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.