I’ve always been interested in the power of narratives. Given my professional interests I’ve focused on their political power–what is rap if not a story?–but I’ve also recognized their power to change lives in other ways. No program conveys that better than StoryCorps. And you can hear that in the hundreds of stories StoryCorps collected. Like this one about love and conversation. Or this one about a mother who ended up “parenting” her son’s murderer.
About a month ago, the kind folks at Tell Me More asked me to participate for National Teacher Appreciation. They wanted me to do a StoryCorps episode about the teacher than meant the most to me.
I was honored, besides the fact that this reduces my NPR bucket list to two (I’ve only got Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and The Diane Rehm Show to go).
I chose Dr. Ralph Story, my English professor at Michigan and Associate Director of the Comprehensive Studies Program (CSP). But there were two others I could have chosen.
Mrs. Gilreath (Principal of an Inkster elementary school at the time) got me into Michigan. I’d applied as a high school student and was rejected. To be more precise I was given a letter of acceptance THEN informed that letter was sent in error. Simultaneously a Mrs. Gilreath’s son (then a friend of mine) had got into CSP’s summer Bridge program at Michigan but didn’t want to go because it wasn’t an engineering program. When Mrs. Gilreath told the Bridge program her son wasn’t interested, she then told them about me and sold them on accepting me.
Once I got into Bridge, Dr. Story was one influence. The other was my Bridge math teacher, Dr. Martha Aliaga. When I talked to Dr. Story about doing StoryCorps with me, I found out that Dr. Aliaga had passed away just a few weeks prior. In fact her ceremony was held 30 minutes away from my home–after leaving Michigan she became the Education Director for the American Statistical Association.
My story with Dr. Story is here. Dr. Story was the first black male teacher I had, but more importantly he was the first teacher to examine issues of race, gender, and class within the classroom. Further his teaching style was open and welcoming. From him I learned I didn’t have to leave a core part of myself at home. I could use the fact that I was black and working class, as a strength. In my writing. In how I carried myself. It became a shield of sorts, and it became a wellspring of ideas. I’d taken honors english classes throughout high school, but Dr. Story was the first teacher to see me AS a writer.
But Dr. Aliaga was as important. Most people teach math as if it required a genetic trait. And there were people who were natural mathematicians and people who…weren’t. This argument has of course, significant racial implications. Now because the formal rules of mathematics are far more rigid than the rules of grammar, it’s easy to get people to buy into this, but it isn’t true. Dr. Aliaga took the work of teaching math literacy to black, latino, and white rural kids seriously. She believed that not only was it something that could be taught, it was something that could be developed and mastered. It simply required work. To say Dr. Aliaga worked us was an understatement. But she put as many hours after class teaching us as she put into her lectures. And she took the time to praise and recognize her students. The Washington Post published an obituary.
Under Dr. Aliaga I became good enough in math that I thought seriously about majoring in it.
I was asked to give an example of how Dr. Story influenced me–the type of specific story you could craft a StoryCorps program around. Because Dr. Story’s influence on me was more…environmental…I didn’t have a specific story.
But I do have one with Dr. Aliaga. After getting an A in my summer math class, I took calculus in the Fall, one of several hundred Math 115 students. I remember preparing for the midterm–my first major midterm as a student at Michigan, spending hours going over problem sets, working on how the problems were structured, on how to think through them. Dr. Aliaga was there every step of the way. I went into that midterm more confident about it than any midterm I’d ever taken.
I ended up being the first person in the packed lecture auditorium to finish the midterm. Twenty minutes early. And got every problem right except one. In fact I didn’t get a grade lower than A- my first three semesters at Michigan.
When I heard that Dr. Aliaga passed away I was heartbroken. I decided to major in political science instead of math, but kept in touch with her until I began grad school. Everytime I’d see her she’d try to get me to consider a PhD in math or in statistics. Though I believed she took special care on my behalf, the reality is she taught literally hundreds of students. When I found out she became the Education Director of ASA I wasn’t surprised. It was her calling. She is survived by her husband, three children (my classmate Pablo, his brother Eduardo, and his beautiful sister Viviana) and 9 grandchildren.
While there are a number of exceptions, most political scientists trained at places like Michigan care more about research than teaching. I don’t think I understood my own power as a teacher until it stared me in the face. And at that point I realized how important teaching was to my life. I also realized how much I owe my approach to teaching to Dr. Aliaga and Dr. Story. They understood that perhaps more than any other thing, students need to know someone believes in them. I needed to know I was as powerful as I imagined I was in my deepest imagination. And I needed more than one voice (my own) telling me that the various teachers that had the audacity to tell me I wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable enough, were wrong. Dr. Story, Mrs. Gilreath, and Dr. Aliaga did this.
I would’ve gone to her tribute had I had known, but perhaps appropriately, as her ceremony was going on, I was teaching a group of kids about politics.
Completing the circle.
As I think about this, I imagine there may be something to hearing from a few others in the academy. If you’re reading this and have some time, either respond on your own blog, or in the comments. Who influenced you?
Dr. Leonard Kupersmith who was my highschool English teacher and guidance counselor and contributed mightily to the scope and depth of my appreciation for the classics and the necessity of reading significant literature closely – and – Dr. Stephen Chorover who was my undergraduate advisor and has shaped the ethics of generations of MIT students while introducing us to levels of the history and philosophy of science probably taught nowhere else in the world.
I have 4 favorite teachers. This post describes two:
The first is General Brown, my father, who was a high school English teacher in Los Angeles for the first part of his career before becoming an administrator. He is now retired. He was well-liked by the majority of his students, but was a strict, old task master. Our grammar was corrected at the dinner table if you can dig that. During summers, he had my brothers and me walk to the local public library, select a book, read it and write a book report. I have keen writing skills that I use professionally, and owe it all to those exercises. My younger brother became a voracious reader, writer and speaker. In his latter years, my father would teach a study-skills class, and one day had me visit and make a presentation about my career. Talk about class control: he would speak in a low voice, and if the murmur grew, he would stop what he was saying and wait for silence, then continue.
My school education can be divided into three unique experiences and time frames, primary, secondary, and university, and I have a favorite teacher from each era. The Browns moved into the View Park section of Los Angeles in 1967, which by then was in in the final throes of the white flight phenomenon that had begun in 1963. The local school was Windsor Hills Elementary, a predominantly black school which in 1969 (my 4th grade year) was the top rated k-6 school in Los Angeles, and was perennially in the top 5 during my family’s years there. I liked all my teachers and was always among the top boys in class, so my teachers liked me. My favorite was my Sixth Grade teacher, Mrs. Thelma Pemberton. Mrs. Pemberton was as classy as her name implies, and she was a tall, brown, glamorous, elegant woman. I close my eyes and see her in a light green dress, black shiny pumps and pearls. She took it very personally that her students were going to be well-prepared for junior high school, able to compete with other students in math, english, vocabulary, science and history. In this picture, Mrs. Pemberton is standing in the third row, second from the right.
For secondary education, my brothers and I were part of the grand Los Angeles school integration plan, where inner city elementary students were given the opportunity to attend their home jr, high or obtain a permit with transportation (PWT) to attend jr high at schools in white neighborhoods. We attended Palms Jr. High in West Los Angeles and became exposed to the jewish and westside lifestyle. During that era, jr. highs were 7-9, and Palms was a perennial top 5 school. In the 7th grade, several of my Windsor Hill classmates and I were in top track, but by the 9th grade, two other black girls and I were the last of the black kids on the top track, and everyone in that track was on the fast track to UCLA or Ivy League. All of my teachers at Palms were white, and some of them didn’t like PWT students, so that was part of our reality. Actually, I had a black 8th grade science teacher who, early in the first semester was in a car accident and did not return. Everyone in my jr. high academic classes were smart, but every once in a while I was actually the top student in the class (even over Howard Weinberg), However, I never felt I was a teacher’s favorite student.
High school was another bus ride, this time to Palisades High School, another perennial top 5 school Wealthy white kids who were pretty open-minded, and a mostly white faculty that were slightly more tolerant of PWTs are what I recall as the difference between Pali Hi and Palms JH. I was on the AP track with the same two black girls from View Park (and Mrs. Pemberton’s 6th grade class of ’72), and no other black students every joined us from the other jr. highs that fed into our high school. The students in my high school classes were super smart, also on the track to the Ivy League, MIT, Cal and UCLA. Many of them today are MDs including both of my sisters from Mrs. Pemberton’s class.
As in jr. high, I did not have a special connection with any of my teachers, who were all white, nor was I ever a teacher’s favorite, although I think most of them liked me. But there is a man who nevertheless became important to me during my college decision-making process, Mr. Glenn Bell. Mr. Bell joined the staff during my 11th grade year as one of maybe three black male teachers, and became the Bee Football head coach. Students of all sorts natually gravitated to him, and I wouldn’t be shocked to learn most of the black students considered him to be their mentor. He was going through some stuff by the entrenched coaches, so he always gave an ear to students when they had complaints. Mr. Bell heard that there was a small budget of PWT funds to provided tutoring for other students, so he arranged it for me, and I turned out to be a natural. Although he did not attend a black college, I think he first saw that, given my sensibilities, my best choice would be FAMU. The rest, as they say, is history. Eaerlier this year, Mr. Bell passed, complications of diabetes. The tributes to him by my classmates were all the proof I needed to confirm that the Teacher Hall of Fame has a bust of Mr. Glenn Bell.
thanks so much for this.
Last but certainly not least is my favorite college professor, Dr. Larry Eugene Rivers, who today is the President of his alma mater, Fort Valley State University. Dr. Rivers was an Assistant Professor of History at FAMU, and I was a student in his US History in the first semester of my freshman year in the fall of 1978, his second year on the faculty. That fall, he was listed in Ebony Magazine’s list of emerging leaders, and my mother sent me the edition after I raved about him so much. He is a renowned expert on the history of slavery in Florida, and I am of the opinion that I was among his favorite students, if not his favorite. In hindsight, he probably made a lot of students feel that way.
The reason he ranks with the other teachers I mentioned had nothing to do with the 2 history classes I took from him. As sometimes happens when someone goes to college so far away from home, I was feeling kind of lost and homesick at one point, and applied to transfer to UC Santa Barbara. When I told Doc Rivers my plans, he went to work on me. He told me that while there was no doubt that I could be successful at UCSB or anywhere else, FAMU needed students like me, those willing to help other students, which I had been doing in some of my classes. It worked, I stayed, and FAMU truly was where I belonged. I graduated in the spring of ’82, took my first job in St. Loius at Anheuser-Busch, then decided to pursue at MBA, returning to FAMU in the fall of ’84. Knowing that among his many talents and abilities, he was also a real estate agent, he was the first person I called when I made the decision to return for grad school, and he help me find a nice duplex for my wife and infant daughter to live.
Before leaving FAMU for his post at FVSU, Dr. Rivers had become the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and appeared to be on track to become president of the university, but the pull of returning to lead his alma mater, which had been struggling, was just too strong, not to mention the often messy politics of FAMU, the Board of Trustees and the Governor made the position somewhat undesirable during the period he could have ascended to the presidency.
“@LesterSpence: Who were the most important teachers in YOUR life? http://t.co/AR3KcW6M” Prof. Lester K. Spence is definitely one!!
12th grade English teacher Mr. Dickey RT @LesterSpence: Who were the most important teachers in YOUR life? http://t.co/7Gm7BOFQ
Who were the most important teachers in YOUR life? http://t.co/Saok9j4S
From the Archives: Who were the most important teachers in YOUR life? http://t.co/SaofBJ3Y