Two months ago I finished my two-year commitment of teaching
at a Title I school in Charlotte, North Carolina. I loved the challenges, the
thrill of inspiring students to seize control of their own lives, and the
invigoration of doing high-stakes work that matters. I want to do this for the
rest of my life, so I am moving to Israel.
Flashback: Beatties Ford Library, Charlotte’s West Side,
winter of 2014. A group of idealistic Teach For Americans have gathered in a
small room where our eyes track the dynamically pacing TFA staffer who is
challenging us to consider what it takes for schools and communities to
collaborate for the sake of children. She prods us with statistics on race and
poverty and educational initiatives. I am tired after twelve hours straight of
work, and I cannot for the life of me think what it would look like to have
schools and communities work together for children. I close my eyes against her
words, and the phosphenes behind my eyelids coalesce into an answer:
I can’t picture communities and schools working together
here, in West Charlotte, because this is not my community. To connect the
community with our school, I should live in this neighborhood, and attend the
same faith institutions as my children, and jog at their park, and let the
thousand natural ways that people connect serve them. But I don’t share their community,
and so I cannot act as a bridge between community and school.
Flash forward: Columbus Ohio, July 25, 2015. My high school
Talmud teacher is quizzing me on what I am going to do this year with the
education he started me on a decade ago. I think ruefully of my own
students—will I be there for them ten years from now? Even if I am, we won’t
sit down comfortably to lunch together while the people they grew up with interrupt
us to chat. We probably won’t be on the same side of the ocean. And whatever
our personal relationship, I can’t craft holistic change with them. I can’t
enhance the community’s sense that it has a stake in educating its children,
nor assure the students that they have a future role in their community,
because I’m not a part of it.
This is one of the reasons that programs like Teach for America are so dubiously
beneficial. I, and other individuals chosen without regard for matching our
identity to the communities we teach in, can’t plop ourselves into a school for
two years and work miracles. If we do, it’s problematic. It positions us as
saviors among victims, rather than newcomers among competent agents. And unless
we radically give up on contributing to and remaining in our own cultures, or
unless those cultures are not highly demanding to begin with, we cannot
integrate enough to facilitate the connection between community and school that
could holistically heal systemic problems.
This does not mean we do not have work, and lots of it, to
do. We need to fight for educational equity—at the very least—as allies and in
policy; we need to vote and to show up to rallies and challenge curricular
norms and educate ourselves and everyone else that we can. As this summer’s
list of murdered Americans mounts and our urgency to end racism and the
inequalities that bolster it increases, our actions must intensify as well. But
that should be sustained work, not a two-year dip into learning about other
cultures at the expense of their own self-directed growth. The teachers who
stay at a Title I school for years, who know the names of all of the siblings
of the children in their classes, and are fixtures in the community to the
point where parents and pastors recognize their contributions—those are the
ones who are doing something valuable. The teachers who grew up in that
community and remain to teach the next generation—they are doing something
inestimable.
So, I am moving to Israel so that I can do the kind of work
that I want to. I want to teach in a place where it matters, but I also want to
teach with my whole self. The need for teachers who try to facilitate human
connection, to advance the respect with which people look at those different
from themselves, is as urgent in war-torn Israel as in racist America. My new
school’s vision of respect, dialogue, and peace, aims to create a spring of
hope in a region seething with anger.
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| What other country would have this sign in the airport? |
I am moving to Israel because I want to leave the world, in my father’s words, just a little bit better
than it would have been if I was never born, and I can do that better in my own
community. I can never abnegate my responsibility for being American. But
Israel’s defects are my defects, in a way more intimate than America’s can ever
be, and its redemption can be mine, as well. I don’t want to teach in a place
where people talk about what I’m doing for
my students, I want to teach in a place where it's obvious that I’m working with my students.
I am grateful for my American education. I will not
surrender my Canadian politeness, nor my Midwestern friendliness, nor my
cracked and bleeding belief in the value of freedom. Never will I lose my deep
conviction that English literature ranks among mankind’s most important
creations. But if I want to live up to the progressive, generous impulses
that America fosters, then I need to leave it and use them in the
country that, regardless of accident of birth, owns me.
When I told my students last year that I was moving to
Israel, one of them wrote on the board: “Ms. W’s leaving to cheat on us with
Israeli children.” The truth is, I always felt, a tiny bit, as though I were
cheating on Israel. Now I’m finally going home.
In the dawn, armed
with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities. –Rimbaud
