I’m A White Teacher: Navigating George Floyd & Race In the Classroom
Trying to have an open dialogue is hard and I’m trying my best
As a high school English teacher, I try my best to create every opportunity to add diversity into the curriculum as much as possible. I am a white teacher and three years into my career as an educator. I didn’t enter the profession because I loved reading and writing, or because I was good at school. In fact, school was hard for me- I had to work really hard to earn C’s on my homework assignments and pass my tests. I became a teacher because I was fortunate to have educators in my life that showed me the gaps in education and empowered me to never stop learning, and I wanted to do the same with my own students. Most importantly, I saw a lack of representation in the curriculum that didn’t represent our culturally diverse country, students in my classes that would be completely left out of the conversation in talking about Huck Finn and Shakespeare, Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men. While these novels are renowned as “classics”- white authors often took the place of African American and minority authors that had just as much merit, and that’s the problem.
While I went to school with students from a variety of different backgrounds in New York, there was no way to truly celebrate or acknowledge…
