I can’t imagine my father herding a roomful of kindergartners.
To be sure, he has mellowed from the strict disciplinarian my siblings and I knew, growing up, into today’s grandpa of nine. He started substitute teaching full-time after he retired, and has mostly subbed in high school and middle school classrooms.
But kindergarten?
No way.
Except that’s exactly what’s happened. He’s been called more than a half-dozen times to fill in for a teacher with 20 squirmy kindergartners. My 75-year-old dad has stepped up, and I was delighted by his reports from the classroom.
“They are extremely energetic,” he said. They are curious about his name, so he repeats it with them a few times. Some of them ask, “Can we call you Grandpa?”
“I tell them to raise your hand. You don’t have to remember my name,” he said. A few students finish their work quickly and want to show him right away, as in immediately, right now.
“That can be really hard to cope with. They are coming at you one after another,” he said. He reminds them to raise their hands and wait their turn, and not to interrupt when he’s with another student. “I have to tell them this 10 to 15 times,” he said. Once they figure out that he means it, they wait.
The majority of his students are Hispanic, some are black and very few are white. A few will start speaking to him in Spanish right away, figuring his brown skin means he’s connected to their native language, also.
“When I tell them I don’t speak Spanish, they are surprised,” he said. He knows a little Spanish, but he doesn’t let on in order to encourage them to speak in English. A few will keep talking to him in Spanish the entire day.
His experience reminded me of a question that circulated on social media earlier this year: How many African-American male teachers did you have?
I did not have a single teacher who was black, Hispanic or Asian -- male or female -- in elementary school, middle school or high school. My massive suburban high school had nearly 3,000 students, with very few minorities among them. I had one Hispanic and one Middle Eastern professor in college, and one Hispanic professor in graduate school.
Out of the 80-plus educators who taught me throughout my life, at least 96 percent were white.
I wonder how that shaped my view of the world and of myself. I remember being pulled out of a grade school class, singled out to be tested for speech services. I had been indignant and humiliated that someone in my school had assumed my English was less than perfect even after years of perfect report cards. I didn’t miss a single question on that test, which I remember vividly more than 30 years later.
Maybe I remember how I felt so clearly because it didn’t feel like just my language skills were being tested, but something more than that.
About 2 percent of teachers in American public schools are African-American men. Research shows that nonwhite children, in particular, benefit from having teachers who look like them. Perhaps students are inspired and see them as role models. Perhaps these teachers see their nonwhite students from a different perspective.
I asked my father what he’s learned from his days teaching 5-year-olds.
“Patience,” he said, of course. But, just as importantly, he said he has learned that his youngest pupils are “very intelligent and smart.”
I thought about the disproportionate rate that black and brown elementary school children are suspended from school, how often they are assumed to be less gifted than others, and how frequently their behavior is considered problematic compared to the same behavior in their white peers.
My dad, in addition to how strictly he raised us, also instilled an unshakeable sense of self-worth in each of his children. Perhaps he will pass on that gift to one of his young charges.
It makes me glad that “Grandpa” found his way to a kindergarten class.