OPINION

Published Monday, October 27, 2003
From Cambridge With Love
By Rhonda Henderson
APPIAN STAFF WRITER

My dear students,

When we last saw each other, it was June, and you finished junior year. We were cleaning out our yellow classroom with the magenta door-packing up our junk from my desk and bookshelves, and your junk from your lockers. Both had become repositories of the year's garbage and jewels. Lanise epitomized "One man's trash is another's treasure" as she tore through my things. A few weeks earlier, I announced to you I would be leaving our school to move to Cambridge, and attend graduate school. Some of you sighed at the thought of missing Miss Henderson (thank you, Akeem), but most of you cheered at the certainty of not having me for a third year. (Tremain, it would have been your fourth.) I interpreted your hurrahs as testament to me leaving my mark at school.

So what's Cambridge like? It's certainly different from D.C. You have to look under nooks and crannies, and then know a secret password to see black folk. It's also slower paced than D.C., as if slower than D.C. were possible. By 9:00, the main streets are just about cleared of people wandering in and out of stores, few people coming out of the T (that's the Metro up here), and restaurants are closing down. By 10:30, the streets are quiet, except for a few dorks like your teacher who are leaving the library.

Yes, my darlings, I am in the library like I have a call number and a place on the bookshelf. There's so much work to do! I told Priscilla in early September I had more homework in a week than I gave you guys in a month! I have, on average, about 150 pages of reading per week. I can hear the cheers again. Isn't retribution divine? Finally, like Markell always wanted, I'm getting back what I gave you.

In graduate school, the school you go to after already going to school and figuring out four years wasn't enough, you take an average of four classes and you meet about once a week for three hours. Yes, three hours. And if you thought an hour with me was rough take a class with Professor.... Sometimes, when you get into an interesting and engaging conversation, or if you're involved in different activities, (or if you've done the reading) time flies by and you walk out of class triumphantly, feeling that yes, you got your $40,000 worth. Other times, time drags like a heavy suitcase. Seconds feel like minutes, and minutes like hours. In high school, when you guys get bored, you start talking to your friends. You can't do that in grad school. You have to be bored politely and hide behind your laptop if you brought it, or read for another class so that class won't turn out to be another level of Dante's hell to get through. But classes like that are rare.

Priscilla asked why I decided to go back to school. Hadn't I had enough? Well, yes. Definitely. But the main reason I've come back to school is because of YOU. Yes, you guys. I want to be a better teacher for you. I was okay-lessons were prepared and hopefully engaging (hopefully no one will write to the Appian to contest), I tried to motivate you to be thinkers not robots, and we generally had a pretty good learning experience. I think.

I know I can do better. I know I can make the lessons more interesting, the class more exciting, and you more confident about your future, your abilities, your lives as intelligent people. I look around this campus and I don't see many faces like ours, people of color, and there are a host of reasons for that. My sweet conspiracy theorists say it's The Man at work at the Office of Keeping Colored People Down, and part of that is true as I'm learning in Education Policy and Urban Poverty. We see this evildoing in dilapidated and under-funded schools, and over-burdened school systems from the administrative level on down. And then there are reasons that exist in the communities, and some take root in the home.

I don't want to speak so much about those forces. I assumed, like many going into the teaching profession, that all the job (itself a problematic term) required was background in the subject, and a little planning ahead. So I decided I'd be a teacher and two months later, I had the position of a teacher, but I was not a teacher. There's a difference. The art of teaching requires a myriad of skills that cannot be taught in a day, a week, or even a year. Yes, we must know the curriculum, but we also must master a far more complicated craft, that of conveying the information we have to you so that you are empowered to think on your own about subjects you aren't the least bit interested in. That is hard. Very hard. People who think teaching is simple must define teaching as dispersing facts, and accepting regurgitation of those facts as understanding, or even worse, learning. That's not teaching. That's training. So to learn better how to help you discover your true intellectual selves, I've gone back to school, to cold Massachusetts to live in an overpriced apartment, the only consolation being great roommates.

I know you don't believe it to be true, because you have had teachers who have not cared as much in the past, but I am honestly here for you. Yes, I yelled and screamed in the hallways when you went to your locker during passing period, and gave your stern talking-to's when you didn't do your work, and forced you to complete assignments long after they were, but you knew I cared because you believed me when I told you I lived in a cardboard box in the parking lot so I could be at school everyday on time. And because you knew I loved you. When people love you, they don't let you take the easy road to do anything. People who love you want the best for you. I want to be the best for you, as do my friends and colleagues who, too, have left warmer weather and better housing to be better teachers.

I hear Mr. Ruffin has my classroom now. Hard to think of someone else in my room. I have to admit that I do miss you. I miss your spunk, your "Good morning Miss Henderson, are you having a bad hair day?" and your spontaneous Soul Train lines that broke out in the hallway. I miss Richuan's frantic changes into uniform before coming into class. I miss Ternisha's fashion statements, and William's random quotes from the Bible. I miss us. Yes, HGSE is a great education school-convent, and the people I've met and spent time with are wonderful. But they're not like you guys. Can you save me a ticket for graduation?

Rhonda Henderson is an Ed.M. candidate in the Learning and Teaching program.