The Souls Of Black Teachers: Reading José Luis Vilson With W.E.B. Du Bois
This article was originally published in Dissent
The heart of education lies in the relationship between teacher and student. The quality of that relationship—its capacity to nurture, to inspire, to awaken the imagination and to cultivate the intellect—is crucial to student learning. This is an ancient truth, equally central to the pedagogy of Socrates in the West, Confucius in the East, and many others in between. But it bears repeating in an age when many self-styled “education reformers” seek to reduce the value of teaching to standardized test scores and statistical algorithms.
José Luis Vilson’s This Is Not A Test (Haymarket Books, 2014) bears witness to the enduring vitality of that relationship. Vilson teaches math to poor black and brown students in New York City middle schools, and his writing is rooted in his classroom experiences. His voice is an authentic teacher’s voice, with the resonance of a teacher’s calling and the timbre of a teacher’s passion for the welfare of his students. Teachers will recognize themselves in Vilson, from his fatherly affection for his students and disarmingly open accounts of classroom triumphs and defeats to his sorrow at a former student’s senseless death and anger over the poverty that throws up so many obstacles to student learning.
Teachers will also experience painful recognition upon reading Vilson’s tale of the arrogant, shallow supervisor who threatened him with an unsatisfactory evaluation not because of his teaching, but because she disliked the aesthetics of his classroom bulletin board. Such was the lived reality of “education reform” as practiced under former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who formed a regime so contemptuous of teachers that it appointed supervisors bereft of teaching expertise. Unable to carry on any meaningful discussion of teaching and learning with those they supervised, these administrators would focus on ephemera such as bulletin boards.
The teacher-student relationship is central to Vilson’s understanding of his vocation. He offers evocative descriptions of his students’ personalities and captivating accounts of their behavior—from Vilson’s clever retort to a smart-ass boy to the empathy that he shows to a rebellious girl. “I had put so much effort into maintaining my professional Shanker Blog » The Souls Of Black Teachers: Reading José Luis Vilson With W.E.B. Du Bois:
