With relief and gratitude, I pushed through the last few days of Institute and thanked the merciful powers that be in the Teach For America bureaucracy for giving me an extra four hours Wednesday morning to begin a 22-hour drive over three days to New Mexico to begin the physical move to Atlanta. While the last week of teaching and the few days afterward had me screaming at every exertion like Michelle Larcher de Brito at Wimbledon, I recognized I had undergone an emotional and professional relocation to Atlanta over the past month.
Instead of making clear-cut claims about education, I will broaden my lens here to share what I think it means to be a part of the American South as part of this emotional and professional move. Having a certain “logic of appropriateness” about my joining Teach For America — I felt compelled to become a young activist retracing a long family history in the South — means I am concerned about what the teaching experience means in context.
The second reason I want to give a broader lens is a need to classify the training at Institute with learning a new trade in general, in this case teaching. Having read Johnny Tremain as a child, I embraced the idea of apprenticeship and loved how Johnny became embroiled in revolutionary Boston politics through his apprenticing to a silversmith. Here I can draw some parallels from my first month, of course without the same literary drama.
- The Silence on Race: I have recently picked up a copy of the provocative book “The New Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander of Ohio State University, which among other things asserts how American society has continued many of its racially unjust practices under different names. Nowhere more than in the South is the ubiquity of race issues present: hidden under the name of corruption, urban politics, low-performing students, delinquency and more. The Battle for DeKalb County, as I liken it, takes this area East of Atlanta and pits new black arrivals against established, middle-class white residents. Accounts like the “land rush” and “nepotism” may not single out race as a cause, but the undercurrents flow strong as ocean tides. Resegregation is the era which we must force to a close.
- What “Southern” means in 2013: In the road trip to New Mexico I picked up a Steinbeck book on tape - Travels with Charley - published in 1960 and carrying the famous author’s reflections on American culture and people. He lamented the loss of American regionalism present even then in the booming postwar years. Now, in 2013, being from the South still has charm, but not the same force it may have midcentury. Even with my best intentions to reconnect with Southern heritage, I have two generations of separation, and most people I’ve befriended in Atlanta so far do not have very deep Southern roots themselves. The experience of Southern culture, whether it be through linguistics or black arts is witnessing a transition which pivots around Atlanta. Are the same lines of identity we used in the 20th century relevant in the 21st?
- Helping vs. Serving in the City: One of the fundamental teaching points of TCU’s community involvement curriculum was “helping vs. serving” — or finding the assets in others which teach the one considered the “helper” or the “volunteer” to transform the action into a mutually enriching and fulfilling experience. Writ large, this principle applies to living patterns in our cities. Gentrification (recall this documentary I linked in my first post) is a social trend from which I have now benefited, signing a lease in an apartment complex built across the street from what until the late 1990s was a public housing project. While people overcoming the stigma of urban living has a lot of great implications for social ties, there is also a responsibility to be serving city residents: something people of faith have taken on already.
I’m going to get myself back in the wheelhouse and making more entries about education and the excitement (and nervousness) building up around moving into the classroom. For now, though, I had to step out and weigh anchor and observe these big picture issues accompanying being a new resident of Atlanta. As always, your thoughts and comments are greatly appreciated!
