Today I spent the morning in a chaotic classroom with distracted kids. This was followed by an afternoon of absentminded trainee-teachers. I was slightly disgruntled with myself as I was not feeling disappointed enough and a sense of permanent boredom was quietly settling down upon my skin. I decided to read something, anything which would shake me out of this feeling of satisfying hopelessness. Maybe this is how my students feel when they can't successfully grasp an idea after weeks of struggle in the classroom. They simply give up. I tried my best to stay engaged, to keep myself from endorsing this tempting idea of letting go. It is a famous fable that I kept remembering as I randomly flipped through the pages of illegally downloaded books on culturally sustaining pedagogy. I waded through the words carefully searching for bits and pieces of enlightening ideas I might find relatable to my experience in the classroom. I wanted to evoke a worthy and inspiring idea. I read the stories of two black students —-Christina* and Derek* struggling in a classroom full of whiteskinned peers, refusing to get co-opted. I couldn’t help but remember the fable of a desperate crow pretending to be a peacock with feathers stuck in its tail, in order to belong, a guise which would inevitably come off during a thorough scrutiny.
This moral fable offers advice - ‘don't try to be which you are not’. Or in other words ‘be yourself’. But how can one gladly do so if everything about oneself is scorned upon?
Still this old-fashioned idea of moral integrity seems to suggest that one should never seek that which one is not.
Then what must one seek? To scorn upon scorn? To redefine the idea of ‘acceptable’ or ‘worthy’? To stay true to oneself even at the cost of losing privilege? All of these things are easier said than done.
The notion that higher ambition is not rooted in gaining temporary approval based on prevalent hierarchical structures but on redefining the terms of it to suit one’s and /one's community's needs is a challenging one at the least and unachievable at the most. Then again to refuse to succumb to ‘norms of the elite’ which excludes and exploits ,(as was being done by Derek and Christina,) seems like the only reasonable and self-affirming plan of action in the face of deep rooted structural inequalities.
The participants from Sunderban who came to my classroom today carried along with themselves an air of unshakeable awkwardness and fatigue. The sheer travel-time seemed to have worn off every last bit of enthusiasm from their hearts. I have never truly realised how devilishly frightening and unwelcoming Kolkata might seem to people from rural India unaccustomed to subtle urbane disdain and oceans of traffic. It must be like facing a completely unknown and extremely powerful entity with unclear intentions. It must have some similarities to how I am feeling right now as I am trying to write this article with the weight of mentoring looming over my shoulders. The words are constantly frightening me.I feel utterly inadequate and the field of research and knowledge development seems to be a rainbow coloured land of the peacocks, and these words and jargons are merely feathers which I am randomly using without truly fathoming their real worth. Who has such an imposter syndrome other than the fabled crow?
And yet, or maybe so, I do not feel discouraged, because as I plan on going through with this project of writing the realities of my classrooms I realise, I just might be able to truly begin comprehending the student who ‘doesn't have ‘it’ in themself ’--- by being one myself.
Now that my position has been made clear, I need to move on to the big question.
You/I don't have it in myself/yourself: What is ‘it’ the student doesn’t have?
The common-sensical and most obvious answers to this question are -
The deadlock created by the absence of these two predecessors of excellence can only be resolved if we take a good hard look at how it came to be so.
