“One has only to look at the gaps between professional education, professional responsibilities, and the policies that direct learning, teaching, and working to recognize that we have important work to do in clarifying not only the role of teachers in school mental health but also in including teachers on the front end and inviting their voices to be heard.”
(Weston, 2018, p. 116)

       This sheds light on an important topic that we’ve touched based on in class: What is the teacher’s role? Well, it’s definitely not just one. This made me think and agree that we must not only clarify our roles and responsibilities as teachers but also make known our concerns, opinions, doubts, and ideas. For example, some of us are taking the course “Ss with Disabilities” and we discussed how IEP accommodations are being made by a psychologist. The school psych observes and tests a student, but usually doesn’t consult the main teacher, and doesn’t discuss with the main teacher what is feasible or what can realistically be done in the classroom to support that student. This is concerning because most of the IEP accommodations are for the main teacher to implement in their classroom, but again, they’re being recommended without conferencing the teacher. This leads up to the challenge that we face as teachers, which is, balancing the demand to meet all student’s needs. I say challenge because of the gap that exists and the article explains it perfectly, teachers care about their student’s well-being, we want to support all students, but sometimes, as we mentioned in class, we don’t feel that we’re trained enough or at all nor capable to meet the requirements of all the roles ‘assigned’ to us. Therefore, it’s been important and valuable to learn throughout this course the resources that are available to us as teachers when it comes to providing any and all support to our students.

“…,political leaders and the mass media have succeeded in publicly denigrating poor Black mothers as the undeserving, criminal poor.” (Goodman, 2018. P.117)

And we have bought it. They both (politicians and the media) keep selling us alienation of “the other” and we keep buying it. I come from a passionate country that sees no gray scales in its passion: passionate hate or passionate love. It wouldn’t be so terrible if it didn’t come with an uneducated crowd that keeps voting with the hatred side of their passion (and the prop$ that come with it). In 2002 that unconscious crowd elected a dictator under a disguised democracy. He corruptly got himself re-elected in 2006 and decades later keeps placing puppets in power to do the dirty job and pay for it to, while he remains untouched and immaculate, sitting as a congressman moving pieces into the most convenient ladders and pushing the useless down the snakes.
Among his many sins, the called “falsos positivos” in army slang, is to my eyes by far the worst. He decided to put a price on every guerrilla rebel’s head, the way Pablo Escobar put a price on police officers’ heads back in the dark 90’s. Soldiers from the Colombian army went to the poorest possible neighborhoods in the forgotten barrios of Bogota (among other cities), where they lured teenagers at risk with the promise of work to other cities that were miles away. The soldiers filled trucks with these “second class citizens” that would be missed by no one (because who can miss the poor), drove them for hours to where they were bound to have a war encounter, murdered them, dressed their corps with guerrilla uniforms and declared them rebel fighters in order to boost their stats in the war against leftist insurgents.The suspiciously inflated numbers, wrongly called “false positives”, got the officers and troops who carried out the executions rewards in the shape of money, promotions or vacation time. They also justified United States aid military packages, which have been helping keep the business of war alive for so long. It was the mothers of these children (because most of them were still on their teens) who made this visible and stood for their sons to say that they were not undeserving, nor were their criminals, even if they were poor. These extrajudicial executions made me feel the hopelessness that was woken again by this painful chapter 5 in the book “It’s not about Grit”. How much longer can we take?

“Both deep and surface acting create conflict within teachers, who feel the pressure to suppress true feelings and either revise them so they are more acceptable or ignore them and present false feelings instead Continue reading The Taboo of Teaching →

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.