Robin: What Brings Me to Teaching

3 weeks into Junior year, I walked into my math class 20 minutes after the bell rang.

“What’s going on?” my teacher asked once the class ended. “You’ve been late almost every day, and you’ve been gone at least once a week.” At first I was surprised. This had been my routine for years and nobody ever questioned it. I’d never been in any serious trouble and got straight As. “You’ve been getting away with it because you’re a good kid,” my teacher said. For me, this was a lesson in privilege.

What did she mean when she said I was “a good kid?” Obviously, this wasn’t defined by truancy or tardiness, which I had plenty of. Why had the school sorted me into a bucket of “good kids” and let me coast for years? Was it my whiteness? (Yes.) Was it that I was consistently scoring high on standardized tests and in class with little intervention needed from the school? (Yes.) I thought of my peers who would walk in the school’s front door 30 minutes late, the same time as me – my friends of color or known “troublemakers” were pulled into a disciplinary office while I was able to waltz into my class without consequence. 

In this first photo is me with my closest friend, the smartest and most creative person I’ve ever known. Maybe it was because of his behavioral disabilities, or maybe his defiant challenging of sexuality norms, but there wasn’t room for him in the safety of my “good kid” umbrella. When we goofed off together in class, he’d be sent to the office, while I stayed and learned. I graduated high school with a 75% attendance rate but no serious disciplinary problems, went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in four years, and found success by all society’s traditional measurements. He fought with the school system constantly and struggled to pass enough classes to graduate, in a battle between the potential he knew he had and the way society measured his worth.

While working with a film festival for children, I saw again our population being tossed into buckets of “good kids” and “bad kids.” The festival, to its credit, is dedicated to educating under-served populations of children and youth in Chicago, and most people associated with it do truly believe in that mission. Still, as other volunteers and I waited at the theaters to greet busloads of kids from different elementary schools, I couldn’t help but notice that the atmosphere before the arrival of a bus from Beasley was different than before one from Blaine. These children, most too young to understand the assumptions being loaded onto them, were being divided and set up for failure or success.

When I lived in Derry, Northern Ireland, I worked to restore the Bogside’s Peace Mural. As the dove looks toward brighter horizons, a city torn apart by civil war and sectarian violence holds hope for lasting peace within the next generation. I ask my friends there why they feel hope for their future, and they tell me that their schools have just been integrated, Irish nationalists in classes with protestant loyalists. The next generation eye to eye, with schools as the catalyst for change. Instead of the system sorting them into buckets, it’s encouraging them to come together.

My friend in the first photo fought is no longer alive. I don’t say this to make you sad, but to hold myself accountable for the promise I make to his memory: I will be a teacher for all our kids, not just the “good kids.”