This chapter explores one high school teacher's journey of becoming a university professor and the identity shifts that occurred along the way. From realizing his own identity of unquestioned privilege to recognizing the often xenophobic forces at play in public schools that serve to demoralize immigrant students, the author describes the events that influenced his decision to leave his high school job and seek a position in higher education. In doing so, the author documents the transformative experience of doctoral studies, the unspoken, hectic process of getting a university teaching position, and the potential that adolescent literature holds for encouraging future teachers to question identities of privilege, teach empathy, and understand the innate humanity of their future students.
TopThe High School Teaching Years
Not only is teaching often passed down in families, but the actual subject matter tied to teaching is handed down from one generation to the next. My mom taught ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) as a second career (her first was eighth grade English teacher in the 1960s). As a teenager, I would observe her on the weekends, with her stacks of papers, not just inking a score on a wrinkled piece of paper and penciling it in her gradebook, but truly taking the time to provide meaningful feedback to her students. It was also in the validating way that she spoke of student success stories that inspired me to investigate the field of TESOL. As was common in many undergraduate education curricula when I attended college in the 1990s, my training in diversity and with diverse learners was limited. In looking to my teaching life ahead, I decided that I could either become an English teacher with tangential knowledge of how English is learned as another language, or I could take courses, have some field experience, and tutor ESOL students at local high schools to enhance my understanding of what it meant to be a teacher of English, regardless of where students are in the language learning process. Hence, although my primary teaching license was in secondary English language arts, I taught ESOL at the high school level for six years. It was also another connection to my mom, and I looked forward to the conversations we would one day have about teaching. In fact, I began my high school teaching career the same year my mom retired, and I attended the retirement party that the high school hosted for her, which had several of my former teachers in attendance, many of whom were beloved and revered. As I looked from cafeteria table to cafeteria table, where everyone was seated during that retirement event, I could see that metaphorical torch being passed from mother to son. As enchanting as that sounds, a Hallmark greeting card come to life, the naivete stops there. Little did I know the political hotbed of the subject matter that lay before me, the xenophobia my future colleagues would casually share with me, and the seemingly insurmountable hurdles I would observe immigrant adolescents endure as they worked against strong odds to earn a high school diploma from an American high school (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001).