Why I may not make friends in grad school

I'm fortunate to have made some really cool friends. Friends who really have enriched my life and for whom I am very thankful. I look up to them because they are all quite passionate about something and pursue their passions. I respect them because they're all smart. They are among the smartest people I could imagine. My friendships mean a lot to me, even if there are long stretches between birthdays or holidays where I might not talk to them. Somehow we pick back up right where we left off. There's some kind of real bond there. All of my friend were made in school: middle through grad school.

I'm worried I am not going to make any new friends going back to grad school. It's not that I'm not going to be around smart, driven, passionate people. I'm absolutely sure that I will. Last week I attended an admitted students day and heard some impressive things being thrown around. My soon-to-be compatriots were running non-profits in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or had just finished some time at Facebook and felt like they needed to give back by going into education. They'd been part of the first roller derby team in some back alley of Prague and that was just to pass the time while they ran a startup to connect refugees to host families. Several stated they spent the last year "With Her" and that they needed to find something new to do with their lives. I can only hope that none of these people are in my specific Literacy Specialist program because I'm clearly not of the same caliber.

Beyond the kinds of lives lived by these movers and shakers trotted out by Teacher's College to wow any admitted but undecided students, I'm also expecting to be a disruptive presence in classes. During a breakout session specific to my program I mentioned that I wanted to "end the supremacy of New York representations in texts and educational literature." So, I think it went well.

In all seriousness, I do want to change that. I can still recall going through my MA at Ga State and sitting through discussions about how to pick culturally relevant texts. You have to know I'm totally on board with this, right? I mostly hate the classics, the cannon, and the "new" cannon (which is the same as the old cannon). I'm they guy who wants to find stories that are relevant to my students. I want stories that have representations of my students, of their experiences, and of their cultures. I believe this really does help build buy-in for classroom activities and perpetuates a culture of belonging. But then the books recommendations started flowing in.

Shutting Out the Sky: Life in the Tenements of New York is supposed to connect with students who are immigrants or from immigrant families. It's a large picture book and we're meant to use it to introduce or complement an instructional unit with a immigration theme. To me this seems superficial at best. Hey, you're an immigrant so let's read stories and look at pictures about immigrants who look nothing like you, whose journey doesn't resemble yours, and who live in a place that looks and acts nothing like Atlanta.

In the Literature for Younger Children course we're treated to I Hate English, a book about an immigrant child who moves from Hong Kong to Chinatown, New York.

Memoirs are popular and we had When I Was Puerto Rican: A Memoir. Esmeralda Santiago's childhood in rural Puerto Rico is upended when her mother moves she and her sisters to New York.

The list goes on and on. A few stand out like The House On Mango Street about growing up Latina in urban Chicago or Esperanza Rising, a personal favorite, which runs as a kind of parallel to Grapes of Wrath. Instead of Okies we learn the story of Mexican Farm workers during the Great Depression. These are, at least to my recollection, the standouts of a bunch that otherwise seemed to paint the lives of urban youth and immigrants in a light of sameness. Namely, New York.

And as I explained this to the room full of random strangers who were just now realizing they had to spend the next year with me, I realized I might not make very many friends. Most of them looked like they were thinking "who the hell is this guy" except the one associate professor who jumped in. She is from Pakistan and remarked that she, too, had trouble finding literature that related to her own experiences as a non-Arab muslim, non-Indian brown person, non-New York immigrant (she moved to the city later) who moved to suburban Detroit. I have signed up for her class, which is, funnily enough, titled "Finding Literature for Older Readers."

But it worries me a little bit that rather than jump in and spend an hour talking shop, the nine other soon-to-be-classmates and one professor just kind of stared at me in shock, horror, or some other unknowable emotion. Maybe it's because they were all from New York or New Jersey? (There is also one who currently lives in Chapel Hill and can't wait to get back to the city.) I know it's a stereotype that New Yorkers are obsessed with being from New York but maybe there's some truth to it? Maybe I should save discussion time for actual classes and not 90 minute breakout sessions on an admitted student day?

Anyway, it's going to be an interesting year. I haven't even brought out the larger critique of ignoring student's language needs to focus on their cultural needs. If anything, the complaint about so many books being from or about New York is a minor one. It's a problem of discovery that will, I think, be fun to try and remedy. But how will these people react when I present a challenging and critical voice? How will they handle someone calling BS on their pedagogy? Those are the things which really do provoke some anxiety in me. I don't expect to disagree with their approaches all that much but I do expect them to be so much more focused on culture, race, class, and gender that they let the nuts and bolts of language slip by. I'm worried about this because those are the selling points on the website, on the emails, and at the admitted student day. I'm worried because those were the approaches from my prior teaching program which I felt left me unprepared to actually teach reading and teach writing. In moving up several tiers from Ga State to Columbia, am I really going anywhere at all? I think pointing this out means I'm not going to make any friends.

"Live" blogging going back to school again.

I'm not a consistent writer. This blog is probably the best I've done and the last time I posted on a regular schedule was 2015. The idea of writing and being a writer has always been an appealing one even if I'm not really sure where I got that from. My family doesn't care much for academics. They've never attended a graduation of mine or celebrated any academic success. It's probably no coincidence that high school was mostly a game for me; I wanted to get through with as little effort as possible. Not once was I ever under the impression that education was the key to my success.

Yet I'm a teacher. (Yes, I still tell myself that despite going on four years since I last taught in a classroom setting.) I love school. I like the idea of writing and talking about ideas and being a person who values thinking and analysing above just about everything else. As far as self images go, I couldn't do better than academic.

So there I was about a year ago coming out of an isolated small town and moving somewhere with access to top-notch universities. Of course I did something stupid like try to get certified in the most difficult state to seek certification in. Of course I didn't pursue the thing which drove me most passionately when I last taught, literacy. Of course I thought the prudent thing to do was to bang my head against the education system and try to teach in New York public schools.

That's what I did last time too, by the way. When I graduated college and knew, absolutely knew, I wanted to get a teaching graduate degree I still tried to find work first. It's a mistake I've resolved not to make again. When you know you want to do something, you should do that first. While it seems self apparent, I'm a dense individual with endless capacity for mild self sabotage. I've internalized that feeling of indifference from my family about teaching, learning, and education and made it into this weird drive to appear practical. Sure, I might think, I'm a loser academic but at least I'm finding work and not wasting time in school! I would deploy this weird circular reasoning to justify not getting the training and skills I desired. I still want to be a teacher. I believe school is valuable. But I don't want to go to school? That's some fine reasoning there!

I'll cut to the chase: I'm going back to school to earn another master's degree. I'll begin at Columbia University this May in a 1 year accelerated program to become a Literacy Specialist. I had considered going the SLP route but I'd need at least three semesters of science and math courses which I'd avoided as an English major and I'm not eager to go back and take undergraduate chemistry or neuro. Beyond that, I really do value the classroom as an environment for learning. I always wanted to stay a classroom teacher and not a "pull out" teacher. I don't want a student one-on-one. I just don't think that is a realistic or scalable model in the our public schools. I'd even argue we're moving more toward massive blended learning courses with 50+ students in a section and break-out groups a bit like you'd find in introductory college courses.

If I'm going to be a teacher, I want to be functioning in the typical environments that most students face. I have some pretty deep feelings about this from my time at Centennial High School where I felt like I was identifying a large number of students with significant gaps in reading and writing in both the special education and general education setting. No school system, certainly not public schools, will be giving each kid individual literacy instruction. Especially not at a high school level where those resources are least allocated. If you're interested in some of what I was thinking about back then, look at 2011-2013 blog posts. I especially recommend On Constructivism because I think it's closest to where my thinking is right now.

As an aside, I ended that post by saying:

As I'll begin presenting later, modern science is quickly discovering how our brains function and how learning really works. It's shining new light on old methods of teaching which probably seem ore[sic] familiar to the baby boomer generation than to ours.

I never wrote that follow up post. I'm sorry for that because I still think about these issues all the time. I'm also sorry that I don't reply to comments. I wish I got an email or a notification that somebody posted a comment because I don't think I go back to my posts much after hitting publish. In fact, just email me!

My plan for this blog is to use it as a space for reflection on my new learning adventures. One thing I think I will really enjoy about Columbia is their focus on literacy work in classrooms and with classes of students instead of a more clinical setting. I'm going to be riding the train every day for two hours each way and I intend to use that time to read and plan my blog posts. Ambitiously, I would like to blog after each class. For the summer that would only be twice weekly but it would pick up in the fall.

Hopefully, I am good about this and can use it as a kind of open ended discussion with my past self and with the new ideas I'm encountering. Keep your fingers crossed.