WHY I TEACH TRUTH!

I do not teach with some idea that a movie like Coach Carter is going to be made about me or that I am going to be making a huge impact in the world. 

The surprise about teaching is you do make an impact in the world if you are a teacher whether that is your goal or not and that’s the trade-off for the low salaries, and burdensome responsibility of co-parenting hundreds or even thousands of kids is that teaching is inherently powerful because it’s personal.

When I teach I think to myself, what was missing in school when I was a kid and largely the answer is the TRUTH. 

I am a black female and 70% of my teachers where white males. White males probably were not the best people to be teaching me about the realities of my life. 

However, I think the real problem with most schools is they are not really designed to teach you about life and it keeps you connected with a misinformed and biased past more than an accurate present or the possibilities of the future,  which I think is dangerously problematic because it creates outdated minds that are out of touch with reality.

I try my best not to lore my students into a false bubble of what life is just because they are stuck in a cage until they are 18 for 8 hours a day with me.  I know one day my students are going to be out of these walls and clueless. 

A lot of parents don’t teach them anything either because they think it’s the teachers’ job to teach them. 

I fight for my students to learn the truth. 

I answer their uncomfortable questions about sexuality, racism, and poverty,  I refuse to teach that there are 9 planets from old textbooks. 

Never in my adult life has anyone ever asked me what an Obtuse Triangle is or if I know what onomatopoeia means. 

My education was never geared towards me being a successful adult. 

It was geared towards standardized tests that did not matter, so I could be a factory worker and I think that was a really misleading waste of my time and so I try not to steal my student’s time the way mine was stolen and I try to teach them things that might be useful like how to take a deep breath when someone who is wrong insist they are right.