A Teacher's Journey
Through peculiar public education in mississippi
In December of 2014 I began wondering what the next step in my life would be. I had been working extensively with youth in the City of Jackson for a while, so I began to explore the world of education. I had worked with educational policy in the past, and so I knew that in this world there were victims that often went unseen, unheard, and unmotivated to seek justice for themselves in this world of educational discrimination and poverty. My professors at Tougaloo College knew how much I loved making a difference, so one by one they began the process of leading me to becoming an educator. My last semester at Tougaloo College, I took the essential education classes to prepare myself. I didn't know how I would become an educator, but I knew I needed the training to really make a difference. While doing this, I applied for the Mississippi Teacher Corps, knowing that I would be stepping into a terrain that seemed like World War III. After being accepted, and graduating, I had no idea what I was going to get myself into, but I knew that there was an entire population of young people who had been unjustly served by the education system. Much like the Sneetches, in Mississippi some students have stars and some do not. School districts, parents, teachers, and students do whatever they possibly can to attain stars on our less fortunate children's bellies so that they can succeed, but are met with indifference by the people who create the game. They are often not invited to play, or to the weenie roast, because they don't match the societal norms that have been designated for them to follow. They shuffle into a machine called a school system to seemingly attain stars, yet the people who make the rules do not change them, and the facade of a fake star doesn't make the cut. My journey through education has been much like Mr. Sylvester McMonkey McBean, stepping in to save the day. Not in the sense of changing the children of Mississippi, but showing the world that with or without stars, with or without resources, and with or without birth given status, they can succeed.
" The Sneetches got really quite smart on that day.
The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches. And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches. That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars and whether They had one, or not, upon thars." |