Teachers can be heroes
Dear President Trump ~ you can't stop this teacher!
This is what happens when Mrs. Stansfield is your very first Black, Language Arts teacher...
She prepares you to be the change you dream is possible. She links everything you read to freedom, and the world around you. You don’t merely comprehend; she has you dig much deeper. You see beyond surface facts, simple responses. You come to see literature as the doorway to liberation and freedom. She made you brave, made you unafraid, and she gave you the courage to reimagine the world as it could be. How could we read Victor Hugo, Maya Angelou, Charles Dickens, James Baldwin, and Beowulf without knowing William Wilberforce, Marcus Garvey, Cesar Chavez, Jose Marte, MLK, Jim Crow, and JFK’s Camelot.
This current administration see teachers like Mrs. Stansfield as a threat to tyrannical dreams. I still remember her clearly asking us, "Why is it that we need to read? Why do you need to write?" As all good poor kids (high school students) we replied "to get a good job, to go to college, to succeed". We were playing right into her hands. "Hmmm so you read and write to be good little worker bees". She then proceeded to walk to the chalkboard and wrote a James Baldwin quote:
“You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
She then asked us if he sounded like some good little worker bee? Readers/writers can be worker bees, or they can be like Cesar Chavez challenging an unjust world. Imagine reading the library books James Baldwin reads. The Gallo Grape company would want JB to read all about being a better farm worker bee. She told us we were going to be reading his heroes; and we read all about William Wilberforce decades long struggle to end the slave trade.
As a highschool sophmore I didn't knew these guys... but she changed that, and connected her heroes to everything we read. In the 70's Jersey City NJ Ghetto Teachers, were not restricted to teaching poor kids just the facts, and dates. They were free to go beyond that box. Control was not the goal. Education to those teachers was about liberation!
Pedagogical Compliance with the status quo was the last thing on the minds of our teachers.
Decades later as a graduate student, I came to recognize Mrs. Stansfield pedagogy in Paulo Freire's writing. “The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.”
Mrs. Stansfield empowered her students to understand that reading can really change your world. She also taught me and my classmates that we could be heroes.
I am the books I read.
I can be a hero, because I had teacher heroes.
Books were our liberators.
To quote Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop "Books are mirrors, windows, and sliding doors to our world. Pathways to ourselves, others, and humanity".
My teachers were "old school" teaching outside the box!
Dr. Jesse P. Turner
Unafraid to follow in the footsteps of my heroes
If you like to listen to the tune that inspired my morning walk today, it is David Bowie "Heroes" link: htts://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFHC6t13hi0
