“i Had To Get Some Ghetto In Me”

When she first started working as a hall monitor and secretary at one of the local city high schools, my favorite co-worker, Ms. K, said she dressed up real fancy for work and tried to befriend the children. “They tore the fur off me,” she said of her first few weeks. “But then I showed them that I got some ghetto in me and it all changed.”

It’s not that inner city kids don’t want to learn or don’t have the family background that will afford them the opportunity to push ahead – I’ve found it to be the complete opposite. My students want to succeed more than any others. If they didn’t, they would join the astounding drop out rate among black high-schoolers in the nation. The students remaining in “the system” desire to be taught, so we must teach them and better than we are currently doing.

But to get to this realization, I had to get the proverbial fur torn off me as well. I also had to “get some ghetto in me.”  For me, that meant being tough as hell and prepared for every single second of the day; it meant being myself.

I came into this school thinking that I would relate to the kids because I was hip to their culture and their ways of living. So much for the diversity training I had participated in – because this was not true at all. I planned on giving them stories about rappers to read and comparing all the poems we read to modern day hip-hop. To say the least, I had seen “Dangerous Minds” and “Freedom Writers” too many times.

I was exposed as a complete phony my first several weeks as a brand new teacher, even though I was doing what I thought I should do. What I found myself doing was catering to stereotypes. It’s hard for an inner city teacher to look inward for the problems around them, rather than always looking for some faceless social ill as an excuse. That’s what I had to do, though. If I didn’t change something, I was going to get run out of the school. I was getting torn apart by misbehavior – students would call me out and make me feel incredibly stupid. It was brutal, but true. If you go into inner city teaching, be prepared for unmitigated speech from your students. If you are having an off day, they will flat out tell you in no uncertain terms.

Inner city students don’t need a friend as their teacher. They don’t need a mother or a father figure or a social worker, even though that’s what we’re often told. What they need collectively are genuine and smart people who use the best of what God gave them to show them a world outside their own. Literature has enough power because of its themes. I teach British Literature, which might seem far removed from inner city culture. When taught well, however, the kids are blown away by the power of universal themes.

Once I got away from feeling like I should be super nice to the kids and should make sure all my materials related in some way back to their culture, I started to see a vast improvement in the behavior, attitudes and performance of my students. They started making their own connections to the work. They didn’t need me to vainly try and relate to them.

I am not from the ‘hood, but I’ve learned through much pain and stress that that’s okay. It’s okay to be where I’m from and to teach my students the way that I know is best for them. Inner city students know about gangs and drugs and violence and sex, so they really don’t need some white dude trying to relate Lil Wayne to Shakespeare or some such nonsense.

Teaching in the inner city makes you painfully aware of your shortcomings as a human being, but always has you striving to do better the next day. One of the big problems in our inner city schools is the dearth of top rate teachers who are willing to put themselves to a test so personal and often demoralizing.

These schools are full of trial and error teachers from one program or another that has afforded them an opportunity to become certified. Many on our staff are foreigners. Many are quite young like me. Not to say we can’t do an excellent job, but inner city kids need stability and they don’t get it through trial and error. Some teachers, like me, stick it out because we are extremely driven to teach where we do. Many quit very early on, and I’ve never once blamed those who’ve left this school.