Mentor Blog #2

In a recent meeting I had with Ozias, my mentor and supervisor at the Center for Vocation and Career, we talked about the workplace, and what the effect of your coworkers is on the work that you do. This discussion was in the context of the fact that I have taken my first post-grad position, with Teach for America, through which I will be teaching at H.L. Harshman Magnet Middle School, on the east side of Indianapolis, or Indy. It was also involving work I've done, partly to prepare for teaching, in joining the leadership of a debate team made up of current juvenile inmates at Illinois Youth Center - Warrenville, IYC Warrenville. These children are wonderful and entertaining, but they do also have poor study habits and what appears to be a learned inattention to academic norms. They are sometimes willfully difficult, but bearing with them and enjoying the fun they have alongside them, validating their experiences, has been a learning process.

I’ve certainly re-learned in my time at the CVC that I value my relationships with my coworkers, and that the social element, and preferably the developmental one, of any position, is highly valuable to me. I’ve found being developed and sharing what I know about resume review have been the crucial parts of the job that are socially fulfilling. Especially when I hear back from or see development in a resume I’ve already once reviewed, I get a lot of happiness in seeing change for the better. I think I will be very well positioned to fulfill these personal needs and goals for my work in my career as a teacher, and I’m really looking forward to starting up in a middle school.

While children in middle school don't exactly qualify as co-workers, Ozias' thoughts on what its like to work with his co-workers were enlightening. He said that he often feels out of the Wheaton loop, not having experienced a good deal of Wheaton's campus or life, given that he is not an alum. I will most certainly feel somewhat outside of the experiences of many of the people I work alongside, and even further outside the experiences of my students, whose perspectives will have a variety of sociocultural differences from my perspective, alongside their age gap. Harshman middle has a student body which fits the greater racial profile of the city of Indianapolis better than any other middle school in the city. Though you would imagine the profile might be somewhat more balanced, the student body is composed of about half Latin and South American cultures, thirty to forty percent black and African cultures, and a sparing ten to twenty percent of all else besides. For as many white people as there are living in the midwest generally, and Indiana specifically, it isn't hard to say from this statistic that Indy's middle schools are unfairly segregated. I am not black, nor African, nor Spanish-speaking, nor Latin or South American culturally, and so I have automatically vast differences with the experiences of almost the entirety of my students. This is a primary concern of mine as I head into the classroom, and I pray that I will have the insight to relate and empathize in healthy ways with my students. My conversation with Ozias has helped me see that having that insight will be critical to doing my job well.