Evaluating Impacts on Professional Practice

Unfortunately, I don’t need to imagine an experience with an ism this week. My very first year of teaching at my current school I replaced a teacher who was African American and was very tight with of our returning parents who was also African American. My coteacher is Puerto Rican and had a good relationship with this family and, although she let me know that some of the parents really enjoyed the previous teacher, she didn’t think that it would be an issue of me “replacing” her since the teacher left for another district. I apparently had a similar upbeat personality like the previous teacher and clearly wanted to do well at my job and create a positive classroom environment and focus on the kids. I thought everything was fine when we met with the parents the week before school to introduce ourselves and go through the school/classroom expectations and paperwork with them. At the end of the meeting however, I noticed that this parent had never directly asked me a question; instead, she kept her focus on my coteacher and looking to her for responses, despite the fact that I was the lead teacher. I didn’t mention it to my coteacher and thought it was just because she knew her from last year and thought nothing more of it until about the fourth week of school when it started happening again. When I would attempt to speak with her or greet her at the door when she dropped off her daughter, she would look at me, blink, and walk on by to speak with my coteacher. She interacted with the other parents, including new parents, but would refuse interaction with myself. The following week, I was called into the principals office and shocked to find out that the parent requested to pull her daughter from my classroom because she “didn’t feel comfortable with me, a young Caucasian “girl”, teaching her. She would prefer a more mature” My principal tried to defend me saying that I was a great teacher and she could already tell that I took my job to heart and truly loved what I was doing, but the parent was adamant for a switch or she would leave the program.

This completely gutted me as a teacher, because first, I had no idea what it was I had “done” to her to make her feel this way, and I always went out of my way to try to be friendly to her and greet her like I did all of the rest of my families. I tried to show all of my families that I respected them, despite my ignorance of their different cultures and languages yet, but let them know that I would take this year to learn more about each of them and the cultures represented in our classroom. The rest of my families were eager to help me out when I attempted to speak Spanish or greet them or my students in their native language and encouraged my progress. I was worn out emotionally wondering what I could have done better to make her happy or prove to her that I was not just a good teacher, but a dedicated one. What made this act of ageism even more frustrating, was that the little girl was so upset when she found out she was going to be placed into a different classroom. We often see other classrooms in the hallway and sometimes share the same specials with them, like gym or outside time, so the first time she saw me in the hallway, she rushed out of the line of her new classroom, and ran to give me a hug in tears telling me that she missed me and wanted to come back to my room. Just because I looked young, didn’t mean I didn’t have any experience teaching, or the heart, to do a great job in the classroom and it frustrated me to be judged based on what I looked like, and since we had only been in school or a few weeks, she didn’t give me the chance to prove myself to her.

Although it stung to be considered “not good enough”, I did not want to let the attitude and beliefs of one parent ruin my passion for teaching and the rest of the year for my remaining students so I let it go and instead focused on the rest of my families. I did work hard to learn about each of them on an individual level, celebrated their cultures and holidays and special events with them and continued to show how I was just as willing to learn from them as they could learn from me. I’m not sure what brought on the prejudice from that one mom, but instead of letting that be my focus and pushing the rest of my students aside, I chose to focus on who I still had. One bad apple does not need to spoil the whole bushel and it actually helped impact my work throughout the years more positively. If I had let her prejudice and personal bias get to me, it would have ruined the rest of my year, and possibly longer. Accepting it and moving on from it would make me stronger and help me overcome it if I ever experienced another brush with an -ism. I found this quote later on that year and it really helped me come to terms with how I felt. I couldn’t change how that parent felt, but I could change how I felt about it.