The Process of Orientation
Becoming an educator influenced my determination for all of my students to create future visions. I am not one to divorce where I am currently from my upbringing, but I also can easily aspire to improve my life (as I know it) as a comfortable English teacher experiencing a South Florida lifestyle, one in which Miami Beach youth, Latin American elites and political conservatives effectively reign supreme. My personal community as a growing child was one specifically supporting my development, which was not exemplified nor mirrored in my early, main experience as a middle school teacher. First moving into this field of education, I didn’t expect a lot since what my state education department tries always seems as if it were falling short..
Such types of sensibilities, being hopeful of a brighter tomorrow, are actually not congruent with what I appreciate professionally from the state and its governor (having contributed enough of his budget to bump up salaries while making teacher unions feel like their worthwhile words really merit putting forth action.) Still, I actually know what’s possible teaching English and drama. As an individual artist, I write poems and produce works of artistic interpretation (i.e. theater pieces and Hip-Hop.) I can’t outline the framework of exactly what “I do” yet because I am still young from a classroom vantage point. One thing I do accept, however, is I am searching far and wide for a new school setting given my first full-time experience teaching was the most horrible experience housed within West Palm Beach, FL.
Even though I traditionally attend schools outside of what made most sense, I ventured to Palm Springs to have even my first Title I experience. I have been in education from substitute teaching for almost four years now and I am a writer encouraged to join via the Master’s in Science for Professional Educators, so I am currently working on producing good academic writing in a teaching capacity that makes sense. However, the fact that I have to mention how minority middle schoolers really did a number on me is sad.
I will start off by mentioning how growing up my talent allowed for me remaining unrestricted within my existence yet I wonder whether teaching is an appropriate role for me. As I try teaching in classes, I can’t fully understand whether my temperament is suitable for the 9-to-4 workday that middle school espouses. Experienced Palm Beach County School District teachers even challenged whether the level of my intelligence was a sourced possibility to contribute to children who are lazy. I cannot challenge surrounding communities but I wonder whether there is a certain type of person that can flourish in a classroom and why, as of yet, I am not.
This question comes from gathering different experiences of my lack in pedagogical abilities and a constant suppression of my talented personality. I am hoping that proving my intelligence to young minds can finally disappear as a need for affirming my own worth in a classroom filled with students that may or may not be more capable than I am in an academic setting. This is important to me since nothing can allow for growth when a leader is unsure of their own potential. I run the risk of making students my sounding board when they should be getting smarter.
As it stands, I have attempted to conform to what schools are attempting to contain, which is students that have difficulty reconciling technological abilities and levels of boundaries. I have created an un-championed ability in classrooms that time can only allow to hold weight within the mindsets of school boards and the superintendents following policy and generating framework protocol.
I have not had a single conversation regarding expected expertise’s relationship to marketable professionalization in the classroom because I feel I have had a unique experience with the subjects I teach, being that I have always been a student-athlete-artist. Nothing helped me feel more tapped into community than the grades, academics, and culture I contributed to on a regular basis in academic settings. My inquiry is mostly informed by how often school problems have expected solutions that I just do not have a “putting out fires” capacity to contribute.
This summer, nothing’s changed as a teacher-student and I have planned to maintain a 4.0 GPA and figure out what makes the most sense for me moving forward as an instructor transitioning into a different city, mainly Miami. I have not had the opportunity to interface with private, charter, nor public schools given that I am within the higher academic orientation and cannot comfortably understand the bureaucracy taking place within school organizations. So, I will learn whether my unique view will find acceptance among a Hip-Hop and education zeitgeist still far behind in the times.
Students represent ideas and may answer prompts with responses not fully fleshed out from an educator’s standpoint. Thus, they need to develop perspectives of which most may seem alien to them. Increasingly, I learn that unimportant pedagogy sometimes remains after the teacher’s preparation has ended, yet following grades, instructors’ validation of answers of students providing power from consigned institutional levels ignored for championing most capacities at the district-level offices, all while making attendance matter, only answers to maintaining a job. It still will not add to a person’s student life. Whichever students I might have at sometime that I am comfortable not adding to a pedagogical approach to instruction could benefit from me better understanding what matters to myself as a man. So, I am re-exploring my high school poetry to understand what carried forward from the pedagogical mind that learned to teach himself sitting in English class. If anything, I will leave behind the aspects of my ego that disappeared within this process of reorientation. But none of this can remove my reason for teaching.
