[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_100

Teaching to transgress, bell hooks, 1994

Many times when I had to explain to my class things that I found banal - simply because I had encountered them hundreds of times throughout my life - I found myself in difficulty in front of students who were unable to grasp them or, worse, I found myself unable to answer their questions.

This is how I realized I didn't know the things I thought I knew. The worst question I faced was: “Why do we have to study this stuff?”. I believe any teacher has faced this question and that the panic is the same for everyone. “We don't know why we are teaching you these things!” but we cannot say that. Or maybe we can? “What is it for?” It's not a silly question, and trying to answer it, as teachers, can profoundly change our perspectives.

Why does my class have to remember the date of the French Revolution? Do you know all the names of the Italian rivers by heart? Please give me the correct definition of the term complement. Many times, putting yourself in the student's place helps. It helps the student, and it helps us really understand what job we are doing and whether what we are doing is our job.

By teaching others, I have re-learned many things and many others I learned for the first time. In a certain sense, teaching has been - and continues to be - finding myself simultaneously on both sides of the desk. But many times, it also means finding myself in front of a mirror and being unable to recognize my reflection. This happened to me during my first year as a teacher.

In the teachers' college, we were writing the report cards for the first quarter and discussing the profiles of the various students when a colleague asked me: "Why did you give Luca such a low grade?". Luca was a first-year boy, and the grade I gave him didn't seem low to me, "7 out of 10 is not a low grade," I replied, a little piqued, "and Luca doesn't apply himself enough to get an 8. He's intelligent but gets lost easily. He is distracted, forgets material, and does homework partially. If I give him a higher rating, I fear he will stop working hard." My colleague remained silent for a moment, then asked me: "But do you know Luca's family situation?". No, I didn't know it. I had received and studied all the files of the children in the class who presented critical issues, be they cognitive or social problems, and Luca did not appear in the files. My colleague continued: “Luca does not appear in the files because his situation is not considered “exceptional,” even if it is. Luca is the son of working-class parents." I remained silent, waiting for him to explain the other part of the story, what made Luca an "exceptional" subject, but my colleague didn't add anything. “And… so?” I insisted. “So what?” my colleague blurted out in surprise. “The boy is completely alone; no one helps him! His parents work in the factory all day, and they have no culture." he stopped for a moment and then continued, "What Luca does, he does completely independently, without anyone's guidance. And it's amazing for his age! He should be rewarded and encouraged for this!”. I remained speechless. I believed that all the kids did things "autonomously" without anyone's guidance, and I didn't find anything "exceptional" about it, as my colleague said. I, too, had been a working-class student with parents who fell into the chilling definition of "without culture"; I, too, had always done my homework and organized my studies alone; and, unlike Luca, my grades were very high. Where was the exceptionality? It had always seemed that I was doing my duty how it needed to be done.

Until that precise moment, my childhood and school experience had never appeared to me as "exceptional." But from that moment on, something changed: talking to my colleague had caused me to awaken; I was looking for my face in the mirror of time, and I found Luca's face reflected in it. I began to notice which parents attended all the meetings, how many did the homework for their children, those who brought them to visit museums, those who pushed their children into all available extracurricular activities, and who paid for their study holidays around Italy or abroad. I began to compare their children's interests, results, and school performance with those of others, the children of parents who did not come to meetings, did not follow their children's schooling and did not pass on interests and passions to them. The result was a divide: on one side, there were attentive students, diligent in their studies, self-confident, and full of desires, on the other, there were students with no interests and often without dreams, who saw school as an enemy and who couldna wait to go to work as a mechanic, hairdresser, waitress, plumber, etc. Many of these students had very low self-esteem and a total lack of confidence; they often felt stupid because they equated intelligence with the high grades they couldn't get.

In most cases, the children in the first group belonged to middle-class families or those who had at least a high school diploma; almost all those in the second group came from working-class families or had a low level of education.

I also began to pay attention to my colleagues' speeches, the references to their training, their ambitions, and frustrations. And I soon realized how there was the same gap between me and them. Almost all of them came from middle-class families; they had traveled and studied abroad; nearly none of them had worked to support their studies, and almost all of them had found themselves becoming teachers as a fallback when their post-doctoral academic dreams had not come to fruition.

While they complained about working as teachers in state schools as a punishment, hating the Italian State and their students, I, on the other hand, was enthusiastic about it. When I received my first teaching job, I felt like someone who made it: I saw teaching as an essential profession, culminating in a life of sacrifices and social redemption. I was the first and only family member to start a non-working-class job.

This gap between my colleagues made an impression on me, and I felt strangely sorry for myself. I also began to review my memories as a young student with different eyes. As a child, I studied a lot; I had excellent results and a thousand dreams, just like those children with very present and attentive parents. I remember that the teachers treated me with special respect and that I perceived this difference: I felt their tenderness and a strange form of admiration.

At the time, I found it unlikely that teachers would admire a small child, so I thought that if I received preferential treatment, it would undoubtedly be due to my excellent academic performance. But it wasn't just for that.

I began to wonder how many speeches similar to those made about Luca had been made about me during various class meetings; I imagined those same speeches made in the voice of my colleague, with the same tone of pain and commiseration: "working class," "she does everything by herself,"

"Parents without culture," "She should be rewarded." Who knows how much help I received to move forward without even realizing I was being helped? Who knows how much effort went into everyone, teachers and parents, not to make me understand the difference between me and the others, even though I still felt the difference.

What I remember of that period, between the ages of 11 and 15, is an infinite and bitter loneliness. I remember feeling responsible for my future, scared of making "the wrong choice," and unable to show my fears because everyone around me expected "mature behavior." I remember feeling profoundly different from my classmates and family and equally misunderstood by both. My family complained that I studied too much, was useless, didn't help enough at home, and wasn't like other children. My classmates, those with a background more similar to mine, called me a "nerd," and even if I tried to pass them the answers during exams, they couldn't trust me nor feel sympathy towards me; those who had grades similar to mine didn't see me as "one of them" but, on the contrary, they looked at me with a particular disgust: I dressed in used clothes and not in my size, I wasn't interested in fashion, I didn't read magazines for teenagers, I didn't watch TV shows or listen to mainstream music. So, while on the one hand, I could be a bridge between two different and distant realities, on the other hand, I didn't live in either of them.

Was I an “exceptional” child? What I can say is that—at the time—thinking I was would definitely have made me feel better. Although I shared the scholastic achievements and ambitions of children from other social classes, my feelings remained strangely the same as those of other working-class children who did poorly at school: I felt stupid, insecure, helpless, scared, alone, and without prospects. These are feelings that still accompany me and against which I continue to fight.

As an adult with experience and class consciousness, I can say that belonging to a working-class background was - and is - a bit like living within the musical figure of syncopation. This effect interrupts or alters the regular flow of rhythm in a composition. When you listen to a melody, you immediately recognize the syncopation: the rhythm breaks, and you feel that a piece is missing, a frantic race to reach something, the lost harmony, the unity.

Well, being part of the working class and aspiring to get out of it is a bit like finding yourself chronically in syncope, being a small eighth note behind several quarter notes, and fighting to recover the little bit of time you miss to get back into the rhythm of the bar. Except you rarely succeed.

“Peers and professors often asked me if I was there on a scholarship. Underlying this question was the implication that receiving financial aid ‘diminished’ one somehow. It was not just this experience that intensified my awareness of class difference; it was the constant evocation of materially privileged class experience (usually that of the middle class) as a universal norm that not only set those not privileged from discussion from social activities […]. Early on, I did not realize that class was much more than one’s economic standing; it determined values, standpoints, and interests. It was assumed that any student coming from a poor or working-class background would willingly surrender all values and habits of being associated with this background. Those of us from diverse ethnic/racial backgrounds learned that no aspect of our vernacular culture could be voiced in elite settings. […] I see many students as ‘undesirable.’

Class backgrounds cannot complete their studies because the contradictions between the behavior necessary to ‘make it’ in the academy and those that allowed them to be comfortable at home, with their families and friends, are too great. […] I encourage students to reject the notion that they must choose between experiences. They must believe they can live comfortably in two different worlds, but they must make each space one of comfort. “