Imagining the Future: Growing Up Working Class; Teaching in the University

Educational Foundations, Summer 2003 by Hursh, David

I never wanted to be a teacher. In school I constantly counted the minutes until the last bell, when I would be free to join the other boys playing whichever sport the season demanded. I measured my success not by test grades but by touchdowns and runs scored.

Therefore, I am surprised that for the last thirty years I have been teaching. But it is in teaching, in the crucible of the classroom, that one can engage in asking questions and making sense of one another and the world. It is in the classroom in which a gaggle of five and six year olds responded to my question of how the Grand Canyon was formed with the unexpected but understandable explanation of earthquakes and tornadoes. And it is in last night's classroom of doctoral students mostly teachers and administrators - in which we deliberated over the effect that the current testing movement has on our ability to engage students in making sense of ourselves and the world.

How then did I move from being a working-class boy who experienced school as a digression from my real interest - sports - to someone who had made education his life work? In this paper I will describe my own understanding of the process. In particular, I will describe my own changing gender, race, and class identity within the context of an evolving political understanding. Further, I will note the difficulties I encountered from elementary school through college because I lacked, as a working class boy, the social and cultural capital of the middle class. How and why I became a teacher was a result of analyzing my own educational experiences.

My frustrating elementary and secondary educational experiences were followed by experiences in and out of school in which I came to imagine teaching as part of a larger effort to create a more humane world. While I was not so naive to believe that developing new approaches to teaching and schooling would by itself change the world, I did believe, like John Dewey, that if schools incorporated democratic decision making, they could be places in which we learned to be democratic citizens. I, along with many others creating alternatives within and outside the public schools, and those active in the civil rights and anti-war movements, had a vision of a more caring, less hierarchical world. Then and now I wanted to reaffirm the possibility of teaching and learning as a way of combating a society that poet Adrienne Rich describes as smelling "of timidity, docility, demoralization, acceptance of the unacceptable" (1993, p. xiii). Rich sees "in the general public disarray of thinking, of feeling...an atrophy of our power to imagine other ways of navigating into our collective future" (p. xv). She laments that we have become a society ' [w]here every public decision has to be justified in the scales of cooperate profits" (p. xv).

In 19481 was born, along with my twin brother, into the baby boom generation and a working-class family. Neither my father nor mother attended college and, reportedly, my father was underage when he enlisted in the Navy near the end of World War II. After the Navy my father was a construction worker and later owneroperator of a small construction company (I sometimes worked for him as a day laborer). My mother worked at home until my father died at the age of 42, after which she worked in factories, grocery stores, restaurants. Now, more than thirty years later, she still works almost full time.

In the early years we moved in and around New York City but in 1954 we settled in Levittown, New York, the archetypal post-war suburb. Levitt, the developer, only sold his homes to Whites and had buyers sign a covenant that they would only resell to Whites until this practice was eliminated in 1968 as illegal (Brodkin 2001, p. 40). Levittown, presently a middle-class community, was initially a blue-collar community of World War II veterans working their way up in the world.

My early educational experiences were not auspicious. Family mythology has it that my twin brother and I almost failed kindergarten - I suspect in large part because we were inordinately shy - but were passed on to first grade because they didn't want to see us another year. I did poorly in school until the end of second grade when my mother, in response to my query regarding how to add all the numbers on the grocery receipt, did not tell me to wait until my teacher taught me how to "carry" in addition. Instead, in a few minutes, she taught me. The mystery of schooling was broken; knowledge for the first time seemed not to be something only possessed by experts. Learning was no longer inherently difficult. Subsequently, with my new skill and confidence, I became a math whiz and did better in third grade. However, as an elementary and secondary student I rarely felt comfortable in the classroom. Neither the goals, rules nor reasons were clear to me and I usually aimed to just get through the day without being embarrassed or punished.

While school was becoming tolerable, life outside of school proved to be equally challenging. It was soon after moving to Levittown that I first was challenged by what it means to grow up a working-class male.