I’ve been an adjunct professor of sociology for the past three years. I’ve been what they call a “freeway flyer.” As an adjunct, I would sometimes work at 4 different college campuses just to make enough money to pay for my rent and take care of my kids’ various expenses. It would be in these classes that I would criticize the very institutions that I was situated in, telling my students to never allow these institutions to convince them to dehumanize themselves, as the institutions would do that enough. I recently transitioned from a career of exploited adjunct professor to high school teacher. I cannot say enough how fortunate and grateful I feel to have made this transition, but it also has highlighted the necessity of theory within the classroom, and more specifically, the role of praxis. 

One thing we must remember, before I get into anything else, is that our positionality sets the tone for any of our classrooms or educational settings. Or really, in fact, any setting in which we are engaging with people. Perhaps we are teachers or parents, maybe we are counselors or administrative staff, maybe we are working within the criminal “justice” field – but we are constantly engaging with people, which means before we can even truly believe we are participating in humanizing engagements and practices, we must recognize our positions in society. For me, I identify racially as white, while ethnically and culturally Korean. I have constantly battled this – in fact, in elementary school I had your typical “well-meaning” white teacher give the other two Asian students more difficult math. When I requested it, she told me, “Oh sweetie, that’s because they’re Asian and they’re smarter at math.” She perpetuated that model minority myth, no matter how well-meaning she was – like many of us do with our students – she completely shattered my perspective. Until that moment, I was Korean. I knew nothing more, nothing less. No different. My Asian mother, who had experienced a variety of issues due to her race when she was experiencing police issues, made kimchi and beef bulgogi, had a hanbok in the closet, and I was Korean. It really was not until I was older that I was able to finally a) admit I was Korean and make sense of my own social identities. Because I appear white, I have very mainly privileges that come with it. I am not stopped in the store, I am not stopped by police – in fact, I was pulled over once, did not have my license on me, and instead, the police asked my Latina friend in the seat next to me to step out and show hers – and education was, in general, fairly positive in K-12. Therefore, racially, I identify as white as race is connected to power, but ethnically and culturally, I still identity as Korean, and being able to deconstruct the dynamics of power in society has allowed me to understand this position. It was finally, though, in sociology personally that I was able to make sense of this world, with real history for the first time.

My focus has always been sociology of education, where I read the amazing works of Paulo Freire and Antonia Darder, Gloria Ladson-Billings and Ira Shor, bell hooks and Henry Giroux, and so, so many others, who really tore into the institution of education. Whether I read something about the astronomical differences between the suspension and expulsion of Black boys compared to white boys for the same actions, to the ways that Spanish has been outlawed in many classrooms on a state level, or that bilingual education was only appreciated when white middle-class women finally saw an economic value for their white children, these realities resonated so much more the first day that I set foot in a K-12 classroom. 

Don’t get me wrong – my college teaching prepared me in many ways. I was fortunate to teach in many diverse classrooms prior to the K-12 setting and it was draining – so many students were experiencing trauma that I felt regularly devastated for them. Whether it was the late night emails from students begging me for extension because they had found themselves having to run from a partner abusing them to the ones whose kids were sick, or perhaps students who were just now experiencing opportunity to express their true gender identities, I regularly found myself the shoulder for many students. While I would hear from many professors on threads how exhausting it was, they would follow it with complaints – “Don’t these students know we have lives?” “I don’t know how much more I can take,” or perhaps the ever so frequent complaint of how “horrible” their students’ writings were – but rarely would I see professors advocate for these students or challenge their fellow instructors on their problematic, often racist, homophobic, and just dehumanizing practices and philosophies.

But with these high school kiddos, there is something specifically different from my college students – these students have goals and dreams and may not believe they can achieve them, or it might be the ones who have never felt like they quite belonged because their teachers in the past never gave them rigorous enough expectations due to their own bias – they cannot express it quite the same way. Getting through to the high school students has been harder as many of them do not trust adults, for whatever reason. And of course, I recognize that interacting with so many students who come from marginalized backgrounds, I, as a white-presenting straight woman, probably do not seem the most trustworthy. 

I think as instructors we fail to see how our positions of power tied in with our social identifies impact our students. Students are constantly challenging us for our power, because they know. They know that we control their grades and in many ways, their futures. They know that life can be hard, and that they have gone through trauma and that maybe these adults cannot be trusted. They know that whatever they do, whatever their feelings, we have power,and in many ways, control of their future. That is terrifying. That is daunting. That is devastating. And for students who know the history of white people oppressing them, it’s no wonder we need genuine educational transformation. 

White people don’t want to admit this and especially not teachers. If we admit we have students who are fighting us for power, it means that we have to admit we have power to begin with. It means that we can break their futures. These students test boundaries constantly. They need stability. But they also need an adult who believes in them. I remember standing in front of my 9^th graders and apologizing to them. I said, “I am so sorry that the system screwed you. I am so sorry that the system hurt you. I am so sorry that the people in those systems hurt you. I am so, so sorry that the system may try to continue doing so. But the only way that you can break that is if you have the knowledge to challenge these systems. And one of the biggest ways of doing that is knowing the true history of things. I am so sorry that the systems did not believe in you enough to hold you to good standards, believing you can do it, but I do, I know you are capable. This is how we will continue after today.” We had just started reading The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and I had a lecture on redlining and how it socio-historically was connected to the fictional world of Starr’s, and many of ours in San Diego. I also feel very fortunate to have read theory as heavily as I had as I do not find myself struggling with the students quite the same way for power – in fact, I talked about power with 9^thgraders, who, as much as it may be believed they are too young to “get it,” really, truly did. 

Realistically when I started writing this, my hope was to write an elaborate piece on the overall institutions. This sociologist is pretty fond of that here. My twitter can be found ranting about the dehumanizing practices of professors during midterms and finals, or the way that we contribute to the oppressive practices we pretend to breakdown in the classrooms by perpetuating them in our grading schemes, and my research is on how dialogue is necessary to dismantling oppressive systems and reconstructing a more harmonious environment, but that we are nearly incapable of doing it as we are socialized in an inherently racist, ableist, classist, homophobic society and I often use sociological terms – like structural functionalism – which is the belief that we have roles and if something exists (like poverty) it has a purpose (and in the case of poverty, a functionalist believes that it is motivating as if poverty is the worst thing in the world and not the result of an economic structure that values capitalists over everybody else.) But I am finding myself revisiting my language, my interactions, and having to deconstruct my knowledge and experiences to see how the theories I have read thoroughly are so applicable and play out right in front of me. 

Switching to K-12 teaching was the right choice for me, however. When I was teaching college, I often felt dehumanized myself and when students would ask me how I keep teaching, I would tell them that I have hope – hope for change – and while it may not occur in my life time, we must be critical and discuss this frequently or else, what is the point? In the high school setting, however, it is so much more than that. The college students at that point had made it, and many were being exposed for the first time to ideas of power and oppression. I truly believe students need to hear this sooner. While I am now an English teacher, I am ensuring that sociology and history is incorporated regularly in our lessons. The students today, for instance, played stratified monopoly (where everybody is assigned a different social class and starting money as well as how much they receive around Go) so we could discuss social mobility and the idea of empathy for each other, the importance of community beyond a zip code and what we are told is community, and how to fight the notion that individualism is the only way to live.  I was prepared to start questioning everything, but switching grade levels has me reflecting in ways that I really never thought I would. 

I will say that the biggest observation I have made is the lack of awareness of power. My goal should only be to have authority over their safety, but teaching should not be about power and taking power back. For many institutions, teachers have always had power, especially as we know the majority of teachers are white women. It’s easy to sit in a staff meeting and theorize, talk about how much you know, and start talking about caring for students, but it’s another to reflect on the ways that we as teachers are perpetuating the same practices we pretend to detest. It’s like the folks who criticize Colin Kaepernick but have the audacity to spout Martin Luther King Jr. quotes every celebratory day – they were never really for liberation, but instead for appearances. Truly challenging these systems means not just recognizing that we have power, but being truly wiling to relinquish power, the very power we’ve held onto for so long. It’s uncomfortable, but necessary, and that means allowing students to have some power and autonomy as well. This means being honest with them. This means trusting students to be able to handle real history.It means questioning what you know. It also means recognizing that we are upholders of oppression within institutions that we are teaching in. And if we aren’t ready to challenge these systems of oppression that we represent, if we aren’t willing to give up some of this power, we really need to question what our purpose is in education.   

-Charlene Holkenbrink-Monk