My really long autobiography

I’m going to start off by warning you all that over my life, I have become very liberal. Very, very liberal. This autobiography may become painful for you if you are more conservative, but hopefully it will describe for you how I reached my current mix of cynicism and idealism about our world and our educational system.

I am white. White, white, white, burning after 10 minutes in the sun white, though that may also be part of my red-headed complexion. My family is a mix of Scots, Germans, some small bit of Irish, and some smaller bit of Danish. Drinkers, not tanners. My family has also lived in Oregon for a long time, as my father says he can trace one of my great-great-grandmothers back to Medford, where she arrived from traveling on the Oregon Trail, though it was apparently the longer version that skipped through Oregon City and the Willamette Valley.

I grew up mostly here in Salem, where I lived in the suburbs in very white neighborhoods, and I attended Sprague High School, the least diverse high school in Salem. My mother is an elementary school teacher, and my father is a United Methodist pastor. My parents got a divorce when my father was getting his Doctorate of Divinity down at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, which occurred when I was 10, and my little sister was 5, and the consequences of the divorce resonate in our lives even now. After the divorce, we saw our father over in Eastern Oregon every summer for one month until I turned 18. When I was 13, his girlfriend became pregnant, so she became our stepmom, and my adorable half-sister Dawn-Hunter was born soon after. When Dawn-Hunter was 8, her mother and my father got a divorce, and my ex-stepmom has recently relocated herself and 12-year-old Dawn-Hunter across the country to Tennessee. So, I essentially grew up with a single mom, and I formed my opinions and thoughts about my gender identity as a woman who needed to have a career, and needed to be able to support herself on all levels.

I suppose my social class background is middle class, though I believe it can be considered that way more because of the levels of education of my parents, since my mom has her Masters, and my father has his Ph.d, than any amount of money they made at the time I was growing up. In fact, I remember being so ashamed the second summer I went to visit my father after the divorce, at the tiny house he was renting with his girlfriend in Oakland, because we had to use food stamps at the grocery store. My father also insisted strangely on buying only powdered milk, which means that to this day I can’t drink any form of powdered drink if it’s cold, because of the associations, as well as the nasty taste. He went back to being a pastor after Dawn-Hunter was born, but was placed continuously out in Eastern Oregon in positions that continually became half-time due to the dwindling, elderly congregations, and left him unable to support many people other than the three he had living in his immediate household.

Religion has, of course, been a huge influence on my life, since it’s very hard to escape it when your father is a pastor, and your whole family is active in a church community. I grew up attending Morningside United Methodist, a fairly small church that was founded in the late ‘50s by a group of teachers, and my mother grew up attending this church, meaning that I am the third generation of my family present whenever I visit the church. Morningside is unique in that it houses a very liberal group of people, and they were one of the first churches in the Salem area to become a Reconciling Congregation back in the ‘90s, which means that they welcome gay, lesbian, bi, transgender, and individuals of all genders in between. They’re all very interested in issues of social justice and outreach, and when I was in the youth group there, we went on a mission trip every single year, non-proselytizing, and continuously performed community service. I grew up with our Vision of Faith memorized: “We are all God’s people! We are called by Christ to ministries of love, justice, and reconciliation, to our church, community, and world.” I have gradually become less religious, and much more of an Existentialist throughout the years, but I have internalized these values to my core, and I always look at the world through a lens of social justice.

Race has always been a hard issue for me, mostly because of my lack of experiences with people from other cultures. When I visited my dad down in Oakland one summer, when I was 11, he took us one Sunday to a church full of black people. We were the only white people there, and I had learned enough history at that point that I felt horrible the entire time I was there, and I felt like they all hated me, or they should, because of slavery, and the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. I had brought candy with me in one of my pockets, for me and my sister to eat later, and I felt that it was important to give a piece to each kid during the children’s sermon, to show that I wanted to be friends. They all just stared at me silently, and only the adults talked to me at the coffee hour, though I was very shy anyway, so I didn’t say much back. My father seemed oblivious to my discomfort, and being 11, I wasn’t comfortable asking about race issues.

One of my worst cultural experiences was on a mission trip my youth group took when I was 17, down to a children’s home in Chiapas, Mexico. It was 90% humidity down there, and very, very warm, with a monsoon-like rain at 2:00 in the afternoon every day, which cooled our compound down for around 20 minutes. The boys were put in a nice room with a bathroom in it, a bathroom that had their own flush toilet, and their own shower. Us girls were put farther away in the home’s compound, and given the old boy’s large bathroom, with toilets that we had to flush with buckets, and showers that were only warm if you waited until the afternoon for a shower, because the sun would heat the water in the tank. Those of us who were female had to wear either pants or very long skirts into town, simply because we were the only white people in the area, and we didn’t want to seem immodest, though all the girls in town wore tank tops and tiny shorts. Groups of men, both students, and old, old men, would whistle at us regardless of what we wore, simply because we were white girls, and women would come up in the market and touch our hair. Obviously, we weren’t in a very touristy area, but groups from churches came through a lot to visit this children’s home. Another thing that upset me was that only the boys were allowed to paint, because it was considered a man’s job, while we girls were only allowed to plant and cook. After painting houses and kitchens and signs on so many other mission trips, I wanted to tell the owner of the home where he could shove his macho culture and outdated ideas. I wanted to forge a path of equality for the women of the village, though the only thing the girls were interested in at the home were the telenovelas, or soap operas, that they watched every night on their one TV.

I’ve always felt uncomfortable being a tourist in colonized areas like Mexico, too, because I feel guilty about having the people, who have been oppressed for centuries, and are still mostly oppressed, serve me, a white person, and have different prices for me because I am a white person. One of my big interests after becoming an English major was finding post-colonial literature, or literature that was written by people who come from colonized countries, or countries that used to be part of imperial colonies, or are still part of those empires. I have to admit, I find a little bit of pleasure in the idea that the countries that went out and colonized are now experiencing reverse colonization, where the people from the lands they conquered come and settle in the lands of their conquerors, like the influx of Indians and Pakistanis into Great Britain, and Algerians into France. I’m very interested in race relations in this country and around the world, and I try not to make stereotypes, though I have more trouble when dealing with cultures that subscribe to much more strict gender roles, which really is almost all of them outside of our Western sphere of experience.

Gender is another huge issue for me. Since I grew up surrounded by a vast continuum of gender identities and gender roles, my own definitions of gender are very fluid. My mother was the provider and disciplinarian in my household, and my grandmother in Salem served as a second mother, so I grew up seeing women doing everything, for the most part. My father is much more interested in gourmet cooking than my mother, so I learned more about cooking from my father, and more about budgeting and taking care of my car from my mother. The only wedding I attended in high school that I really cried at, and was moved by, was the wedding of two women from my church, who had been together for as long as I had been attending Morningside, so since I was 5 years old. Their relationship is much more a model for my relationships than many of the heterosexual marriages I’ve seen, like those in my family, mostly because of the nature of equality in their marriage, and their ability to communicate and stay interested in and committed to each other over the years. Their wedding was also technically not sanctioned in our church, since the greater United Methodist conference is much more conservative about these issues, so it had to be a secret wedding with only close friends, and no one can tell the conference that the pastor performed it, because she could lose her ordination. Of course, this informed my sense of justice, and I continue to fight for gay rights wherever I can.

Feminism, which to me means both men’s and women’s rights, has also always been a big issue for me, ever since I was a little girl attending preschool, and was continuously told by the boys that I couldn’t play with them because I was a girl. I was always good at math and science, at least until I reached Calculus, and part of my identity was built around trying to become a strong woman in science, though I eventually gave that up for my love of English and the humanities, and the fact that I’m really bad at lab work. One issue that I’ve become interested in now is the achievement gap between girls and boys in secondary education, and I’m continually trying to imagine ways that I can try to engage young men in my classroom, as well as support the young women in using feminist texts, and find fiction that interests and applies to each group and their own issues.

Now that I’ve gone on for so long about myself, and bared some of the dark secrets of my white, privileged soul, I will stop, and start preparing myself to enter McKay, the most diverse, and apparently dangerous, of the Salem-Keizer high schools. If I can make it there, with all of my cultural inexperience, then I can make it pretty much anywhere.

Reflections on my purpose as a teacher

My vision of myself as a fantastic teacher is that my students are excited to come to class, even if language arts isn’t their favorite subject. I see myself maintaining control while being able to use humor and passion to hook their interest in our current text. Of course, this is my ideal vision.

Loving children means, to me, supporting and assisting them in all their efforts, and getting to know them personally. Wanting to help students means that I teach them all I can about my subject area, about social issues, and give them all my knowledge about operating out in the real world and relating interpersonally, so that they can become successful and compassionate adults. Another reason I want to teach is that I feel a social responsibility to younger generations, and I want to share with them knowledge that I wish had been shared with me when I was in high school, and different ways of looking at the world, and the reasons for people to read books and be able to critically analyze what other people say.

I believe that my desire to make the world a better place will help sustain me when the going gets tough during teaching. I’ve worked some in the corporate world, and some in government, and I’ve found that I feel my best about my job when I believe that I’m helping people. I’m also eternally curious about the lives of other people, and other people’s experiences growing up, and every year I’ll have a new crop of young people growing up in front of me to examine and interview. I feel so much sympathy for teenagers, too, which may help me get through interacting with an intimidating student, if I can remember to feel compassion and empathy for them and whatever their situation may be, and if I can take each difficult interaction and culturally challenging interaction as an opportunity to learn about others, as well as about myself. I also believe that my own innate stubbornness will get me through the difficult times with students and parents, and that I will be able to build good relationships with most teachers and students, if not the administration.

I’m sure there are many, many things I’ll have to learn as a teacher. My own desire to love and help children and the daily necessities of learning about and addressing the ‘substantial diversity of experiences’ are not mutually exclusive, they just mean that as part of my desire to help each and every students, I must learn a greater number of teaching strategies to tailor parts of each lesson to each student. I will also have to develop further my ability to see how my students think and learn, as well as what they know, and what they have the ability to do. This is, of course, the reason why I decided to get my MAT, in the hopes of learning these different strategies, rather than just plunging ahead with a teacher’s license and hoping I could sort things out on my own.

Sojourner Truth’s argument in her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech was that she could do things just as well as white men, white women, and black men, which was a revolutionary point to make at that period in history, because women were considered inferior as a whole, and black men were regarded as hardly even human. So for a black woman, a member of the most oppressed and disregarded minorities, to argue that she could do just as well as any member of society who was considered her superior, was mind boggling to those who heard her in that time. Really, it serves as a rallying cry and a reminder to examine each person on their qualities and abilities, rather than their gender or race, even today.

I believe that the main purpose of schools is to turn students into productive, responsible, empathetic citizens of the world. Other people, of course, would say that the empathy and responsibility is not necessary to be a productive citizen, which is all that much of the United States cares about, but I say that you cannot truly be a good citizen, and that you cannot be a truly good person, if you cannot take responsibility for your choices and their effect on the world, and feel empathy for people who live in completely different situations than yours, as well as people who are similar to you. This purpose relates completely to a diverse society, in fostering understanding and equity, if all people in all situations could look at each other and see a common humanity despite their differences and struggles, or lack of struggle. I want all of my students to be aware of the stratifications of our society, to be able to consider the challenges of each person’s life, and want to correct the inequity that they see in the world around them. As a teacher, this implies that I must break the ignorance of my students, and expose much of the problems of the world to them, which I feel is accomplished partially, in my subject area, by examining many different texts and narratives. When they are feeling confused or overwhelmed or angry, I must be there to support them and help them deal with their increased understanding, and I must encourage them and maintain my hope and ideals along with theirs.

My vision of myself as a teacher has not changed much over the course of this exercise. I still see myself as transferring my passion for my subject to my students, though I suppose I have deepened my own role in my vision, as one who also supports them, gets to know them, and helps them understand the world around them, and my social responsibility to send more responsible and compassionate human beings out of my classroom and into the world.