Rookie Teaching
I used to hate reading. I hated how long it took to finish a book, I hated how small the text could be on a single page, and I despised the constant assessments and tests. Then I went to high school.
I had the privilege of getting a fancy scholarship to attend a fancy prep school in the Massachusetts suburbs. The whiteboys were racist. I’m tired of denying this reality to myself and others.. I was often asked if I knew how to rap, who was paying for my education, how could I live in a city as scary (read: black) as Lawrence. Oh and of course, that one time a whiteboy at an after-school club told me to my face that Trayvon Martin (Rest in Power) deserved to die. Yes, there was a teacher in the room. No, he didn’t say anything. I was fourteen. I just sat there blank-faced, confused why these whiteboys were blaming a child for his own murder.. So, why did I stay in such a toxic and racist environment where I never felt comfortable?
Well, for one, my parents are Dominican. From el campo. For the layman, that means my Americano tears didn’t mean much to folks who were skilled in the martial art of machete-swinging by age eight, and scholars of the lost art of La Loma. Secondly, my teachers kept me hopeful.
When I was a first-year at prep school, I found myself in the shocking position of being the only negrito in my English class. My teacher had been a tutor of mine in middle school, and he always tried his best to make me feel comfortable in class. For a lesson, we read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie. It was one of the first books I vividly remember enjoying. I didn’t know much about American Indians[1]. This book was like an invitation to a life I never lived. Plus, I found the main character very relatable as I began my own trek through Gringolandia.
Speaking of which, whiteboys love sports. We all know this. We also know that American sports are racist as fuck. Each in their own unique, patriotic way. And so my teacher, trying his damned liberal best, spoke to these fools about how fucking racist sports mascots caricaturing Indians are. But the whiteboys didn’t get it. Whiteboys simply love sports too much for racism to interfere. An intoxicated big-bellied whiteman painting his face red and wearing a feathered headdress he bought for $19.99 three years ago was simply honoring “their” culture. Whose culture, I don’t know. Whiteboys don’t see color, for the “who” never mattered. They just really want to wear redface, blackface, yellowface. The “who” never existed to the whiteboy.
I was getting HEATED. My hand shot up and I told off these whiteboys. Exposing these privileged, coddled, pale-faced milkboys for their racist bullshit was satisfying. In the dead silence that followed my tirade, I heard fourteen consciences whispering into fourteen ears, “Are we actually racist?” When presented with this heavy, intergenerational inquiry, whitefolks will do what whitefolks do best: nothing.
I didn’t know it then, but literature was pushing me into a space unknown. I didn’t know anything about Indians at the time. But I felt for this imaginary Indian boy conjured up in my mind through the deciphering of little black scribbles on a page. I saw a piece of me in him, though I would never know him. And yet, I knew I needed to say something for him, because in a way, I was saying something for me.
My sophomore year English course turned my brain inside out. We were reading the strangest book: A Canticle for Leibowitz. I wasn’t sure why, but reading this book transported me to a vivid world for the first time. Everything intrigued me in this world: I wanted to know how people talked, what people ate, whether or not they could rebuild society? On top of that, my sophomore English teacher gave these lectures…OOMF. Yes, he’d been doing this for decades, but I didn’t think some dude talking about words for an hour could be so interesting. He drew out literature to be a Universe, a realm, a kingdom of (im)possibilities.
Junior year I started consuming literature like I was drinking from the Fountain of Youth. Once I understood literature as a realm, I believed I could go find answers to the racist shit happening around me. It was this year I started my journey into wokeness[2]. I read Marx, Fanon, Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, Nietzsche, Malcom X, James Baldwin, The Quran. I had the Knowledge at last. I would argue with every whiteboy who uttered the faintest bigotry. I would purge all ignorance.
But, alas, even with winning every argument and exposing every racist, it didn’t matter. People aren’t racist because they’re ignorant. They’re just racist, and they want to stay racist. Feeling defeated, I started to forget why I even liked reading.
Then senior year came, and one more English teacher taught me an important lesson. Literature is a realm, not just a tool. Not everything learned in this kingdom can be understood by those who decide to never visit. Nor by those who refuse to understand this kingdom as realm unto itself. The visitations to this kingdom are an end to themselves, for each visit changes a part of you in a way you could have never expected.
“Jhoneidy, what does any of this have to do with anything? And why’s your introduction so damn long?”
Well, dear reader, ya boy’s in China to teach. And I sure damn well know that if I didn’t have the privilege (and IT IS a privilege in the United States) of good teachers, I would not be where I’m at today. I would not love literature, and I would not have wanted to be an educator if it wasn’t for a lot of people who had educated me growing up.
Plus, I just wanted to talk about my high school.
***
After being in Wuhan for only three days, I was told to ready a lesson plan for my first class on Monday. My co-teacher told me not to panic. She suggested that I focus on introducing myself to my students. I have an interesting background, she said.
On Sunday night, I scrambled together a PowerPoint presentation and a vague lesson about learning to talk about where one’s from. I was going to talk about my hometown of Lawrence, having two Dominican parents, the culture shock of high school and college, my love of literature, and visiting my family in the Dominican Republic. I was nervous, for sure, but I had a plan. Just had to follow it. Simple.
I woke up at eight in the morning that day, though my class wasn’t until two in the afternoon. I did some exercise, ate a big breakfast, and practiced my presentation. I left my apartment at 1:30pm to make sure I had enough time to set up for class. On my walk to work, I kept reciting the presentation to myself. I was most nervous about connecting with my students. What if they didn’t like me? What if I actually didn’t know how to teach well? What if they make fun of my shirt?
To relieve this torment, I pulled my headphones out of my ears and listened. Though I’m desensitized to it now, the walk to work is fairly eventful. I would walk down a few stairs to cross a track-and-field. In the mornings there would be an ensemble of elderly folks lined up in rows on the soccer field, practicing Tai chi collectively. On this afternoon, there were some grandparents playing with their grandkids, a few college couples holding hands and walking in circles around the track, and other students and teachers crossing the track and field as I was.
Crossing the intersection, the sidewalk I was on was lined up with little stores and restaurants of all sizes. Across the street was a huge construction project. Before the Foreign Languages Department was an elementary school. Parents and grandparents alike stood outside the school gates, waiting patiently for their kids’ dismissal.
The building I work in is a twenty-story tall high-rise. The building alone is so daunting compared to the little, suburban liberal arts college I had attended. I checked my phone one last time, as I still do before every class, to make sure I was going to the right room. Room 1207. Cool.
The elevator shot me straight up, and I found the classroom easily. I entered the room and all my students looked like they were passed out. Ten minutes before class and it was silent, except for vague murmurings here and there. When the first students saw me, they alerted the rest of the class. Heads sprung up from their desks, and then smiles began to gather left and right. I smiled back and said hello in the most confident but least assertive way possible.
No one responded. We just kept smiling back at each other.
I started setting up, dictating every movement with an internal monologue. I ripped a sheet of paper from my notebook and drew out a crude attendance sheet. I stood up and projected,
“Hey y’all, can you write your English name, Chinese name, Pinyin, and student ID numbers on this sheet?”
Since it was the first day, I repeated everything in Chinese. There were oohs and aahs all around the room.
As the sheet made its way around, I began my presentation. I wasn’t completely sure how much was understood, but everyone was paying attention, so it couldn’t have been that bad. Afterwards, we had a brief five-minute break, and I asked everyone to introduce themselves.
“You have to say your name, where you’re from, what’s your favorite food, and one question that you would want to ask me.”
Oh. I was not prepared for some of these questions. All my students are sweet and funny and kind…but these kids were wild.
“One thing I want to ask is: will you be here for the Spring Festival?”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Can I have your number?”
I kept it cool and professional, of course.
“Yes, I’ll still be teaching at the University during that time.”
“Yes, I do have a girlfriend.”
“No, I won’t be giving any of you my number.”
After the introductions, I presented a little video showcasing Lawrence, and had my students do small group discussions, and then a larger group discussion, on what makes their hometowns unique.
Overall, I felt really good about the first day! The awkward questions were a little weird but I thought it was just a fluke. Nothing to get too embarrassed about.
I was wrong.
The next day, the questions were bolder.
“Could I give you my number in case you ever want to hang out?”
“What’s your favorite perfume? Oh! And when’s your birthday?”
“You are very handsome.”
“Um, that’s not a question.”
“Oh, umm, I don’t really have a question right now.”
Like I said, these kids were wild. As time went on, though, this happened less and less. My role as teacher was solidified quickly. I’m lowkey, I like to laugh and have a good time. But I’m here to teach, y’all.
As each class went by, I began to feel a little less overwhelmed. I teach eight classes on four different subjects. I have about eighty students, varying from first-years to juniors. Come to think of it, now that I’m reading what I just wrote I’m surprised I made it this far. And it’s only been a little more than a month…
I teach courses on audio and visual English, pronunciation, Euro-American Literature, and Literary Criticism. To be honest, I enjoy these last two the most. I’m a literature major, what can I say? After introductions in these classes, we did a good ol’ (de)construction of the course titles. I needed these youngsters to know that I ain’t your typical English literature teacher. So far, we’ve read Sherman Alexie, Zadie Smith, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Neil Gaiman, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Dereck Walcott, and a dash of Shakespeare and Melville.
No matter the course, however, I made sure class time was dedicated to topics that my students and I would both find interesting. From our first-day discussions, my students told me they were really interested in learning about American culture. But ya boy’s Caribbean, too. For our food class, I showed a video on how to make goat curry. I taught a lesson on hip hop culture and history, and made my students write raps for their homework. Frankly, some of these were great.
In my pronunciation classes, I had my students rap the opening verse of “Children’s Story” by Slick Rick and “Jazz (We Got)” by A Tribe Called Quest. When they perfectly rapped Q-Tip’s opening verse, I couldn’t help but laugh. If you told me a year ago that I would be teaching twenty-eight Chinese students how to rap one of the smoothest verses of the early 1990s, I’d think you were joking. But here we are. Y’all really thought magical realism was fiction?
For the last couple of weeks, I did a lesson on speeches in movies, and the power of words and body-language. I taught a class on comic books.
To this very moment, I’m not 100% sure what I’m doing. I’ve just been picking a topic I find interesting and discussing it with my students. Next week, we’ll be talking about climate change.
In the spirit of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I believe that the best education is one that is more relational than dictatorial. There have been moments where this has been difficult to do, though. Many times, in the first few weeks especially, I would ask the class a question, and they would stare back at me blankly. I understood this as them not understanding the question, or me not explaining it well enough. I would later learn from one of my students that this was a cultural difference. To speak, unless directly spoken to, was understood as a lack of modesty. My student explained that everyone is thinking about an answer to my questions, only that they await for me to call them by name. I took note of this, and have been doing so ever since.
Even a month in, however, things are still not always smooth. There was one particular day where I did not have the will to teach, but ya boy pushed forward. The Tuesday night before, I was sending out graduate school applications, and afterwards had a lot of trouble sleeping. To make matters worse, Wednesdays are my busiest days. My alarm shrieked into my ears that early morning. I laid in bed for another twenty minutes before dragging myself out. I quickly got ready, grabbed my coffee, and started my walk through the cold, foggy morning.
I arrived a minute or so late. For this class, we were going to discuss The Sandman Issue #13. I chugged some coffee, and began to lecture for 45min on the history of comics in the United States, and the absurdity of the trusting superheroes. Then, I introduced the text and we began our discussion.
My students made incredible observations on how the use of color and details in the comic book art style expressed changes throughout history. They noted the strange question of mortality, and the ethics of choosing immortality. And they were shocked by the presentation of the slave trade within the comic.
By the end of class, a student of mine asked me a surprising question.
“Can you send me all the issues of The Sandman?”
I just smiled back at first. “You sure? There’s seventy-five issues.”
“I don’t mind. I really like The Sandman.”
I chuckled and told her that I would. (Still working on it.)
Another student came up to me and asked if she could have my lecture notes. I apologized and told her that I didn’t have any. She seemed very confused.
“Wait…you didn’t use any notes?”
“No, but that’s not a bad idea.”
I still don’t use notes.
A third student came up to me and said that she found this class really interesting, and thanked me for it. I was genuinely surprised but I felt my heart warm up. Another student interjected, saying that I was the best foreign teacher she’s ever had.
“The guy last year just said really bad jokes.”
The remaining students began to laugh and nod in agreement. I thanked all of them for being so kind. I was trying my best to hold back the tears. I entered the room feeling so tired and drained, but these kids brought me back to life.
I called my partner the next morning to tell her the good news. My students not only liked me, they found the topics interesting! They were learning! I was teaching! And I’m not bad at it!
She started giggling as I explained my excitement to her. When I asked why she was laughing she said,
“Well, duh. Did you actually think you were going to be a bad teacher?”
[1] I will be using the term “Indian” in this piece for a couple of reasons. For one, the main character of the novel refers to himself in this term. Secondly, years ago I had the amazing opportunity to get to know some folks of the Penobscot Nation in Maine. They preferred being called Indian as well, and gave me a number of reasons for why. Anyway, my woke, millennial brain is too self-aware to not add an itty-bitty footnote.
[2] I say this seriously and ironically. Now, avert your eyes up. There’s still more to read.
