Frames of Reference

My family was a station wagon full of New York transplants. In fact, my entire suburban childhood was spent around children of New Yorkers who escaped the boroughs in a massive white flight to New Jersey communities. Every one of my friends and school mates had a New York connection, foreign-born grandparents, and a story of the decline of their old New York neighborhood, as told to them by their parents. New York City was a cultural mecca, a place to see a Broadway show or a concert, visit a museum, or dine in a fancy restaurant. But it was not a place to raise kids, in our parents’ eyes - Great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

I attended a brand new elementary school, fifties-style “modern” surrounded by truck farms, wheat fields and a dirt road that was soon to be paved and named the Garden State Parkway. My teachers were either really old – forty something! – or straight out of college and model-beautiful. One lone male taught in the building, and of course the principal was a man. We were in awe of Sputnik, feared the Russians, hid under our desks in preparation for “the bomb,” and feared the “new math” that never came. My life and my school experiences were suburban easy. My only real difficulty was finding my way home on the winding streets, where every house, car and tree was identical to the next.

A favorite family story is my mother’s elementary school experiences, which she loved to tell and we loved to hear about. Growing up in Greenwich Village, she was the daughter of a night club owner. My grandparents decided that the neighborhood schools were not safe enough, or good enough, so they enrolled her in a nearby Catholic school. Being the only Jewish girl in the school, she attended only the academic classes and was allowed to skip the religious mass and instruction. She graduated at the top of her class, and was the class valedictorian. Of course the moral of the story was that city schools were so bad that a little Jewish girl had to attend a Catholic school to be safe, educated and basically to survive.

My father’s tales of being brought up in Brooklyn and attending city schools were pretty grim. The parents tag-teamed my brothers and me, and we believed with all our heart and soul that suburbia and its safe, clean, homogenized schools were fantastic. Beware the big bad city!
I did grow up just a little bit after high school, traveled and studied around the country and around the world, and found out there was a life beyond my backyard. I was in awe of kids my age who lived so differently from me. I remember being so curious about many of the Native Americans and Mexican immigrants who attended the University of Colorado when I was there. Their lives were difficult, funding was difficult, cultural transitions were difficult. I saw something unique and so different than what I grew up around. My journalism experiences after college took me to small newspapers in the Midwest, where I encountered the rural poor for the first time.

Looking back, I know I had tremendous opportunities, more than others would ever have, but I never really questioned or deeply considered what urban centers, urban life and urban education were like for people. I lived what I lived, had limited exposure to urban life, and was basically hard-wired to believe that the only way to live in an urban area was with a ton of money to pay for private school tuition for my children. City life was only a good thing if you could throw a lot of money at it. It was so much easier – and cheaper - to live in small town New Jersey and put my kids through school systems similar to what I came up through. My husband, who grew up in the rural Midwest, had no city experiences at all, and lined up behind the notion of safe, suburban living.

I didn’t think about the urban educational experience until I began to study in a post-B.A. program for my educational certificates. In a small suburban Catholic college, I was asked to consider what my beliefs were about education - my own educational experiences, preconceived notions and personal feelings regarding urban versus suburban school systems and aspirations for teaching in my own classroom. It was there that I learned that my childhood experiences, my family background and the beliefs I fostered based on my parents’ experiences would actually affect the kind of teacher I would become.

While taking a course at Montclair State University I had the opportunity to work with middle school students from a charter school in Paterson through the Silk City Media Workshop project. We met with a group of boys and girls weekly at the Passaic County Community College satellite in downtown Paterson. Despite my very suburban upbringing I didn’t feel apprehensive at all about entering and working in Paterson. As a child I had spent quite a bit of time visiting family and friends in working class neighborhoods of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I developed strong feelings about urban centers as places where large numbers of people of many cultures, ethnicities, religions and socioeconomic backgrounds live in close proximity. These centers are like human laboratories that foster relationships, interactions and experiences, good and bad.

At the workshop project the children were writing, directing and filming video stories of their own creation. The videos ran the gamut from family issues and difficulties, personal experiences with friends, school and classroom experiences, to fantasy, ghost and horror stories. Working with the children on their videos was the “curriculum,” and learning about the kids and making personal connections with them was the “hidden agenda,” the part that really mattered the most.

The young participants in the Silk City Workshop were motivated students whose families sought to provide a better education and plot a more positive course for their futures by enrolling them in a charter school. I realized these children and their accompanying teachers did not exactly embody a complete picture of urban education. Urban schools are a slice of life. They are educational centers of excellence with many positive experiences to be gained. They are also the underfunded, neglected, corrupted and dangerous schools of impoverished inner cities, where few survive and profit. Urban school teachers can be the most dedicated teachers in the profession, the most burnt-out and cynical teachers or anything in between.

As a pre-service teacher, I had a preconceived set of notions about what the classroom would be like. I was working as a public relations consultant for the same community in which I would soon student teach and eventually be employed as a teacher. In my job as a consultant, I primarily dealt with elected officials and other employees of the borough hall offices. My dealings with the community were very scheduled, structured and proscribed – meetings, events, etc. Based on the people I interacted with on this job, I assumed that the community was very middle class, very comfortable, with basically intact nuclear families – two parents raising children.

I applied to student teach in this community because I had a comfort level here, knowing many of the town’s residents and the social and political structure of the town. My preconceived notions were about to be challenged. Although the community is considered suburban, it has many rental apartments that are (were) reasonably priced, is on the border of Bergen and Hudson counties, has quick access via public transportation to Newark, Jersey City and New York City and has a very diverse population culturally and economically.

Although this community was semi-suburban, many of its residents were from the cities – Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Newark and Jersey City. Not surprisingly many students had attended large urban schools at one time or another in their educational careers, or had parents who attended urban school districts. Many of the district’s students were very street smart and savvy, very oriented to and accustomed to city life. Some were hardened and difficult to connect with and teach. Many had been thrown out of one or more schools, and some had been through the juvenile courts and detention system. I began to feel that these students were a combination of their environment and the way they were hard-wired, as are all human beings. Many fail and many succeed, some because of the advantages or disadvantages they experienced, and some in spite of those.

As a student teacher at the elementary level, I never thought I would hear war stories or see battle scars like I did. I encountered multiple challenges, the most surprising of which were the difficult lives many of my young students led. It was quite an eye-opener for me. This so-called suburbia on the outskirts of a large urban center had its struggles.

At this point in my early teaching career, I began to realize that the child was the sum of his/her entire life’s experiences. These children came into the classroom with everything they were about and everything going on in their lives. Teaching was not just simply working with the curriculum. I had to make human connections with the children, connections which were more important than the academic content.

I also realized that I was going to learn as much if not more from my students than they learned from me. Even now, 14 years into my educational career, I have that moment once in awhile when I am very grateful for being given a glimpse into the inner workings of one of my students. Once in awhile they open the door and let you into their world, their culture, their minds. It’s what makes the job worthwhile – and possible. Every student I’ve ever taught has changed me.