There is a very special woman in my life that taught me much of what I know about education; experiencing both failure and success within school, and what really matters when it comes to thriving academically. From discussions and her lived experiences, I came to a greater understanding about schooling and the education process that grounded much of what I was learning throughout graduate school and beyond. Often, as was the case with my experience, educators who begin graduate studies typically are doing so to further their careers in education that has already begun. And using statistics as a guide, much of the learning regarding educating students from socioeconomically depressed backgrounds is conceptual in that most of us who work as educators, don’t come from such backgrounds. We learn about it, but are largely disconnected from it, and in that disconnection, there’s somethings we simply can’t know…but I have been blessed to learn from the experiences of one remarkable woman.
My wife is Puerto Rican. She grew up in Camden. She went to Camden schools from elementary through middle school. Her mother was fifteen when she gave birth to the baby girl that would become my wife. Her mother and stepfather struggled with drug abuse. Her family has a history with mental illness. My wife spent the bulk of her childhood being raised by her grandmom who spoke little English. My wife went to many schools from kindergarten through 8th grade and was left back once in first grade. She got in fights. She began driving at 15 and despite wanting to attend Woodrow Wilson High School with her cousins, her grandmom forbade her and made her attend a vocational school in Pennsauken in hopes she’d learn a trade that would help her “get a job.” In high school, was absent as often as she was present, barely graduating in 2000 with a GPA south of a 2.0. She recalls her guidance counselor speaking to her “only once following a standardized test” to discuss her results and made clear that she was not “college material”, an assessment her estranged mother repeated during the few times they did speak. My wife was the first in her family to graduate high school, despite not knowing how to multiply.
Seeking something “to do” after high school and sensing the need to leave Camden, my wife heeded the advice of her cousin who suggested she join the military. She joined the Army briefly before being medically discharged. She was living in San Antonio full time when she and I met during my junior year at Rutgers-Camden in 2002. Fast forward…our daughter was born in 2003 and my wife moved back to her grandmom’s North Camden home from San Antonio later that Spring.
One of the 1st conversations we had as new parents was the “what are we gonna do” conversation; essentially mapping out our next steps as young parents. ( We were both 22 when our daughter was born.) I didn’t have a job outside of working at a nightclub 2-3 times a week, and she didn’t have a job either. The couple hundred dollars in cash each week I earned (in a good week), in addition to “food stamps” and TANF money carried us for quite some time. What I didn’t know about my wife was how organized, and detail-oriented she truly was. She is still, as she was then, very meticulous and “about her business”. As a condition of receiving TANF aid, mothers either have to enroll in a post-secondary learning institution or perform documentable volunteer work. My wife chose to attend Omega Institute (now defunct) to become a licensed medical assistant. This was in the Fall of 2003…three years since struggling out of high school.
During the ten months my wife was at Omega Institute, she got up every morning for class where she learned medical terminology, concepts, along with basic practice: taking patients’ blood pressure, how to use a stethoscope, and even preliminary phlebotomy. She went to school and pored over the assigned texts dutifully, all while being 22 and mothering an infant. At the completion of her program, she earned a medical assistant’s certification and soon after landed a job a nearby Camden hospital earning $10 per hour…
In early 2004, my wife and daughter secured a low-income apartment in Glassboro, about 20 miles away from her job, and enrolled our daughter in a local Head Start for daycare. Each day, my wife would get our daughter up in the morning and drop her off at daycare, before making her commute to Camden for work, then commute back to the Glassboro daycare to pick up our child, and then finally return home. (During those days I was working as a permanent substitute and living in Camden with my grandfather.) Things progressed as such until late in the Spring of 2004 when my wife’s employer cut her hours which placed our daughter’s access to Head Start at risk. Despite my wife pleading with her supervisor’s to not cut her hours, or to at least simply report on paper that she was working the required amount of hours to keep our child eligible (to which her supervisor declined), my wife was facing the end of her term at that job – the first job she’d had.
Noticing how expendably her employer treated her, we agreed that without continuing her education, every job she took could, and likely would, treat her with similar disregard eventually. My wife agreed to give Camden County College a shot. I had no idea about the prior struggles my wife had in school back then, nor did I know depths of angst and apprehension she felt internally toward going back to school; a system that exhibited little care for her, and a journey she’d been told she was not suited for.
Nonetheless, she persisted. The first step was getting her to the apply to CCC and complete the FAFSA, which we did. Next we drove to CCC in order for her to take the college placement test. She tested in remedial Math and English (as I did). Not the end of the world, I’d thought because, “we’d get through it”. Throughout the remainder of the summer of 2004, my wife and I had a series of conversations around school and getting “good grades”, with her repeating over and over again that she’s “not a math” person and “I don’t know my times tables.” She wasn’t lying; she didn’t. Throughout the summer before school started, we’d go over multiplication tables with pencil and paper, and eventually with flash cards. Before long, she learned her times tables.
My wife began CCC that Fall; still mothering, taking our toddler to daycare while going to class and working a Work Study job earning about $7 per hour. She brought her 1st computer and printer with her college refund check, and went to class, worked, and studied, and mothered… went to class, worked, studied and mothered…cried in frustration, went to class, studied, and mothered…. went to class, cried in frustration and spoke of dropping out, studied, and mothered only to get herself and our daughter up early the next morning to go to class, work and study the next day. My wife gave school her all, never missing a class or an assignment. Despite toiling on like this throughout the first semester, my wife who barely made it out of high school, who didn’t know how to multiply very well, earned the Dean’s List nearly every semester at CCC – while working and mothering. After three years at Camden County, my wife applied to Rutgers University in Camden in 2007, and was accepted.
This time, with confidence and documented proof that she was “college material” (whatever that actually means), my wife flew through Rutgers earning Dean’s List honors multiple times and becoming the 1st person in her family to not only graduate high school and attend college, but to earn her degree. Not stopping her studies at a Bachelor’s degree, my wife continued her graduate studies and earned her Masters Degree in Social Work in 2012.
While still in school, and to this day at times, my wife and I talk about her educational journey from high school and throughout college. As she began accumulating multiple academic accolades, I’d ask her: “Do you realize you’re in class with some New Jersey Stars…people that had been earning good grades throughout high school”? and while at Rutgers “Do you realize you’re getting these grades while sitting in class next to people from more privileged backgrounds than you…like people who attended “good schools”? and also, “Yo, I went to Moorestown Friends and got a 1080 on my SAT and you did better than me all throughout your years in college”? My wife never vocally entertained those questions very long, quickly downplaying how amazing her educative path was, and how instructive her journey is.
From reflecting on my wife educational experience, I’ve learned three things that have informed my practice as an educator, and analysis as a researcher concerned with urban education:
- Be mindful of our prejudices – we educators, like most of society, formulate ideas of a young person’s potential primarily based on what we see them doing in school. If students are coming to school, doing their homework, acing tests, and are well behaved, we believe all is well and their future is bright. On the other hand, students who aren’t performing well academically, exhibit difficult behaviors, or have high degrees of absenteeism, we often make negative determinations negative determinations about their life’s potential. We seldom take the time to find out that student’s “why”; and often, their “why” is often far more complex than not “caring about learning” or that they “don’t care about school”. We ought to remember students are human beings first, and are subject to all of the frustrations, fears and triggers adults experience, but often without the power to materially change their situation on their own; and that reality can manifest itself in school in a myriad of negative ways.
- Watch what we say to children – students listen to the things we educators say to them whether we recognize it or not. They are always listening; which is why negative labeling of students as “behavior problems”, “lazy”, or not “college material” is dangerous to children’s self-appraisal and assessment of their own self-worth. Certainly working with students can be maddingly difficult at times, but we must always remember they are children…young people who listen to what we say to them both good and bad. As such, we must always mind our tongues. Are we speaking life into our students, or are we tearing them down. Lastly, we should never forget our students are human beings before anything else and it is very likely that the hurtful words spoken to a child are the words they’ll remember most vividly.
- What all students need to thrive academically is steadfast support beyond the schoolhouse – school can be difficult. Commonly, students have subjects they perform better in than others, and simply being exposed to course material at school is rarely sufficient for students to commit it memory. Students need folks outside of school helping to reinforce what’s being covered at school, and this is particularly true in the early stages of literacy, writing, and mathematics. Such need for support doesn’t end at a certain grade as students throughout PK-16 need support, it just takes different forms. Support may take the form of learning times tables with flash cards with a loved one, or a motivational word to “keep pushing” and a pat on the back when academic goals have been reached; or support can look like, “Dear, focus on your paper. I got the lil’ one tonight.” As much as the idea that school is a solitary endeavor involving students individuals permeates our society, education should be a community effort where students’ networks play a vital role in working toward their academic success. Few people succeed in anything alone, and students are no different.
If it cannot be ascertained by this point in this essay, I’ll state it plainly: I find my wife and her educative journey amazing. Both taught me a lot about my own practice and how I perceive the schooling experience in a way I could have never understood without her. Hopefully, the above causes folks to do some reflections on their own academic journey, as well as help inform the way we go about educating and appraising our own students. In education, there’s so much to learn and perfect, and I’m blessed to share my life with a woman whose taught me so much by her example.
