Serving Those Who Wish to Serve

For the amount of writing that my students do, it is probably not too much to ask from me to write more than once every four months. However, this makes me think a lot of choice. I can choose when and what I want to write about. However my students do not necessarily have that choice to and there is a chance that they may never get that ability to choose.

For most of them, the choices that they make everyday in school will greatly impact their future. While most people that have lived a middle-class childhood could get away with not doing well in school by shirking a few papers here and there, each paper that my students write are a big deal to them. They know that their futures are heavily dependent on how good their writing is. Unlike students who can get into college because they have money or the middle-class upbringing that has intrinsically blessed them with the type of writing needed to get into college, most of our students have not had experience yet. Instead, they have to work hard to write in a way that is different than what they are used to. So in a sense, they have limited choice into how they can write. I learned to write like how I was taught to speak. Unlike most of us who went to college and had parents who spoke and wrote in a way that colleges prefer, most of my students would be the first in their family to go to college and the way that they speak and write with their parents greatly differs from what colleges prefer.

But writing is just one of many choices that are heavily influenced by their socio-economic situation. As a person who has lived a middle-class life, I have many more choices - choices that my students do not have. When it comes to service, I also have many more choices that my students do not have either.

When I was in college trying to plan my alternative spring break trip or even trying to raise $3,000 to go to Uganda, things were much easier for me than for each of my students trying to scramble to find $500 to do service this spring in New Orleans. It took me a few minutes to create a facebook group where two of my friends (Thanks Josh & Annemieke) quickly donated $100, whereas my sixteen students have written dozens of letters only to get $50 between all of them.

There is a bitter coincidence in thinking that those who need service are also the ones most willing to do so. It makes sense because if you are experiencing poverty firsthand, you would also be the ones most motivated to work for those in poverty. However their connections are limited to those who live within their own community.

Having access to my college network and the middle class peers that I have worked and went to school with makes fundraising for service much easier for me. $50 for a friend with a $30,000 a year job is much more manageable than $50 for a student's parents who both work two jobs to make less money than their family needs to survive.

This begs the question that if we have less, does this mean we have to give less?

In Africa, top developmental experts like Jeffery Sachs and William Easterly, who disagree with each other on many things, at least agree that you cannot only give people who need to eat, fish. As the adage goes, they need the tools to learn how to fish. To do so, it takes the start-up money and resources to learn how to fish.

My students need to learn the tools to improve their community and how to fight for social justice. New Orleans, while half the continent away, offers a glimpse into this. While my students could be doing service in the local community, I know that I would not have the breadth of knowledge that I now have about service and social justice without the amount of travel that I have done to be able to learn from people in situations worse than me.

The choice to serve should not be denied to those who are economically disadvantaged. While students in middle class colleges can easily choose what they want to do for spring break (i.e. anything from service in New Orleans to partying in Cancun), my students are doing everything in their power to try to help the people of New Orleans with what limited resources that they have.

The choice to serve should be universal. Moreover, those who already have the choice should choose to help to give others the chance serve. It is almost selfish for those in the middle class to serve and feel a sense of catharsis when the opportunity to serve should be offered to others as well. When a student needs to worry about where their next meal will come from, it is hard for them to be able to serve others unless someone is willing to give them the choice to do so. If given the chance once again in college, rather than going on an alternative spring break trip myself, I would easily have spent that money to give student here the chance to do so.

If you agree with me, I encourage you to help an economically disadvantaged student in your community to serve. It is not that they do not want to serve – we had over 60 applicants for 16 spots. Rather, it is hard to serve when you have not been given the tools and resources to do so.

Donations to help a student from KIPP: Gaston College Preparatory or KIPP: Pride High (www.kippnc.org) do service this spring in the New Orleans Recovery Schools District may be made out to “Gaston College Preparatory” and sent to:

Patrick Wu
320 Pleasant Hill Rd.
Gaston. NC 27832

Sex May Sell Social Causes, but Abstinence Makes them Work

This week, a group of high school students from my campus are going into Washington DC for a youth Conference about the conflict in Darfur. I will be speaking with them before they go and knowing how delicate people's perceptions are of the region and how the media tends to slant the conflict, I know I need to be smart and savy with what I have to tell them.

However, the one message I feel like I can tell them without reservation is that Darfur is not cool and it is not something to get involved in if you need Leonardo DiCaprio to tell you to do so. In fact, the Save Darfur campaign has led way to many students and young leaders to get the wrong impression about how they can help.

Last week, the LA Times wrote a piece about people trying to raise money and awareness about certain causes by performing tasks like climbing mountains or running really long distances to try and media attention. The problem is that while these people are doing this for their causes, barely anyone is noticing. Click here to read the story. It got me thinking of all the ridiculous things that youth are convinced to do in order to raise money & awareness for Darfur and other SSA causes.

Much alike the people in the Times article, these students end up working very hard, but not so smart. Oftentimes, they spend more money than they will even make back in their efforts. By putting together sleep-outs, protests and ad campaigns they are trying to create awareness, but not necessarily beneficial education and advocacy around these issues. While I realize that awareness is the first step, in talking to many of these students that they have a very surface level understanding of both what is actually going on in Darfur, but even more damaging a very artifical grasp of what social change looks like.

Students are taken in by the sex appeal of a romanticized protest or novel idea that while creative, oftentimes proves to be ineffective. Rather, their focus should be on proven methods of affect. Raising money to pay powerful lobbiests to lobby on behalf of Darfur and not the tobacco industry, working on political campaigns to get Darfur on the radar of politicians seeking office and most importantly in the classroom. More of their peers will listen if they are listening to things in the classroom beacuse that is where youth will associate their learning. People are less likely to listen to a bunch of rowdy students just trying to get on the news and more to interpersonal interaction that takes place in a simple classroom discussion.

No, it's not sexy; no, it's not going to get you on the news; and no, it's going to be as personally rewarding as you want it to be. But if you're in it for those reasons, you're probably going to hurt the causes you are fighting for more than you are helping them.

People who run marathons and climb mountains to raise awareness for their causes are missing the point. You need people to care because they care about the issue and not because they need something shiny to look at. These causes should not be sexy nor should they require anything other than the truth to get people to care about them. In the end, sex may sell, but abstinence may be the best way to help the causes we truly care about.

How to Overcome a Fear of Commitment

Teaching is hard work...even if you’re bad at it. Actually, especially if you're bad at it.

Don’t worry if you’re one of my students or a parent. I’m doing my best to get better at it and I doubt you’ll find few teachers as dedicated, passionate and hard-working as I’ve been in my first month.

I’d like to use teaching as an excuse to ignore my blog, but as Batman once argued, “it’s not what you say, but what you do that defines you.” And if I am really going to encourage my students to become stronger writers by making writing a priority, I know I need to do the same.

I say this, of course, as I am awake at 2am, watching SportsCenter and trying to procrastinate my lesson planning by surfing the web and remembering the multiple blog postings that I had meant to write, but never did.

Perhaps the most appropriate posting I should write about has to do with last week’s Time Magazine’s Special Issue dedicated to Service in America. In the issue, there is even an article about KIPP schools and Teach for America (TFA), the program of which KIPP schools were born.

Now I’ve always had my issues with TFA. TFA’s website states: “Teach For America is the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become leaders in the effort to expand educational opportunity.” It is clear that the website it geared more towards recruiting applicants rather than serving as a resource to the community. While there are several outstanding TFA teachers who I work with and it is undeniable that KIPP would not exist without TFA, a two year commitment to education is hardly a commitment to a community.

It reminds me of the reoccurring problem of service with college students. College students and so many recent college grads always look at community service as service and not as commitment. College students rarely register to vote in the same district that they go to college in, even though they live in that district for three-quarters of the year and are most affected by the politics of that district. Moreover, when you ask them where “home” is, they will rarely tell you the city their college is located in – it is always the town where they grew up. What is a better litmus test to how seriously you take community service than how you define your community or where you live?

In Time, the lead story speaks of how Harvard professor Robert Putnam has been in the news about his new research that argues that communities are more civically engaged if its racial make-up is mostly homogenous. The typical TFA teacher seems to be young and white, a dangerous combination in most of the minority majority populations that they serve. Those two things alone create justifiable assumptions in the students and parents that they serve. Add the fact that most students and parents see that many TFA teachers are only around for two years and then comes the snowball effect that young, white teachers are given little respect within the community.

While community members may show respect and appreciation to these teachers for taking two years out of their life to serve, it is clear that in the back of their minds they wonder, “why bother if you’re only here for two years? Are you ever going to truly understand our community?”

Moreover, as last week’s Time and many other resources have clearly documented, volunteerism in America is at its highest, especially with America’s youth. However social problems only seem to be increasing. This is because we are all willing to volunteer or serve, but unwilling to commit. Rather than calling it community service, we need to start calling and thinking about it as community commitment.

To me two years is hardly a commitment other than in the factor of time. Outside of time, most people are not committed to communities as much as they could be. While I have no empirical research to back this up, my informal conversations with most TFA teachers has affirmed to me that TFA teachers rarely go into their placements with any sense of the communities they are going to work in. Moreover, upon arrival, there is little immersion into the communities to create “the change they wish to see.” Outside of their usually plush homes (which I am guilty of living in one of these) and safe school walls, it will be rare to see a TFA teacher knocking on the doors of the local mayoral or superintendent’s office asking for better resources or a stronger commitment on their end to education. Or even better, TFA teachers could be looking for ways to find a successor within the community in case they decide to leave their school and community after their two-year commitment.

TFA is trying to create social change through service and not commitment. By change, they have recruited several strong teachers who are committed to social change and have revolutionized not only the schools that they work at, but entire communities. It is important for TFA teachers to overlook that they are not just teachers, but social change agents. The end goal of TFA is not to just close the achievement gap, but to revolutionize communities. If the schools that TFA teachers work at only leave their good works within the walls of the schools, the communities that they are in will continue to struggle.

Rather, TFA teachers, as do all teachers have the responsibility inspire their students not only to do great things, but to do so in their communities. It does not help out a community in the long run if their best and brightest students leave to go to college, only never to come back. Why aren’t more TFA teachers from the communities in which they serve? Besides the fact that few of these students are going to college, those that do are unlikely to apply. It would make more sense to hire teachers within the community, but this does not happen. Why?

I am not trying to pick on TFA, but use it as an example of the larger problem of service in America. Service is becoming more and more of a young, white, middle-class pastime where youth are convinced that they are doing great things by helping out poor, black kids. I am not saying TFA is doing this. I am saying that as a result of America’s youth having an incorrect notion of what service and commitment truly are, that many times we may be doing more disservice than service in the communities that we are trying to serve. Too often, there is an “us” and “them” issue. If people are going into a community thinking “what can I do for them?” then true social change will never happen. Rather, people should be committed to saying, “what can we do together to strengthen our community?”

This seems to be a problem Putnam is most famous for his book Bowling Alone, which used research and the stories of failing bowling leagues to argue that American communities are falling apart. In the critically acclaimed book, Putnam argued that in small American communities, the youth are trying to get out, while the elderly stay there and become more disengaged. No longer are people taking ownership of their communities. Instead, people are looking for ways to escape the responsibilities that take building a strong community that benefits everyone. People forget that by strengthening their community, they are creating better conditions for themselves. Selfishness is actually hurting people from being selfish. Who would have thought selflessness would actually be the best thing a selfish person could do?

This becomes a larger problem when combined with Putnam’s new research about the low civic participation rate of heterogeneous populations. In the community that I work in, the majority of the population is very young or quite old – I am actually convinced that teachers make up the majority of the twenty-something population in the area.

With a lack of educated, dynamic youth with a true commitment and vested interest in struggling communities, these communities are only doomed to fail without a paradigm shift in the near future. Teachers need to be encouraging students not only to create opportunities for themselves to go to college, but opportunities now to create positive social change in their communities. Rather than saving their passion and energy for college, we should be using it to inspire and change their communities. America’s young teachers have this to offer if nothing else. While we may not all be from the communities that we are teaching in, we can easily start becoming part of it by committing ourselves to changing more than what happens in our school, but what happens in our community. No longer should we refer to the community that our students live in as their community, but our community. It is only then when the real change will take place.

Let’s be clear here. I am not recusing myself from being a bad teacher. I am only stating something that I and every other teacher should be aware of. But I’m starting to make the commitment. While at first, I saw this as another chapter in my life, I am starting to see this as the book. Rather than leaving my community when this chapter is finished, I need to wait for the book to be done. Rather than simply serving the community, I am here to commit to it. In the meantime, I’ve even joined the local bowling league.