[...]
He appeared at my classroom door in the middle of a busy morning gripping the hand of a harried school secretary... The secretary handed this child to me and rattled off the institutional essentials: "His name is Michael. He is a bus rider. He doesn't speak English."
... Michael existed marginally on the outside of the group. Sometimes he was on the outside looking in; sometimes he was on the outside looking out... I met with the bilingual resource teacher to chat about concerns and possibilities... She came. She watched. She listened. On the way out she said, "You might have better results, dear, if you call him Miguel."
... Miguel didn't stay with us for long. His family moved on to follow their own calendar of opportunities... Miguel's paperwork arrived about three weeks after he had moved away. I was going through the folder, updating it for his next teacher, when I noticed something that made me catch my breath. His name wasn't Michael. It wasn't Miguel. His name was David.
... I wonder how it was that this child could have been part of my classroom for more than a month, and in that entire time he never had enough personal power to tell me that his name was David... I have to do a bit of guessing about what was going on in David's head. I am guessing that he was told to respect la maestra - to "be good" in school.
... I don't have to do much guessing at my own complicity... In the entire breath of my experience, people had called me by my given name. In those few instances when someone mispronounced my name, I would offere a oplite but prompt correction. I was taught to speak up for myself. I was given the power to be me... I never considered checkin in with David about his name. It was beyond the scope of my experience. It was beyond the lens of my culture.
... Our power distance was huge. I had all the power. I was white; I was the teacher; I spoke English. David had no power. He was brown; he was a child; he spoke Spanish. Our sense of individualism clashed.
... I have learned many difficult lessons in the years since David sat submissively on the edge of my classroom. I have learned lessons about passive racism - the kind that we cannot see in ourselves, don't want to see in ourselves, and vehemently deny. I have learned lessons about implicit power and explicit powerlessness - about those voices we choose to hear and those voices we unknowingly silence. I have learned that being a good teacher is as much about rapport and relationships as it is about progressive curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment.
... If I could go back to that day when the secretary brought in a little boy with carefully combed hair wearing a crisply pressed shirt, I would shake his hand and say, "Hello. My name is Mrs. Marriott. What's your name?" I believe that if I had simply asked him, he would have told me.
Donna M. Marriott
Source: Academic Reading - College Major and Career Application, Kathleen T. McWhorter
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