Home | How It Works | Stats Login | Register         Case: White Intern in a Black inner-city school My sister, Gina, who is a young White girl, started her student teaching in a predominantly Black school in inner-city America. She initially approached her job with optimism and purpose. However, she began to experience her first doubts with the presentation of an emotionally charged poetry reading at an all-school assembly. The poem painted a picture of the oppression of the African Americans by the European American majority. My sister was moved by the poem and accepted the historical truth of its message. At the same, she said she wondered what educational effects of the poem were and whether it would affect her legitimacy as a White teacher in a Black school. She talked to me about her experience. I am an experienced teacher, but I could not answer whether poems like that have any educational value, and whether or not my sister should worry about her legitimacy as a White teacher. I don't what she should do in this specific situation. Solution: (Rates are posted for this solution!) We know that poetry has many themes-many that are moving, beautiful, and powerful; others are full of emotions, tone, and controversy. Either category, words can always serve a purpose, one just has to connect the author's purpose with the reader, no matter the reader. I tell my students when they are uninterested in a text for whatever reason-there is always something we can connect to-try to identify with the speaker or character in some way. By the students' responses, the positive "educational effects" seems that the author's word choice delivered an apparent tone. This is an important literary element that helps students translate meaning. If they were capable of understanding tone in the poem's text, hopefully it will be easier for them to identify tone in other text, which in itself warrants optimism. However, the fact that the teacher was unable to connect to the poem or connect to the students' identification with the poem does not make her inadequate. She is no more inadequate than a student rejecting Shakespeare's "My Mistress Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun" because they do not speak in Elizabethan dialogue. As Joel Spring notes in our text, it is more important to focus on what we can connect to with diverse cultures, than our differences. The human race has far more in common than not. With that said, perhaps she should approach the poem with the idea that, "perhaps I have never experienced your [students] emotions in reference to the poem; but, I have experience, frustration, anger, etc." These are all human emotions, so the question posed should be how can these emotions be channeled for change? We may not all connect culturally on every level, but surely we can connect by what makes us human, and that is found in our emotions.