Chapter 2B

“You’re a Racist, Mr. Brock”

Another year, another AP biology class, and still things weren’t going quite like I wanted.
“Mr. Brock! You’re going too fast again!” Latisha complained.
There was a general murmur of assent and a lot of head bobbing. I looked out at them from where I stood at the chalkboard and shook my head.
“Look, people, we’ve talked about this before.” I replied wearily. “We have a ton of material to cover and only a year to do it in. Besides if you’re going to survive science courses in college someday, you’ve got to get used to the pace of college level lecturing.”
They didn’t quite groan, but there was a collective exhale of disgust.
“Couldn’t you slow down just a little?” begged Evan.
Again, I shook my head.
“I’m already practically a snail compared to what you’re going to face next year.” I told him.
He and the others simply frowned at me in disbelief, and not for the first time, I wondered if I was ever going to get any better at this job.
“Okay, let’s get back to the mitochondria.” I said, continuing my lecture on cellular respiration. “As I was saying, the NADH products from the Krebs Cycle and earlier stages such as glycolysis enter into the ETC….”
I had turned to sketch my next diagram on the board, and you’d have thought a party had broken out behind my back.
“Did he tell us what ‘ETC’ stands for?”
“Yeah, it’s short for ‘electron transport chain’.”
“Can I look at your drawing, Audrey?”
“What are you doing this weekend?”
“My dad’s got tickets to a Blue’s game.”
“NADH? What the heck is NADH? Mr. Brock, you haven’t….”
If murmuring can be characterized as cacophonous, this fit the description. I stopped talking entirely and simply stood there, watching them. One by one, the voices began to go silent as they noticed me staring.
“I’ve told you before; I’m not going to try and compete with you.” I said stonily, letting the silence hang in the air for a few additional seconds before continuing. “You all don’t have to be in this class. It’s an elective. If you can’t control yourself enough to cope with a few minutes of lecture, there’s the door.” I nodded my head.
By this point, all of them were trying to look anywhere other than at me.
“Ready?” I asked after deliberately counting out a full thirty seconds to myself.
There was a general mumble of agreement, and I started up my lecture again.
“Okay, the bond between the hydrogen and NAD plus breaks, releasing the electron from it to one of the cytochromes in the carrier chain….”
This time the murmur was only a mild buzz, and I sighed inside in frustration because I knew that if I tried the silent treatment every time they muttered or made sounds, I’d never actually get anything covered. So I did the mental equivalent of clinch my teeth and went on.
“As the electron is passed from cytochrome to cytochrome, its loses some of its potential energy each time….”
“I think we should go see Malcolm X this weekend.” I heard Latisha say too loudly, and something in me snapped. I turned around and walked over to where she was sitting and glared.
“Latisha,” I announced in my darkest tone. “If you interrupt class again, you will be asked to leave.”
She shrunk back into her seat.
“Am I clear?” I demanded.
“Yes, Mr. Brock.” She whispered.
The room was a silent as you can imagine by then, and as I walked back up to the chalkboard, I hoped that maybe I had actually bought myself some genuine attention for a while. But within minutes, the murmuring in the background returned, and this time, it was Jane Anderson who made the mistake of being loud enough to single out.
“Jane, will you please be quiet and stop talking!” I growled at her.
I felt defeated. Could I do nothing to get these kids to shut up at the appropriate times?
A hand shot into the air. Alleluia, I thought, my good one; my bright one; the student who will ask a meaningful question about this material and hopefully get everyone’s interest back on track.
“Yes, Audrey?” I asked.
“Why did you tell Latisha that she would have to leave if she was caught talking again but all you just did was simply tell Jane to be quiet?”
Oh SHIT!!
I closed my eyes and stood there in my own stunned and naked silence. It didn’t matter that what I had done had been an unintentional response to my feelings of defeat, that I had singled out Latisha while I was still hopeful I might modify their behavior and had simply given up moments later with Jane. It didn’t matter that my teacher mind had been preoccupied with how to transition from lecturing to encouraging questions. I had just screwed my publicly professed personal values–accidentally or otherwise didn’t matter–and Audrey had had the integrity to call me on it.
I took a deep breath and slowly opened my eyes to face them all.
“I did so, Audrey,” I answered, “because I was not paying the attention I should have been to what I was doing. Thank you for pointing out that error.”
“Latisha.” I said, turning toward her. “I apologize for singling you out earlier. Everyone today has been talking when they shouldn’t be, and any rebuke I made should have been shared equally with all of your classmates.”
“Jane.” I pivoted. “If you–or anyone else in this class–chooses to speak out when you shouldn’t, you will not be welcome to remain.”
“Is everyone clear on that?” I asked determinedly.
They all nodded, and I turned once more to Audrey.
“Again, thank you.” I said.
She responded with a terse, single nod, and for the rest of class that day, she and the others acted like nothing had happened.
Later, though, when class was over, the one student I expected might stay behind walked up to my desk, smiling, shaking his head, and studying me with bemusement.
“I told you that first day, Mr. Brock,” said Lamar Johnson, chuckling, “ ‘you’re a racist’.” “Yes, Lamar.” I replied, my own expression downcast. “And I still stand by what I replied to you then–‘Of course, I’m a racist. You cannot be raised in a racist society like ours and not be one!’ ”
“‘But the goal in life,’ you said,” he continued, quoting, “‘is to be a conscious racist and to fight it with every fiber of your being. To always pay attention to everything you do and say and to how you see people and to deliberately stop yourself whenever you’re about to judge or treat them for the wrong reasons.’ ”
His young face stared down at me sympathetically.
“Guess you missed one, today, huh?” He declared.
I barely nodded my head, still feeling ashamed.
“Yes,” I replied. “Yes, I did. Thankfully, Audrey was here to call me on it.”
Lamar nodded in agreement and then scooped up his books.
“Don’t beat up on yourself, too hard, Mr. Brock.” He said, heading for the door. “Nobody’s perfect, and we all know you care enough to at least try. Which is a lot more than can be said for some of the teachers in this school.”
He started to push the door open and then turned around for a parting remark.
“Just remember, Mr. Brock, that Audrey only said anything at all because she trusts you might really listen.”
My student gave me a long knowing look and departed, and I sat at my desk, thinking, for a very, very long time.

The Moral Quest

Among the most significant challenges authentically engaged teachers ever face when generating appropriately intimate rapport is not the failure to learn to balance the ways we share our full humanity; it is the complacency that we already know how to do it well enough.  In the everyday struggles of the classroom, it can be extremely tempting to compromise just how much latitude we allow our behavioral pendulum to swing when balancing between connectedness and aloofness, and each time the amplitude increases–even a little–it becomes more and more easy to turn what should be a razor’s delicate edge into a concrete walkway.  Even the best-intentioned teachers can fall prey to this trap, and when they do, the consequences can be both ugly and disillusioning–as happened with me and Latisha.

They can also be educational.  The research on implicit association and hidden bias is extensive,⁵ and I am hardly the first teacher to struggle with prejudice (nor, most certainly, will I be the last).  But as I sat there that afternoon long ago, I realized there was a larger learning to extract from my own instance of complacency.  Like others before me, I suddenly saw that I must “try not to have the arrogance to think I [can ever fully] understand what other people know, what they understand, [and] what meanings they’re making”⁶ with their lives because when I do so, I stop respecting the innate “Otherness” that is so critical to the teaching and learning process.  I realized that afternoon that the real danger of getting complacent about how well I or anyone else balances our presence in the classroom isn’t just about forgetting or failing to fight potential prejudice, racism, bigotry, low expectations, or any of the other host of social evils and hidden biases a teacher can bring to the classroom.  It’s about neglecting to embrace the full, unique richness that is an “Other” person–about not recognizing that the complexity of our students’ identities equals our own and must be engaged accordingly. 

Nel Noddings is right, then, to remind us that “teaching is a life-long moral quest.”⁷  The ideal balance between disengaged intimacy and intimate disengagement is precisely that, an ideal, and while it lies at the heart of all human interactions–even a handshake juxtaposes the trust of touch with the respect of firmness–the aspiration to attain this balance is particularly significant for education.  As teachers, we must intentionally and reflectively strive every day to walk as narrow a path as possible between connectedness with our students and separation from them because only when we do so are we reaching beyond our own incompleteness in the very way that equips children to reach beyond theirs⁸–the defining essence of learning.  Hence, we must never believe that we have fully learned how to maintain our “ecological” balance in the classroom environment because if we did believe we have learned how to maintain it “well enough,” we would stop the very striving process toward constructing “selfs” that is education.  It is the fact that we really will “never have it exactly right” that makes teaching and learning possible in the first place, and that is why we must always “keep trying to get better at it.”⁹ Anything less just isn’t education!

But if that’s true–and teaching in its essence is a struggle for an unobtainable ideal–then why choose an actual career in it? There are many occupations that have quite obtainable goals, that still involve the moral quest to become as good a person a you can, and that are as equally stimulating as teaching is.  If being authentically engaged in the classroom is as difficult a task as I’ve been describing, why would anyone in their right mind actually join this profession? To have experiences such as those I had with Mark, Michelle, and Audrey? To spend thirty years being underpaid, blamed for society’s ills, and swamped in paperwork?  My inner skeptic appears here to smile maliciously and argues that perhaps there is a reason why nearly a third of those who enter teaching leave after only three years in the classroom, why five years on the job makes you a “veteran,” and why over 50% of us never make it past the tenth year.¹⁰   Who, he challenges, would want to care that much for a living?