One of the ways I finally learned to survive and even succeed was to separate from the en-
vironment around me. I became another person, projecting the proper appearance in an ef-
fort to control the way other people saw me. I had a couple of close friends, but essentially I
remained detached from the rest of the social scene. I strove to get into honor classes and
then avoided taking academic risks. I felt I had tricked everyone into thinking that I was a
good student. I could never let anyone know how insecure I felt; they might discover that I
was really stupid.
I was marginalized in school, but I am White, I speak Standard English, and though my
parents are working class, they have middle-class values. After experiencing the humiliation
and pain of being held back, I learned to compromise with the system and started to obey its
rules. I was given the benefit of the doubt and allowed to succeed. Children who do not have
privilege based on their skin color or class membership or who have experiences that are at
variance with the middle-class expectations of public schools often find school a devastating
experience. They are labeled and tracked into the lowest rungs of the school and rarely
given the benefit of a doubt or the opportunity to succeed.
When I started college, I originally planned to go into psychology; however, I had an “edu-
cational moment” that redirected me toward teaching. I took a class with a visiting professor
from the University of Chicago. He told the class that he did not value our ability to repeat
what was in textbooks. He wanted to hear our ideas about what we had read. Nobody had
ever valued my thinking before. In that class, I went from being someone who received
knowledge and information from others and reproduced what they thought to someone who
could produce ideas that were significant. As a result of this experience and the professor’s
recommendation, I entered the school’s elementary education program, received my teach-
ing certification, and taught for 3 years. Then I decided to combine my love of psychology
with my love of teaching. I earned a doctorate and became a teacher educator.
A perspective that I present in my education classes is that schools are designed to mold
children to fit into very particular boxes. If teachers want to help children explore possibili-
ties beyond the limits of these boxes, they must learn about the lives of the students they
are going to be teaching. If we ignore their experiences, we deny children the possibility of
exploring who they can be in the world; we put them in a box where they are constrained
and defined.
Teachers need to find out as much as possible about their students and their families.
They need to know about the neighborhoods they live in, their faith, language, and culture.
More generally, teachers need to find out what their students already know about the world.
If teachers begin with where students are they can provide an environment in which stu-
dents use what they know to gain access to what they do not know. If students do not be-
lieve that teachers value what they know, they will resist and what they learn will have little
to do with explicit classroom goals and objectives.
When I ask my own students what they learned in traditional classrooms, they rarely dis-
cuss subject matter content. Instead, they remember that they learned about what counted
as good behavior or bad behavior, they learned about rules and schedules, and they learned
about power and who had it. In short, they learned about the boxes they were expected to fit
into and not about possibility and potential and how what they already knew about the
world can provide the basis for learning so much more.
When I discuss adolescence with my students, I begin by dispelling the myth that adoles-
cence is a time of raging hormones and uncontrolled emotions. Although it is certainly true
that as children get older their lives get more complicated, most of the problems associated
with adolescence stem from the way this period of life is framed by the popular culture.
Teenagers are trapped in a world where they are no longer allowed to act like children but
are not permitted to be adults. They are denied the rights and responsibilities of adulthood,
228 CHAPTER 9