Having turned 65 two years ago, I’m getting an orientation to the world of healthcare via Medicare. There are a series of seemingly automatic checks that begin to unfold beginning at the time you first sign up for Medicare, mostly based on the assumption that both your body and mind are suddenly heading down a gradual decline (not a completely unfair assumption in my case). As evidence, I can’t remember any details from the long list of questions the doctor asked me a year ago! Recently, I had my second-year-on-Medicare annual check. One of the areas that was emphasized was the importance of ridding my home of “tripping hazards” – like throw rugs, misaligned furniture, uneven floorboards, stairs without rails (small grandchildren? pets?). Before that check-up, I don’t think I had ever uttered the words “tripping hazard” and now I see them everywhere!
In my life up to this point, I didn’t see tripping hazards because I didn’t need to see them. As a fairly healthy person with full use of all my limbs, tripping was minor thing that happened from time to time with no serious consequences. As a more seasoned person, a fall might turn out very badly long-term, so now I’m much more aware of the threat. Something about this new level of awareness has given me a bit of insight into all the “hazards” that many of my students and colleagues and neighbors experience every day that I just don’t see because I don’t have to see them. For people who are minoritized based on race/ethnicity, who are differently-abled, neurodiverse, LGBTQ-identified, economically insecure, who experienced childhood trauma, and others who have other challenging life circumstances, there are hazards that inhabit their lives, ones that they can’t just not see.
Being constantly aware of hazard takes up some bandwidth, even on our best days. I’m thinking now of the many classrooms where I’ve met with students over the past couple of decades. My goal was to make those places as hazard-free as possible. Before they walked through the classroom door, I wanted my students to be able to take a deep breath and let it out slowly, leaving as many of the outside hazards outside. In order for students to learn and thrive in classrooms, they need to have access to all their bandwidth and to the extent that we can create safety and belonging, they can relax and open their minds to learning.
In response to the argument that we need to remember the limitations and demands of “the real world” when we’re interacting with students and evaluating their work and class performance, Joe Feldman, in Grading for Equity, says,
“Why wouldn’t we want to create a classroom that provides our students with a refuge from the unfair world? Doesn’t equitable teaching compel us to treat students more fairly, with more respect and more caring, and love, than the real world? If so, our grading system has to push against the aspects of the real world that are unjust and unfair, that judge people without opportunities for redemption, and that evaluate with harsh consequences rather than offering feedback, dialogue, and support.“ (p. 213)
bell hooks referred to the classroom as “…the most radical space of possibility…,” (1994, p. 12) the space in which we can “…open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions…,” That kind of mental activity is only possible when both the teacher and the students have access to most of their bandwidth. And this only happens when we create classroom learning environments within which the hazards of everyday life are temporarily set aside because everyone belongs in all their identities, everyone’s unique ways of seeing the world are valued, and everyone is invited and expected to contribute.
In my life, teaching has been such a privilege. As I age – and learn about things like tripping hazards – I have a deeper appreciation of the opportunities we have as teachers to transform the world for students, if only for those precious few hours they are with us in our classrooms.
Feldman, J. (2019). Grading for equity: What it is, why it matters, and how it can transform
schools and classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY:
Routledge