One approach to planning a mural at a school is to meet with principals and involved faculty membes about the project to hear their ideas about themes for the mural. This meeting should be kept pretty small, because with too many people having a say it can get out of hand. So we had our initial meeting last week with the principal and the art teacher. The principal told us that the theme for the mural in the auditorium was completely up to us, which kind of surprised me. So we thought of three different themes and presented those to the 4th and 5th grade art classes today, to get students' ideas about them.
First we had a group discussion about the three themes: growth, our communities/neighborhoods, and heroes. We made a list of things that came into our minds when we thought about each theme. Then we asked students to make drawings about these things that came into their minds.
We got a lot of drawings of buildings and neighborhoods. One kid made a really sweet portrait of Abraham Lincoln. When we asked kids to name heroes from history, every student kept repeating the same two figures: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. It reminded me of how whitewashed our civil rights curriculum is in elementary schools, that we are only learning about those two people. And when I asked students what Rosa Parks did that made her a hero, we heard the usual story that textbooks teach us: One day an old lady name Rosa Parks was tired. She didn't want to move from the front of the bus when a white person came on board. So she didn't. And now we have equality.
We don't teach kids about Rosa Parks' long history of organizing, about how many other times she performed this act of civil disobedience, or about how many other people had also done it. None of those kids would remember the fact that she was the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP at the time, or even know what the NAACP is. Our textbooks just call her a tired old lady who randomly decided to not get up one day. This is done to hide the truth of how organized the movement had to be to even get attention called to their actions. The people who write our school curriculum don't want kids to know that African-Americans strategized and organized things for themselves. It's a completely disempowering narrative.
Aside from that, what was depressing about our morning was not the students or their work—there were some of the usual behavioral problems but nothing I haven't dealt with many times before. It was two of the teachers we talked with while we were there. They were miserable, hated their jobs and took it out on the kids. They referred to certain kids as “jerks” (to Jessie and I) and I don't think it's a stretch to say that they were racist. One white teacher made a really offensive comment to us about an African-American student's hair.
I appreciate how difficult their jobs are, and I've worked in situations where I felt like a zookeeper because of how many behavioral issues I was dealing with. But they seriously lacked respect for their students and had piss poor attitudes about what they were doing. They both flat-out admitted that they hated their jobs. If that's the case, people like that should really take the leap and just switch professions, because they're not doing anybody any favors. They're potentially doing more damage than good, and probably making un-nurtured kids feel even worse about themselves than they already do. The more I think and write about it the more angry I get. If you don't respect the people you're teaching, you can't expect them to respect you, and you're going to give them a lifelong aversion to whatever subject it is you're trying to teach them.
One teacher warned me NOT to get my MA in Art Ed and not to become a teacher. I know she has that perspective because it's clearly not the job she wants, but it was still really depressing to see her hating her job so much.
