Back in Brooklyn

Well, one of us is back in Brooklyn -- and that would be me, Becky.  Sarah is still in Williamstown with her mom and will be returning later this week.  After a concerned text from one of our friends, we realized that -- to our delight -- people had been following our blog and were wondering what had happened to us since our post last Sunday.  I figured it would be a good idea to offer some sort of update, despite the fact that it will be entirely one-sided.  (Sarah, you'll fill in the details, right?)

We completed our last interview on Tuesday evening with Sarah's good friend, Keith, a Math and Computer Science teacher at a Chicago public high school in McKinley Park.  Keith, his wife, Chris, and Sarah met many years ago on a volunteer project in El Salvador.  They became involved in the project through their activity with the oft-underreported progressive side of the Catholic church.  And all have been committed to social justice ever since, though they have chosen different paths.  Keith saw teaching as a legitimate option to becoming a priest, which he'd originally planned to do.  It was a way to help people who are often denied access to our nation's resources -- like education, good jobs, healthcare, and political representation.  Through becoming an educator, he hoped to give his students the tools to give themselves a better life.

He's been disappointed, though, by his experience.  He's positive about being a teacher and says he expects to stay in his job until he retires.  But the prospects of his students are not particularly encouraging.  Half of Chicago public school students don't make it to graduation.  Keith says students fail his courses often, but that they rarely feel the need to improve performance.  They wonder why a high school education is really necessary.  There are jobs in the neighborhood that don't require a diploma -- and parents are not involved enough in their childrens' schooling that students are taken to task for failing or not graduating.  The problem, though, is systemic, Keith says.  It's not the students, the teachers, or the parents.  And for his school, at least, it's not the money invested.  It's all of these factors and more.  What education reveals most, Keith implies, is how entrenched the power structure is and how invested the powerful are in maintaining their position,.

We learned similar things when we interviewed Bob Breving, who teaches at the Labor Center at DePaul University.  Bob is a friend of my parents.  They all met in Maywood, IL public schools in the late 1960s, where they taught middle school students.  Maywood was -- and still is, to some extent -- a disinvested school district.  Most of Bob's and my parents' students were African American and their educational prospects were as bleak as those of Keith's current students.  Bob and my parents became teachers for different reasons.  For Bob, he felt it was in line with social justice work he had already been doing with the VISTA program in New Mexico.  For my parents, teaching was a profession that they felt able to do, but they did not start off as exceptionally passionate about it.  All three became dedicated teachers though.  Not only that, but they gained even more insight into the injustices facing their students.  As Sarah and I interviewed Bob, my parents joined the conversation and revealed more about how the three of them worked together to form a teachers' union in Maywood.  My parents say that teaching made them "politicized."  All three had come from rather conservative, Republican households, but seeing how their own students struggled inside and outside the classroom and how teachers themselves were treated by school administrators as something akin to indentured servants pushed their politics to the left.  After years of teaching, Bob and my father began working directly for the American Federation of Teachers, while my mother focused her attentions on raising me and working in the community.

Sarah and I had the good fortune to interview other people as well, but these last few interviews really galvanized our interest in talking to people whose politics blended with their careers.  In fact, not to scoop Sarah, but it seems likely that we will be focusing our interviews exclusively on teachers now.  By the way, in case you find the summaries above rather broad, you will be pleased to know that we recorded them and that we may make them available for viewing in the near future.

There will be more to come!