1.
"Well, I'm glad it won't be all white men up there," I said to A., upon hearing she'd been invited to represent teachers on a panel on equity in math education. A. seemed irritated. "You're all making assumptions because I'm a black woman. I grew up educated mostly with Jewish white men; I have white privilege from that. Why should I be the one up there?"I had a sudden recollection of talking with my friend from high school after she won a National Achievement Scholarship, which was (until 2015) a National-Merit-Scholar-like award given to black students who scored well on the PSAT. We were both children of single parents who were receiving a wonderful education at a Quaker private school on scholarship, and she didn't like the idea that she was receiving an award I wouldn't have gotten with the same score, even though we had the same education. But even at that age, I knew we didn't really have the same education. It was harder for her; there were times she was treated more like an outsider. Besides, I told her, we both should try to exceed at science (my main interest then) and engineering (hers) partly to represent women well, but as a black woman, she would be a more important role model than I would be. Essentially, she was talking about her own personal history and identity, and I was talking about the history and identities of women in STEM fields. I can't remember if she was convinced, but she did take the scholarship money with her to Princeton. Did she really have a choice?
How and when does an individual represent a larger group? Is it how the individual identifies, or how others identify them? "Positionality refers to the tension between how we see our identities and how the wider society sees them," say my notes from a Robert Q. Berry III presentation. If that equity panel had been all white men, I'm pretty certain our wider society of math educators in the audience would see them very differently than we did with a majority of non-white panelists, before they even opened their mouths. And in fact, A. has passion and insights which the math education world needs, and which seem to spring from her lived experience as a black woman... partly because other people see her as a black woman.
Tension is right.
2.
The girl is a biracial (black/white) sixth grader. She's in my math class, but she isn't. She isn't disruptive. She isn't rude. She isn't unfriendly. She isn't anything. Other kids like her all right. What's not to like? But when she's with them at the whiteboards, or at their tables, she doesn't say anything about math. Sometimes she doodles with the whiteboard marker. Occasionally she jokes around, in a gentle way. She seems to like me OK. But if I ask her what she's thinking about a math problem, she just sighs. On tests, she writes a little and then gives up. I can't tell if she learned anything.We call a meeting with the girl and her mother. Her father has substance abuse problems and isn't available. Her mother is loving and concerned and brilliant and wants to work with us. She tells us how hard the father's problems are on the girl. She tells the girl how much it means to her for the girl to do her best at school, and how much confidence she has in her. The girl looks calmly aside and lets the mother do the talking. We make a plan for the girl to get help, academically and from the counselor. We all tell her how we are on her side and how much we think of her. We all feel happy about the meeting. The girl smiles.
Nothing really changes.
3.
I'm in my twenties, in graduate school, in a meeting with my advisor and his computational chemistry group. This is his current research group, not his Golden Days group. The Golden Days group produced brilliant work, but more than that, he misses their esprit de corps (and tells us so often). Along with him, they were a bunch of brash, confident American and (I think) Australian guys who loved working together, spent all their waking hours in the chemistry building, partied together, and had jokes together. The youngest member of the Golden Days group, G., is still there, but the rest have moved on to be replaced with Chinese and Taiwanese men and me.At this meeting, we're talking about the latest workstations. Workstations are hugely expensive computers that can do our calculations far faster and better than personal computers (which most of us don't own), and they have something else personal computers don't have: WINDOWS, which let you see and do more than one thing at a time on the same screen. It occurs to someone that maybe soon you can actually watch TV on the workstation while doing your research! This strikes everyone as hilariously inappropriate, and we are all laughing about it together. "You could check out football while you're running your Monte Carlo simulation!" says G., and we crack up. And then he adds: "Julie, you could watch soap operas!"
I stop laughing. I want to tell him that I've been watching football all year because I was curious about why people liked it so much and wanted to see how little knowledge it would take to fake my way through a conversation about it (answer: not much). I want to tell him that I never, ever watch soap operas, and that when most other girls I knew in high school watched General Hospital after school, when it was trendy, I refused, because the main characters got together through a rape story line that infuriated me as a feminist. But I don't say either of those things. I can hear the reaction in my head as if I did, though. It was just a joke. Lighten up.
My boyfriend gets the brunt of stories like this. He tells me I am smart and belong there and should just act like it. He tells me my anger is off-putting, that men don't want to talk these things through with me because I get upset. Lighten up. I think he probably does listen, though. Later, after we break up, he goes to grad school and eventually becomes a science professor and researcher. Now he's a crusader for women in science, years after I stopped being one.
How strange that this stupid little remark about soap operas, with so much less apparent impact than other worse examples of exclusion or sexism from those times, bothered me so much I remember it decades later. I wonder how much of that is because I didn't find any productive way to react to the anger, and since I've been ashamed of that, I've tried to shame my anger out of existence. Proponents of mindfulness say to acknowledge a feeling and not judge it. Perhaps that's worth a try. Anger takes up less room by itself than with shame attached.
4.
The boy is in eighth grade. When he started public school, he didn't speak English. Now he's a student at the top of his class and an Eagle Scout. He plays the violin two hours a night. Later, he will get degrees from UCLA and Harvard, and will rise to head a school district of almost 50,000 students. But all that is unseeably far in the future. Right now, at school, he is a kid who is so quiet he wonders if his teachers know if he can talk. They don't know anything about his home or his family. None of them look like him, and few of the other students do either. Later, he says he felt disconnected and disenfranchised.I got this story from a video of three Latino and Latina school district leaders speaking with a moderator about "seeking solutions to familiar challenges." Portland's superintendent, Guadalupe Guerrero, was answering a question about how his background highlighted issues that affect kids in our schools now. He added:
"We often think of students of color who are having challenges—you know—particularly those externalizers. We see it in the disproportionality of behavior referrals. But we don’t often think about the internalizers… How do we get to know, in the public school setting, who our students are? How do we ensure that they can point to at least one adult—imagine if we could create a round table or circle of people who are explicitly making sure that our students have that level of attention and support so that we’re not pushing them out?"
In the same video, Richard Carranza, New York City Schools Chancellor, says about his own time at school: “All of the teachers, all of the counselors, all of the support people that thought I was smarter than I was—so I was. So they believed in me, and they pushed me… It’s those little moments in time that build the resiliency of kids… I can remember thinking wow, if she’s really smart, if he’s really smart, if they think I can do it, maybe I can do it… We’re not educating widgets, we’re educating souls, and souls need to be told that they have a vision, and we have a vision for them.”
5.
The letter is shoved under my door, typed on white paper and signed. I had no idea it was coming.Dear Ms. Wright,
I wanted to thank you for being such a great teacher. You have made me more confident in my math skills ... and you have made me a better person in general. I look forward to your class every day and I look forward to getting to talk to you... I used to always dread math and try to avoid it at all costs but now I love it. It has opened so many more gateways for me. You have really boosted my outlook on school and changed what I want to do with my life. You not only made me proud of myself but you've helped my parent realize my strength and become proud of me for it. You're the best teacher I've ever had and I don't want to leave your class next year but I'm so excited to take my math skills to the next level and make you proud. Thank you for all you've done for me.
As I read this letter, I'm smiling, and tears are in my eyes. I feel wonderful. I feel validated. I am so happy she knows her power as a mathematician and loves math now.
It's bittersweet when I think of the other kids, the many who would not and could not write me such a letter.
But I'll hold onto the vision that maybe more of the math dreaders, the internalizers, and the externalizers will feel this way someday, too, if I keep becoming a better teacher.
