Rick: What Brings Me to Teaching

When I was 21, I decided to loc my hair. I thought locs were beautiful, tightly binding a history, entangling and connecting moments of joy and pain. The manager at the Italian restaurant where I waited tables disagreed and fired me, stating “my look” didn’t fit the restaurant’s image. After 18 months of struggling to find work and make rent, I felt compelled to cut them off. This experience flipped a switch on my own ignorance. I began to better understand my privilege as a white male once some of them were revoked. I gained a small window into how people of color experience the world under the white gaze. The reinstatement of my privilege--brought simply by cutting my hair--also brought resentment that such benefits were not available or extended to all people.

When I was 29, I visited my estranged aunt (my mom’s sister) and looked through family pictures. Her narration of the photos included commentary about our family’s Polish traditions. However, my mom raised me to believe I was Italian. The smells of Italian gravy would waft through our apartment on Sundays. I patiently awaited the ladle’s dive into the stock pot, past the spare ribs, sweet sausage and braciole (rolled and stuffed flank steak) to claim the meatballs made for me. Italian culture emanated from my home--from my last name to our religious practices as Catholics and holiday traditions.

When I was 38, confirmation of my ancestry came, a year after my mom’s death. My wife and I ordered a genealogy test so my daughter, Dakota Metzli (friend of the moon), would know the ethnicities that informed her identity beyond my wife’s Mexican ancestry. I discovered I was predominantly Polish and German and less than 10% Italian. The confusion about my aunt’s competing narrative gave way to anger in having been lied to by my mom for reasons I would never know.

Now as a 39-year-old, Italian gravy can still be smelled in our loft, though less frequently. So does the complex and slightly sweet flavor of salsa de chile guajillo salsa or hints of cinnamon from the atole warming on the stove. As a father of two children, I fear society’s pressure to enact whiteness may smother my children's Mexican heritage, including Spanish, their first language. Sadly, it has already begun. While replaying one of her favorite movies, Frozen, Dakota said, “Papí, no quiero la pelicula en español, I like English better.” She was a little over 3. In that moment of no words, I remembered those whose cultural expression has been sanctioned by the dominant gaze and the sting of having to relinquish the Italian culture I claimed while my daughter’s cultural view seemingly echoed the chorus, “Let it Go.”

Monitoring and Controlling My Thoughts About the Reading

As a teacher of the English Language Arts, I am constantly struck by tone, or the author’s attitude toward the subject matter they are presenting. I make a concerted effort to assist my students in developing and strengthening their awareness of the author’s tone, as a means to interrogate texts critically, to ride the ‘unspoken’ current of meaning that exists beyond words. After reading, “What is Metacognition?” by Dr. Michael Martinez, I am struck by his tone regarding teachers. On one hand, he acknowledges teachers intuitively recognize the importance of metacognition, but in the very next breath, he also suggests teachers’ understanding may be surface-level, lacking dimension. With that, there’s so many places I could go… I could present a compelling argument as to how the perpetuation of this deficit view of teachers’ professional knowledge continues to undermine our professionalism, but I will abstain. I could argue that we could source teachers’ struggle to understand the multiple dimensions of metacognitive awareness in the failure of teacher preparation programs to adequately prepare novice teachers for the complex work they will embark upon and engage in with their students, but I will refrain. And while I could advance the position that the effort to push students to be critically-engaged thinkers is absolutely undermined with the realities of standardization, I will choose not to go there either. In thinking about my thinking, or ‘closely monitoring and controlling my own thoughts about the readings (Martinez, 2006), I recognize the hefty baggage I carry regarding the need to elevate the profession I call my own. Rather, in this blogging space, I choose to make my way through this ‘maze of discontent,’ to elaborate on how students’ metacognitive awareness can be supported through an apprenticeship model, making the invisible more transparent and normalizing struggle through promoting dialogic interaction (teacher to student as well as student to student). Attention to these tenets can provide a liberatory pathway for both students and teachers alike.

Metacognitive awareness can really blossom if we begin to reframe our relationship with students through the lens of an apprenticeship. Such reframing creates the right social environment for modeling the patterns and standards of reasoning (Martinez, 2006) associated with a given discipline, as well as facilitating students’ acquisition of those ways of knowing. Yet the real challenge of such work resides in supporting teachers as they make their tacit knowledge more visible to themselves. Then and only then, will teachers be positioned to demonstrate to their students the practices and processes valued in the discipline under study. For so long, content-area teachers have understood their work in terms of supporting students in developing the requisite content knowledge to demonstrate mastery on a given task. As the Reading Apprenticeship Framework suggests, making the invisible processes of reading more transparent repositions subject-area classrooms as spaces to support the reading and comprehension of text, thereby deconstructing the complex processes of reading and meaning-making (Schoenbach, Braunger, Greenleaf, & Litman, 2003) Perhaps most importantly, it helps teachers provide access to academic discourses, or particularized ways of knowing, that extend both power and privilege in our society. Through my experience at Project READI, I learned to move beyond notions of metacognition as “thinking about thinking” to really negotiate the nuts and bolts of how and why we read. Opening up those lines of inquiry for my students has helped them develop a sense of ownership when it comes to reading Literature, even though many of my students have shared that Language Arts was their least favorite subject. Framing Literature as a way to understand the human condition, to interrogate the human experience, has invited them into the landscape of literary analysis and critique.

Metacognition moves the learning away from understanding the other and toward understanding how to examine the self. Developing one’s own self-awareness is a formidable challenge; teaching others to be self-aware can seem to be an insurmountable challenge. Yet Martinez offers the reader a small nugget buried deep in the article: “on the self-regulatory side, persistence in the face of difficulty can be crucial” (pg. 699). Establishing a classroom culture that normalizes struggle and provides strategies for students to successfully grapple through the challenges they will encounter is critical. Speaking from my own experience, I try to establish this culture from day 1. After the students and I have worked collaboratively to negotiate classroom norms and expectations, I explain that I have a final rule, the Golden Rule, which is non-negotiable. It states, “You may opt for help, you may opt for a break, and you may opt for a second chance, but you can never, ever opt out!!!” The words are just that, but the actions required on my part to bring this rule to life are another. It’s a promise, put in writing and posted prominently, that serves as a reminder to the students and myself. It requires me to be mindful of the fact that the supports and scaffolds needed by students vary according to each individual. It means that I provide second chances. It requires me to understand that sometimes students aren’t feeling it on a particular day. It means that I don’t foreclose on my students, even when they have repeatedly failed to make due on their responsibilities. It allows us to recognize our shared humanity, and the moments where we will undoubtedly come up short in meeting each other’s every need. Martinez does well to bring up the point but falls short in fully fleshing out what it means to teach students persistence in some legitimate and meaningful way.

Finally, I’m reminded how essential dialogue is to metacognition, in terms of engaging with more knowledgeable others (Vygotsky, 1978) as well as engaging with our own ideas and thinking. Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin argues that everything that has been said is in response to what has been said or in anticipation of what will be said (Bakhtin, 2010; 1984). This idea resonates for me as a classroom teacher on so many levels. Dialogue allows us to pilot our ideas, surface our misconceptions and widen our lenses, to include the perspectives of others as we formulate our own ideas. While metacognition is a cognitive theory, I do appreciate Martinez’s acknowledgment of social contexts and how they work to inform and influence learning. I do believe he could have also included cultural realities, which have tremendous influence in how we come to know and understand our worlds. Being mindful of embedding opportunities for students to engage in dialogic interaction with one another is critical. However it’s simply not enough. As educators, we must also have handy our rationales for the types of participation structures (e.g pair-share, small group, triads) we’re employing, as well as clear paths to facilitate students as they work toward the goal of the particular lesson. Constant mindfulness toward each element of instruction we design and implement helps us reflect and grow as teachers. It puts us on a pathway to orchestrate those periodic moments of magic in the classroom.