For all those folks who use a Creative Commons license on their blog, please think about making a donation to support them.
A View From the Schoolhouse
For all those folks who use a Creative Commons license on their blog, please think about making a donation to support them.
I’ve never met Neyda Martinez, but I know Bronx Leadership Academy — we played them in girls basketball quite often — and I remember asking the coach about the college process for one of their players. I was told, "Oh, we have an amazing college counselor here. She’s really on top of it." Until I read this article in today’s New York Times, I had no idea just how on top of it she was.
Neyda Martinez of the Bronx Leadership Academy was visited by her daughter, Bennell La Porte, a college student home on break, at the hospital.
Now, as Ms. Martinez, a 54-year-old guidance counselor, lies in a bed at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx waging a struggle with cancer, she is so firm about education that she will not even let her daughter, Bennell La Porte, a 20-year-old junior at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, come home to New York to nurse her.
"I give the same advice to my daughter that I give all my students about a college education: Go away," Ms. Martinez said. "Even if it is only three hours from the city, you will come back a changed person. You will see the world differently."
Ms. Martinez, a teacher in the New York City public school system for 23 years, made it her mission to get students to college. "I tell my students, ‘Never say you can’t make it,’ " she said, smiling, trying to shake a fist in her weakened condition. "If you set a goal, and you show up at this school every single day and work, you will make it."
She sounds like an amazing person and teacher, and I know she’ll be there to see her daughter graduate college.
As an urban educator, I find myself dealing with issues of race and class a lot with my students. Sometimes — and often in the best moments — it’s explicit. Some of the most powerful conversations I’ve had in my ten years in the classroom have been around those issues. In the worst moments, it is the unspoken undercurrent in a classroom, unnamed and corrosive, as people fear talking about thing that they cannot necessarily resolve. And after ten years, I still struggle with these issues, and perhaps all I have learned is that we cannot allow race and class to be unspoken. We have to have the hard conversations, even when they become uncomfortable. And while I cannot say that I’ve always had them — I have shied away from too many, I think — I continue to try. Ten years ago, when I was a student teacher, I had a teacher in the high school where I student taught tell me to “go to the suburbs and teacher your own kind.” I didn’t, and my life is richer for it… and with any luck, there are a few student of color who are better off for my being in their lives as well. In the end, issues of race and class remain some of the most difficult ones to talk about.
Tonight, I found an old essay by Henry Louis Gates from a 1998 PBS Frontline special called The Two Nations of Black America: Are We Better Off? It demands a read. It is historical, challenging, powerful and all of us who teach African-American students, whether we are in the cities, the suburbs or the rural communities, should read it. We should read it with our students, and we should talk about it — even when the conversations are difficult. I quote Dr. Gates’ final paragraph:
Dr. King did not die so that half of us would make it, half of us perish, forever tarnishing two centuries of agitation for our equal rights. We must accept our historical responsibility and live Dr. King’s credo that none of us is free until all of us are free. And that all of us are brothers and sisters, as Dr. King said so long ago–white and black, Protestant and Catholic, Gentile and Jew and Muslim, Gay and straight, rich and poor — even if we are not brothers-in-law.
I hesitated to quote any of this piece because one paragraph cannot sum up the richness and complexity of his essay. The full text really must be read.