A Town Called Ruleville

Hi all,

I feels so strange that I’ve been gone for less than two weeks when it feels like months. The days have been long and challenging, both for the volume of information we are trying to absorb and the emotional challenges of witnessing the structural racism and classism that plagues education.

After five days of regional induction in Baton Rouge (more on that later), we drove to Mississippi for the official five-week training program, where we will earn a teaching certificate that qualifies us to teach for one year. We will have online classes throughout our first full year of teaching to reach a higher level of certification by next summer.

We are staying in the dorms at Delta State University (home of the Fighting Okra) in Cleveland, Mississippi, which is a big deal because it has a Walmart. The nearest movie theater is 45 minutes away, and the nearest Starbucks is an hour and 45 minutes away, but with 12,000 people it’s the largest town for 60 miles in any direction.  The locals are very familiar with Teach for America, and it seems the presence of the corps provides an economic boom every summer when the college students depart. The coffee shop I’m sitting in right now has a “Peach for America” drink, and another local bar sells “Drink for America” T-shirts…

The first week of training was an intensive crash course in lesson planning, classroom and behavior management, and social justice issues as they pertain to educational inequities. We learned that it took a long time after the passage of Brown v. Board of Education for Mississippi to actually take the integration of schools seriously. The backlash to this was the creation of all-white private schools that denied acceptance to black students on the basis that they were “unqualified”. The principle of school choice was used to defend these schools, even though many of them were unaccredited and even failing. I felt sick to my stomach when I realized that meant that parents would send their students to failing schools where they would graduate with a GED instead of a high school diploma rather than send them to school with black kids. The most infuriating part was that many of these schools still exists in the south.

On Thursday and Friday we visited the schools that we will be teaching at starting on Monday. Teach for America has partnered with local schools to provide summer programming that would otherwise be non-existent, though it is simultaneously a four-week training program for the teachers. (It’s kind of like how beauty schools do free haircuts and massages so that their students can get practical experience—the quality isn’t guaranteed, but it’s free.) Each classroom has three or four TFA teachers who trade off teaching different subjects. I’ll be teaching math as my primary subject, and literacy in small group rotations in a 2^nd grade classroom.

The school I will be teaching at is in Ruleville, Sunflower Country (population 2,800). In the hallways hang progress reports from prior years, which are mostly red, indicating “F” status on the national exam that measures Common Core standards (PARCC). The proficiency levels range from 15-40% across every subject and grade. My stomach dropped when I flipped the numbers in my head. 80% of third graders were failing in reading. 85% of sixth graders were failing science. One rare chunk of orange showed that 45% of fourth graders were proficient or above in math. I questioned the rational of displaying such depressing news so prominently. Just a reminder, you’re failing.

But compared to the rest of the town, the school seems the most joyful. The classrooms are colorful, with alphabet rugs and encouragements voiced by animated paper stars. You can do it! Keep up the great work! There is a sense of resilience in the administrators we have talked to throughout training. They know what their kids are up against, but they haven’t lost hope.

The surrounding streets are a different story. Everything feels slow and sprawling, with wide spreads of unkempt crab grass separating single story houses from trailer homes from lots with rusted tin sheds and farming equipment. The houses here are tired. They seem to sag into their frames, surrendering to the tendrils that creep and wind up the cracked and peeling paint.  The mosquitoes and the weeds seem to be the authority around these parts.

The one clear point of pride in the town is that it is the birth place of Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black sharecropper and civil rights activist who fought alongside Martin Luther King for voting rights for Black folks in the South.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Lou_Hamer) You may have heard her famous quote “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

There is a monument garden around her burial site that is well-tended. When we passed by in the school bus that takes us to the site every morning there were several locals gathered with flowers at her headstone, paying their respects. One of our coaches said it best: “before you feel sorry for these kids, remember that they have the blood of Fannie Lou Hamer in their veins. Fear them. Respect them. Their ancestors led the civil rights movement.”

I am excited to start teaching, but also overwhelmed with the amount of information We've been given in the last 10 days about how to teach. I never fully realized how much goes into the process of running a classroom until we did our lesson plans for teaching single digit addition, which were around four pages long. Everything you say and do as a teacher should be intentional and rehearsed—the way you give directions, your body language, the way you give praise and consequences. To be honest, I’ve never been more anxious about standing in front of a room full of 7-year-olds. I worry that I will get so caught up in getting the processes and procedures right that I forget why I’m really there—to love them.

To end with a fun fact, I learned recently that teachers drink more than any other profession, and kindergarten teachers drink more than any other grade. After the past ten days, I’m not surprised.

Wish me luck.