Teaching in the Inner City
This is in response to the article (June 10), “Education Professor Tests Mettle in Inner-City School.”
Mimi Warshaw is to be commended for descending from the ivory tower to gain practical teaching experience in a public school. But I am distressed that the article conveys a generally negative impression and seems to reinforce the stereotype of hopeless, poorly achieving blacks in the ghetto.
As a product of that very inner city school, a former inhabitant of one of the four housing projects, and now a member of Markham’s faculty, I wish to offer another insight.
Warshaw mentions her “surprise” at learning that parents cared about how their children were doing in school. Our parents may be short on money, but they have plenty of pride. My mother, a divorcee, struggled to support three children, first as a domestic worker and later as a low-paid, unskilled factory worker, yet she provided us with a set of encyclopedias, an unabridged dictionary, an inexpensive set of the classics, and a second-hand typewriter to help us with our school work. Often exhausted from working as many as 12 hours a day, she wasn’t able to take us to museums or other places, but she encouraged my weekly trips to the library and bragged to her friends about my high grades and “all the books” that I read.
Warshaw speaks of being “exhausted.” I, too, am exhausted after a day of teaching and tending to my family and other tasks. Teaching adolescents is a demanding and often totally exhausting chore, but many nights, as tired as I am, I lie awake marveling over the intelligent, ridiculous, funny, sad, terrible, and wonderful things that have happened during the day. She says that our kids are “noisier, boisterous, and aggressive.” I find them to be stimulating, bright, perceptive (no matter their so-called ability level), and proud. The low scores on standardized tests do not reflect those magic moments between teacher and student.
I am gratified by the brilliant--and sometimes not so brilliant--poems, stories, letters, compositions, speeches, projects, newspapers, and school yearbooks produced by my students. I am amazed by the large storehouse of general knowledge exhibited in class discussion, not just by my college-capable types, but by my so-called “low” classes as well. I am delighted that my students continuously challenge me and each other, that some of them become moved by a poem or delighted by a book or enthralled by a play.
Yes, our kids are sometimes rowdy, sometimes hostile, sometimes lazy, sometimes downright obstreperous, but then so are kids everywhere. The wonder of it is that our kids lack the advantages, suffer racial prejudice, and still manage to prevail.
We don’t graduate as many from our inner-city neighborhood, as do middle-class schools, but we do produce college professors, doctors, lawyers, writers, and other successful members of society. That this is so can be attributed to the strength of the children and the strength, pride and dignity of their parents, who struggle under often adverse circumstances to raise their children as best they can. And to the fact that at school they have teachers who believe they can achieve and who insist on high standards.
This last factor is key to those who wish to succeed as inner-city teachers.
YVONNE HUTCHINSON
Los Angeles
Hutchinson is a mentor teacher at Markham Junior High School.
