Notes from a Feminist 2nd Grade Teacher

Off Our Backs, Nov/Dec 2003 by Manzano, Angelita

I got my first teaching job last fall. I had a class of sixteen students, seven girls and eight boys, mostly Black and Latina/o, mostly immigrants, and all from low-income families. I thought that teaching kids would be a great way to put my artistic impulses, my nurturing instincts, and my feminist beliefs into practice. Yes, I really think that teaching kids can be a feminist act. I don't believe that it should be solely the parents' responsibility to raise children. And in the good, feminist society that I imagine, women and men, as members of a society, will share responsibility for raising children. As a second-grade teacher, I think of myself as participating in raising children and fulfilling my responsibility as a member of a community.

What would the world look like if children were taught by radical feminists?

As a feminist teacher, I try to create an environment where all students can learn and grow, where girls who are usually timid will not be afraid to participate. I try to respect each student, to promote democratic decision making among students, and to allow students to express feelings. It is my hope that this will make students less fearful, more willing to take risks, to make mistakes, to express their frustrations and to express their enthusiasm for learning.

I don't want my students to look at me as the authority or expert, but as someone, like themselves, who is fallible, who is struggling to find the truth, and is capable of finding it. I want students to trust themselves and know that they are smart and able to learn.

This can be a hard message to get across to students, especially for some girls. I had a few male students who were struggling with math, for example. The boys who have problems usually act out when they don't understand how to solve a problem. They yell, cry, jump around the classroom-anything but admit that they need help. This behavior, of course, gets my attention. I remember pulling Andres* aside, trying to calm him, to convince him that there is no shame in needing help. "Do you think I never failed a test when I was a kid? Of course I did!," I told him. I think about my own school experiences in South Texas. The great majority of the students at my schools were, like me, Mexican-American. But, thanks to "tracking" and my talent at faking my way through standardized tests, I ended up in the classes for the "gifted" students, who were mostly white. I can't remember what was said or done. But I remember that I was confused, that I was stupid, that Mexicans were stupid, and that I was bad.

"Needing help doesn't mean that you are bad or stupid," I told him. The two girls who had trouble with math, however, tried not to call attention to themselves. They often pretended to understand (by copying off others), rather than admit they didn't understand. They didn't want me to call on them. They nodded their heads when I asked if they understood. While the boys acted out when they couldn't understand, the girls quietly blamed themselves.

Linda had so much difficulty with basic math that other teachers suggested that I have her tested for learning disabilities. When I gave her one-on-one instruction, she seemed to understand the logic of two-digit addition and subtraction problems quite well. But when I gave her problems to do on her own, she either copied off a classmate or got practically every answer wrong. She would never ask for help. One day she turned in a test with almost all answers wrong. I went to her desk and gave her a blank copy of the same test. I told her that I knew that she knew the answers to the problems and that I would prove it to her. "First problem: 53 minus 28," I asked, "What do you do first? What next?" She solved the problem. I said, "Do you realize that you did that whole problem on your own? All I did was ask you what to do next, and every time I asked you, you knew what to do!" Her face lit up. She completed the rest of the problems correctly, on her own. Since this day she often asks me for extra double digit addition and subtraction problems for homework and she raises her hand during math to volunteer answers.

Time is Money

"If you don't finish all the answers by the end of class, is that okay?" I ask. "Yes," replies Lisa, "because quality is more important than quantity," repeating a phrase she's heard me use many times. But my own use of time, and my students' sense of time, goes against the schedule imposed by the school. The school doesn't take into account that the time needed to understand a subject varies for different students. We have math from 10:15 to 10:45 everyday. We have to learn a specific skill each day. And if the student does not learn that skill in this time-even if the skill is writing an answer to a word problem and the student is a recent immigrant from rural Nigeria with limited English skills-we move on. If the student can't keep up, refer her to special ed. This schedule is even more difficult to keep to in Reading/Language Arts class. The school schedule allows students two hours to write a "perfect" story-and by perfect, they mean no errors in "CUPS" (capitalization, usage, punctuation, and spelling). But, as I like to point out to my students, it takes their favorite author, Marc Brown, an average of one year to write a story. It took me 2 months to write my last 2-page article for oob. But our school values quick, not deep thinking. We don't teach children how to find the best ways to express their thoughts and feelings through words. We prepare them for timed, standardized tests. We don't teach them how to be good writers, but prepare them to be good notetakers for their future bosses.