All posts by Martina Gamboa

Clock out doesn’t mean check out

Reaching Adolescents and How to Respond

Often conditions of poverty are confused with conditions of neglect… Gaining insight into those struggles also provides insight into the well-being of their children—our students. — It is empowering for them to see us, their teachers, social workers, and other adults who reject the deficit discourse and debilitating racialized, gendered stereotypes about them, their parents, and marginalized communities, to see us as educators and allies who will teach them, as Makeba’s lawyer and Elena’s principal did, to advocate for themselves and stand up for their rights. -Goodman, p. 108 & 126

The first question I ask myself is: How can you tell?

It’s not so easy to tell the difference between poverty and neglect and we are almost trained as educators to only ever see neglect regardless of the community we are in. But then I revisit my question and I realize that it’s not rhetorical. The answer is pretty straightforward: care enough to find out.

I feel that this can be understood as one of the ways to tell between a teacher that is involved in the community they teach at and those that are not. In order to become an ally for a student and show them that you care, you have to actually care about who they are as a person, not just who they are in the context of a classroom. Recognition initially that a student is a whole human being that experiences all of life can be the first step towards a more empathetic way of approaching students. Interacting with students and getting to know them better also is a great way to gauge what their experiences outside of the classroom might be like. In addition to that, not assuming things about their life but actually communicating with them and getting more information makes all the difference. 

The big question now becomes: How do I do this for all of my students?

It can seem so manageable to keep track of one student if you’re an elementary school teacher that sees roughly 30 kids throughout the day, but what happens when you’re a middle or high school teacher and we double or triple that number of students? When we add the bodily changes they go through? When we add the hormonal changes they go through? When we add the individual and personalized attention and need of every student? It’s easy for a few students to slip through the cracks. It’s difficult to embrace a job that “ends” at 2:20 but is actually 24/7. Reaching our students and empowering them is an amazing goal and feat to achieve but nonetheless a difficult end we strive, but also sometimes struggle, to attain with our students.

Becoming a true ally to our students doesn’t happen overnight and it’s definitely not an easy job, but then again, I would also like to believe that we all didn’t choose to be teachers because we thought it would be a quick and easy job.

More questions than answers about “thick desire”

Friendship, Love, & Sexuality

“We  see our job first as documenting the links that tie bodies to policies, and importantly,  we see these ties as both punishing and supportive; the question is for whom are policies  punishing and for whom do policies provide consistent support? Our second job is to theorize  the implications of the loss of state support for people, their families, and their communities. To this end, we ask how relationships with policies and the state form  (constrain, expand, inspire) the subjectivity of individuals—a task that diff ers somewhat from that of the philosopher, political theorist, or anthropologist.  With social psychological theory as our guide (Lewin, 1935), we look to the person as well as the environment to ask, how do you know what you want?” (P. 15-16).” -McClelland & Fine, 2013

This week’s reading left me with more questions than answers. Where do we draw the line between liberation and freedom and crime and pedophilia? I completely understand that teenagers have desire and attraction and can attest to that personally but I still find the territory this article treads in to be a bit confusing (convoluted).

Having been a society that previously had children working in factories or one that still follows religions and cultural values where humans enter adulthood a lot earlier than what the “state” allows, how do we define what is okay and what is not? There are certain age differences that I personally consider to be concerning but I’m sure that maybe in another time period no one would have batted an eye at that. At what point did we as a society decide that 18 was the age that separated children from adults? Furthermore, how do we allow youth to have sexual expression while still regulating behavior that we have decided is wrong such as child brides, child pornography, human trafficking of minors, and more? Even using the word “allow” makes me uncomfortable because who are we to decide what someone can or cannot do with their own body.

Adding to this that black and brown youth, queer youth, immigrant youth, non-binary youth, neurologically atypical youth, Muslim youth, and other youth that don’t fit society’s cookie-cutter-mold, are at a much higher risk especially when they fall into more than one of the afore mentioned “categories”. How do we make the world safer for them without simultaneously making it more difficult for them to express themselves? Expression not just in gender identity and performance or sexuality, but expression of who they want to be and what they want to do in the world which reminds us that this desire to live and live boldly goes “beyond the heart, mind, and genitals” (p. 16).

 

Yes, in New York City too

Gender Socialization & Identities

Through no fault of their own, in a culture that vilifies those with a nondominant identity and sexual orientation and objectifies the body image of girls and women, they must endure catcalls and put downs, threats of sexual harassment and violence, and learn to measure their self-worth by weight and dress size. (It’s not about grit, p. 81)

Yes, this occurs in New York City too. Sometimes, blinded by the “liberal-ness” of this huge cosmopolitan city, we believe that the types of hardships and trauma described in chapter 4 of this book happen only in rural areas of “fly over” states where they live in repression of sexual identity and expression. This happens in New York City too. This happens in all the big cities of the United States. This happens all over the world. With as much advancement as we’ve made with/towards gender equality, gender identity, and sexual orientation, we still don’t live in a world where the majority of our students don’t experience harassment, bullying, or violence towards them of just being who they are.

It would be purposefully  ignorant not to recognize that these societal standards affect our students on a daily basis and sometimes even cause themselves to distance themselves from society to the point of self harm and danger to themselves. Unfortunately, there is still problematic and violent behavior still regarded as “normal” and its up to us as educators to stand up against that so that are students can, even if for 45 minutes of their day, exist in a space that welcomes and celebrates them. We have no idea what that can do for them and what the extent of that positivity can cause in them.

When we explicitly denounce and go against behavior and language that puts our students down, we show them that we can be or are allies and that they can trust in us. Upon reading the statistics regarding the language schools present around anti-bullying, I remember in a recent class on this topic watching videos and never seeing the topic of sexual orientation come up. Even I, as a member of the community, completely overlooked this glaring chasm in the anti-bullying movement. There was an emphasis on gender, race, size, ability, but the basis of sexual orientation was either never spoken of or grazed over so lightly that I cannot remember it at all. We can all do better for our students. We can all step up and stand up for them, even when that comes with a cost.

The stories in this chapter and articles for this week can still happen in our classrooms. What will we do for our students that experience this?

Translanguaging to stay true and connect (+ playlist)

Newcomers & Perpetual Foreigners, Urban Adolescents

“She asked us to work harder to build positive relationships with immigrant students in our classes, and to take time to listen to their stories and learn about what they have experienced. If we can bring a bilingual approach that taps into students’ home language and culture, we as teachers, school leaders, counselors, and school social work staff can more effectively partner with our students’ families to bridge the gap between school and family and community.”

– Goodman, It’s Not About Grit, chapter 3 p.79

I feel so happy to be teaching ENL in a time where translanguaging is embraced. Specifically at the middle school level that I’m working with in Spanish Harlem, these students have a lot of knowledge in their home/first language and even more extensive knowledge in the fields and subjects that interest them the most. For the “All About Me” activities we worked on as a class, I allowed them to “code switch” a bit and include some of their answers their first languages. Since the goal of that specific activity was to get them to focus on personal and possessive pronouns, answering “my favorite sport is arco y flecha” did not interfere with the language objective or learning target of the class.

Giving the students the space to talk about where they’re from, where I can find it on a map, their favorite food from home, or the many other parts of them that they can now bring into the classroom makes them more excited and motivated to be in their in the first place and is what this chapter touches upon. Connecting with our students and empowering them are products of the type of communication we have with them. If we welcome their knowledge, their differences, their backgrounds and work with them (not against them), we can build a better classroom environment for them. I know I still have a lot to learn about being an ENL teacher but learning alongside my students and simultaneously learning from them makes the experience uniquely enriching for all of us.

As an emotional response to this chapter and it’s stories, I created a playlist on Spotify. This is just a small compilation of tracks that I felt inclined to include but even the diversity in artists and array of years in which the songs were released says a lot about the importance of this topic. The songs talk about human rights regarding immigrants, stories of people emigrating, how immigration affects those left behind, the resilience of immigrants, the politics behind views on immigration, cultural preservation post-immigration, and more.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e7B7KA30ouPBt4vXli0HsVFc5e7W9eE2grQoQ8lH_5c/edit?usp=sharing

This is a link to a sort of “annotated song list” explaining the topic of each song and a translated quote since not all of the songs are in English.

Re-opening old wounds in an attempt to let them heal

Blurring the In-School Ouf-of-School Line

“In both cases, they were criminalized and assaulted for sitting where they were – on the steps in front of their house or in a lunchroom in their school – and more fundamentally, for being who they were… In some cases it’s important to know that an angry student pushing back against a teacher’s authority is also fighting with painful memories of encounters with the authorities in the justice system.” – Chapter 2

Chapter 1 was a struggle to get through and chapter 2 was increasingly difficult by the paragraph. My experience with this book so far has been mostly re-evaluating aspects of my childhood and adolescence with the new perspective I have as an adult. Looking back at why certain school years were so difficult for me on a socio-emotional level and not understanding why. Not getting why it was so hard for me to do well in school, not getting why I never wanted to go home after school, and then reading section by section similar situations that were going on in my life and seeing it “click”. I get it now. This passage in particular helped me revisit those memories and understand why. It wasn’t that my teachers were bad, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a good students, I just didn’t respond well to authorities that mimicked too closely that of police officers and the unjust actions I had repeatedly seen terrorizing my neighborhood.

One cold winter Saturday morning a white police officer stopped my dad with my brother and I in the back seat because one of the license plates on the vehicle didn’t match the registration of the car. Someone had tried to steal my dad car but only managed to switch out one of the license plates before they were interrupted. As much as my dad tried to explain this to the officer in his “calm proper English” the officer just couldn’t fathom that this black man could have such a nice car so we all had to get into the backseat of his police-car, drive back to the precinct, and sit in a holding cell until someone could come with “more” proof that the car belonged to my dad. More proof than the registration in his name, more proof than the insurance of the car in his name. My brother and I cried in that cell while my dad held us for the several hours it took until someone could come with more documentation. 

I was 7 years old.

I didn’t understand.

Seeing police officers stand by their “emergency mobile stations” outside the schools in my neighborhood. Seeing 11 police-cars holding 4 officers each flood the corner of the bus stop I was waiting at because two high school boys were fighting across the street. Looking at my high school yearbook and seeing the faces of our 4 guidance counselors, then turning the page to the see the faces of the 16 security guards that were constantly patrolling the grounds of my school. Hearing my brother curse and get heated when talking about getting “Stopped and Frisked” for looking at an officer wrong. Not understanding why my friend didn’t come home and later learning that he got deported for hopping the turnstile on his way home from work because it was past 8pm and his student metrocard was invalid. Hearing my mother’s words “Cuidado m’ija que la policia no está buscando quien se las debe sino quien se las paga” (Be careful my daughter because the police aren’t out to get who owes them one but the one who can pay for it). Feeling the blood drain from my head when an officer stood only a few feet away from me looking straight at me successfully intimidating me with his hand on his gun strapped to his waist. Feeling the pain in my right wrist as my best friend pushed back against a cop trying to arrest me for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and then running until I couldn’t feel my lungs.

There are still many things that I don’t understand but now, as an educator, I’m more aware and perceptive of my students. We just don’t know what our students are going through and they may either not have the language to know how to talk about it or the safe-space to be able to speak out. But we can read their body language, we can be there for them. We can make the effort to see when they’re having a particularly bad day. They may be smaller or younger than us but they are whole humans experiencing real life and they may not understand it all.