LJ Idol - Week 13 - Inside Baseball

[applespice]

Sometimes I feel like a cosmonaut touching down on another world, my toes bumping against unfamiliar terrain. I know the language of the locals, have observed the varying cultures as they rub and scrape along each other, can parse the slang and with a little effort make sense of words I do not understand, but I will never fit in. I will always be the spaceman, hovering somewhere in the incomprehensible spaces between.

Nowhere is this clearer than in my professional life. Teaching high school is like rattling around on the inside of a cultural kaleidoscope - the disparate pieces of glass clunking together to form eye-bending, mind-twisting patterns.

On the one side, there are the teachers - ideally impartial fonts of knowledge and caring, leading lights for every child. Realistically? Biased and baggaged and often petty. Often I feel obliged to defend them as a uniform whole, as I do know many educators who are paragons of generosity and open-mindedness, though I also know all too well how unintentionally twisted they can be. Sometimes I am one of them, pushing back my helmet to find that I can breathe their air. Sometimes their words pound senselessly against the plastic bubble, an impenetrable toxic fog.

"She told me she was raped, but she was drunk! I tell these girls again and again..."
"I don't care if one of my students is gay, I just don't want them talking about it."
"I don't know his name! Paco, Juan, Jose - something like that."
"These black girls, it's no wonder stereotypes exist."
"You know they just have babies to get on welfare, just like their mothers."

I try and speak up, but their eyes glaze and brows wrinkle - as though I'm emitting nothing more than a series of insensible beeps and whirs and gibbered phrases. Isolated again, drifting off on a cosmic wind.

On the other side are the students, at my place of work a nearly 30-30-30 split of White, Black, and Hispanic (bubble kids, at risk, low expectation - titles placed on their heads like rotted laurels, and we wonder why they glare at us with sharp-cornered eyes and claim continually, "I can't.") A tapestry of community, language, culture, faith; sometimes even in the weave and sometimes snagged, sometimes ripped outright.

Among them I am liked, a kind of otherworldly oddity. I understand them (perhaps, being young, my world is closer in the planetary alignment to theirs), but in small ways I am strange, as though I hover continually between being one of the untrusted cluster of authority they rail against and being a teenager myself. Am I one of those or one of them? No one can say.

"Nobody likes me, Miss. All the boys want is a yellow bone girl, and I'm too dark."
"He did some bad things to me when I was little. It's in the past, I'm over it, please don't tell anybody."
"I got a fake ID, Miss, you want to see?"
"Who cares? He's retarded!"
"I got wasted this weekend!"

Again I open my mouth to protest, and again the stream of ear-deadening babble issues forth. Their eyes squint and slide away. Rocketman in flight.

Is there any way to bridge the chasm between them - bring their worlds together, make them sensible? Is it pretentious to even want to? Youth and age never intersect entirely, never understand each other, never "get it." Is this that, or something more insidious, indicative of rifts that have never closed - and never will if they are pawned off as being harmless results of an age gap?

Will we ever speak the same language?

Comments

[michellerz.livejournal.com]

My ex boyfriend struggles with this, too, along with being hit on by freshman and sophomore girls. It makes you wonder - is it better to be younger or older? :-\

[applespicy.livejournal.com]

It's a very weird position to be in. I get hit on and underestimated and my authority is often ignored, but I'm also more respected as a person, trusted, and appreciated. It's kind of a two-edged sword, I guess, but I can't imagine that there aren't benefits and consequences for every age.

[basric.livejournal.com]

Well written, I liked it.

[applespicy.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[team-jessie.livejournal.com]

Well put!

[applespicy.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

A "failure to communicate"?

[devifemme.livejournal.com]

Really, Spicy, that was a tour de force, especially in regard to the generational divide among teachers -- and several commenters reinforced what, to me (long out of school, myself), translates as a huge resource issue. Namely, given the trust and friend-at-court aspects, school leaders ought to integrate such younger teachers as important channels to communicate better. And in BOTH directions.

Not using such staff as snitches, not at all -- in fact, for such communications purposes, the young teachers ought to assure kids their identities will be protected. And the principals/others should assure the younger teachers that their interests, while carrying out such a sensitive role, will be respected.

Is anything systematic being done now? Perhaps it's not do-able for reasons not apparent to me.

You all are doing vital work -- I'm in awe of all of you!

Hugz,
Justine

[lawchicky.livejournal.com]

It is a tough situation to be in!

[alephz.livejournal.com]

What a fascinating (if, at times, depressing) place to be.

And so very well communicated. Well done!

[superhappytime.livejournal.com]

I like the dreamy, introspective quality of this.....

[tigrkittn.livejournal.com]

Interesting take on the topic! It's like different groups live in two (or more) completely different worlds/realities.

[greenfernway.livejournal.com]

It seems both sides are reaching out for understanding while wearing blinders. How surreal.

[wyliekat.livejournal.com]

I would imagine a school could house a lot of that - people who no longer care crashing up against people who still want to believe.

[phoenixejc.livejournal.com]

Well written example of how perspective determines so very much!

[pixie117.livejournal.com]

I really liked this entry. You really know how to make a subject purely your own and write it beautifully. Well done!

[joeymichaels.livejournal.com]

Will we ever speak the same language?

Well, of course, the students will speak the same language as the teachers a mere few years out of school. I work with high school students, too, and I think the thing that's hard to remember is that they're not adults yet. They have the intellect and bodies of adults (sometimes), some have the responsibilities of adults, some have experienced things that nobody (not even adults) should experience, but they still have a way to go developmentally. Not a criticism, just a fact. Accepting them for who they are and shepherding them in positive directions are two positive things we can do for them.

However, who a person is at 16 and who they are at 19 are usually very, very different things.

Anyhow, thought provoking entry!

[applespicy.livejournal.com]

That's definitely true, but there's more than just an age gap between the teachers at my school (mostly in their 40s and 50s, conservative, mostly middle class, white) and the students (obviously teenagers, more liberal, most of them living below the poverty line, 2/3s of them POC). Somehow I doubt these kids are going to be on the same wavelength as their teachers, even in their own 40s and 50s. Though perhaps I only think that way because I am not on the same wavelength as many the other teachers. I should analyze my own position more closely, as right now I sympathize much more with the students and it's making me biased.

Thanks!

[joeymichaels.livejournal.com]

Well, truth be told, they'll be more like their parents, but they'll be a little bit like the teachers, too!