioned off.

• There are too many long-suffering, martyr types.

• There are a noticeable number of eccentrics: people who find it difficult to fit in most places but who can find anonymity in a place that’s happy just to have a warm body in each teacher’s seat.

• There are a few young, irritating, ineffective self-appointed change agents who are really trying to impose their normatives onto the community.

… students

• They will have backgrounds, interests, skills, knowledge, mannerisms, modes of thinking, and realities that are different from mine, probably uncomfortably so.

• 45-60% are not terribly distinguished along any dimension.

• 15-25% either don’t want to be there in school or, worse, find in school a public stage ideally suited to acting out really unattractive personalities, attitudes, and ambitions.

• 15-25% are bright but do not have the obedience/inertia that suburbia installs in students to just shut up and finish high school and then do what you want. These students are on the fence and will become engaged if the class experience is interesting and relevant, but will remain disengaged if not.

• 5-15%, as the result of a variety of internal and external motivations, see school as a ticket to a more attractive place, and are thus motivated to see and grab the educational good that’s on offer, and are able to ignore the rest.

My confidence level in these assumptions is:

Pure fiction ___________________________X_________ Lived experience

The sources of my assumptions are my experiences living and working in a number of urban areas: Manhattan (8 years), Singapore (4), Rio de Janeiro (2), London (4), Kansas City (2). I was a Big Brother in “Alphabet City” on Manhattan’s Lower East Side for three years, which gave me first-hand insights into inner-city urban adolescents. I have four children who went to school in urban areas and live/work in New York City. I am humbly aware of the fact that some of the experiences on which I base my assumptions are 30 years old.

How might these assumptions affect my interactions with teachers and students, and affect the kind of classroom I hope to create?

With respect to the teachers, I plan to do what I did in my Wall Street career, when every three years or so I was reassigned to a new position/country: I will jump to some pretty quick decisions about which teachers fall into each of two horribly over-simplified buckets: 1) they are there because, although they have options, they want to be; 2) others. I will self-appoint the former my mentors, and will struggle to muster the gracefulness to politely ignore the others.

With respect to the students, I spent five years in a PhD program intensively studying how meaning is dialogically constructed. The process and attributes of genuine dialog are a kind of secular religion for me. This is at the core of how I hope to interact with the students, and has the following significant implications for urban students:

• The amount of meaning-making/truth constructed/learning-education is proportional to the differences between the dialog partners. Little or no learning takes place between very similar conversants. My students and I will be radically Other to each other. This is by design (assuming someone’s willing to hire me), and will provide for the maximization of the education-learning process. But only if …

• Genuine dialogs do not happen without open-mindedness and goodwill. I will try to both exhibit and encourage these “hermeneutic virtues” as the two paramount priorities of my classroom after physical and psychological safety.

• Each dialog partner enters the hermeneutic circle with a set of foregroundings that are a result of their nature and nurture. In a successful conversation, these biases are risked and expanded … which equals the learning-education. A classroom is not perfectly democratic, in that it is the teacher – moi – who gets to ask the question that starts the hermeneutic circle spinning. In order to ask the right questions, I need to understand my students’ foregroundings. This is the “Velcro” onto which I “stick” the lessons. I am relatively clueless about this. That is why I signed on for the Urban Teaching Academy. Professor Goldstein, you are one of a handful of people who can get me up-to-speed here. The mentor relationships inside my school that I will work hard to cultivate will be another, ongoing, source of help. Of course, listening to students is the greatest potential source of these insights.

Because I suspect I will unconsciously triage the students in the following manner I will try to consciously do so:

I will try to quickly identify the 15-25% who are shit-stirers and individually tell them the deal I am prepared to cut: I will try to make learning Social Studies as relevant and as interesting as anything else they do, if they explain to me what they find relevant and interesting. If that dialog proves unproductive, I will ask my mentors a) if I’m missing something, and b) how to neutralize those students so they don’t interfere with my ability to work with other students.

“Turning” the 15-25% who are on the fence would be a source of special satisfaction: I will dedicate myself to getting them excited about what I have to teach them, drawing on my own (fairly considerable) experience, the insights of my mentor-colleagues, and the other students.

The 5-15% who are genuinely motivated to learn are low-hanging fruit. I think providing them with extra challenges in class will require minimal extra effort on my part. Based on my Boys Club experience, I also expect to be able to introduce them to life-options beyond high school that they might want to think about. I view myself as a resource to these students, and would like to be fully taken advantage of.

I’m not terribly proud of myself for saying this, but beyond trying to make Social Studies relevant and engaging, I don’t plan to take a direct personal interest in the 45-60% who are essentially undistinguished.

How might these assumptions relate to the type of professional I hope to become?

Being of the “dialogic” religion, I believe that people might say the following kinds of things about me ten years from now:

• Mark worked well with his students’ other teachers, pooling their resources to triangulate on both high-potential and problem students to develop effective individual strategies for them.

• Mark’s students sensed that he knew how to hook his lessons onto other things in their lives that they found interesting and relevant. As such, they enjoyed learning in his class and were thereby able to get good grades and feel good about that portion of their academic experience.

• Mark’s students had an in-depth understanding of one of the most important insights of modernity: that knowledge is constructed in dialogs, and that these are only successful if the participants observe a small number of critical rules. The knowledge created is the private personal property of those who constructed it, and it has real – even economic – value. Understanding this one thing became important to how Mark's students thought about everything in their lives after high school. That was a lasting contribution that Mark had on his students.

• Mark did not burn himself out angsting over that which he would never have been able to accomplish anyway.

• Mark came to education late in life. He did not (have to) suffer fools among his colleagues and administrators. Too bad: he might have made a really good teacher.