Author: Mike Copperman
For years and years, I struggled with both my attendance and late work policies. The attendance policies and late work policies I was trained to use in the first-year writing program I apprenticed in included mandatory attendance, with loss of ½ a grade for every absence past three, and a policy of no late work accepted except under extraordinary circumstances. If you weren’t rigorous and firm, if your policies didn’t clearly lay out punishments and structure, students would walk all over you, the thinking went. They’d take advantage of you, skip class, and fail to learn the real-world consequences of failing to meet deadlines. Being firm and putting the fear of the stick in them was the only proper way to go.
I already knew, as a former public school teacher, that this thinking was wrong—teaching the rural Black public schools of the Mississippi Delta hadn’t made me a good teacher or a good person, as I failed and failed and failed catastrophically. But I had learned one lesson there that stuck: there are almost always good reasons for the choices students make, and assuming the best of them is the least an educator can do. The PWI I was teaching at, a large state school in the Pacific Northwest, struggled to retain first-generation students of color, who dropped out at three times the rate of majority students. The culture of the school and the culture of teaching doubtless impacted those statistics. So when I was hired to teach writing classes geared for the retention of students of color, based on my background with Teach For America and the fact that I wasn’t white (their previous diversity-retention writing instructor had been, and it had not gone well), I knew I didn’t want to depend on the department’s policies. I just wasn’t sure what I SHOULD be doing, especially because the policies were set department-wide and our syllabi were checked each class.
The truth was, I possessed a knowledge gap. I was a professor of color whose racial ambiguity as someone Japanese and Jewish gave me an automatic brown buy-in: I was frequently mistaken for Latinx, Native, Iranian or Afghan, and I’d grown up in the area going to working class white schools where I’d known plenty of racism. My parents were also both college-educated and upper-middle class—I was a privileged person who didn’t know the cultural and social barriers to success such students face. I knew the history of racial capitalism and the legacy of slavery in the United States because my children in Mississippi forced me to confront it—but I had not lived it, especially not in its manifestation at an institution which preached vague rhetoric about diversity and inclusion while refusing to rename academic buildings named after Grand Wizards of the KKK. All of this is to say that I had much to learn.
Being young and ignorant and brash did have its benefits. I could connect with my students by fact of being only a decade older (if that) and looking younger. I was not scared to talk about race and racism, after two years spent immersed in a rural Black community. If I had to present my syllabus with the language and policies forced on me by program administrators, I could create an understanding in the classroom that my practice differed from written policy. I told students that I was averse to syllabus fundamentalism—enforcing policy as it was written—and that I would always accept late work, give out an extension, forgive an extra absence, because I was there to see them succeed. I would become a fundamentalist if pressed—when their third grandmother died, I joked. If you work hard, you will do well in this class, I promised them, and for the most part, that bore out.
What I hadn’t counted on was that student after student needed the flexibility I’d laid out—and then some. There was no end to the circumstances of unbelonging, to limited resources and family tragedy and mental health struggle for students who lacked privilege in intersectional, compounding ways. The queer Samoan girl from Seattle whose Christian parents disowned her after she came out whose (much older) partner began to physically abuse her needed more than a few absences waived. The indigenous student from the reservation who felt lost and isolated and depressed and then had his uncle die needed to miss a week of classes to go mourn when he’d already missed classes not being able to get out of bed. The black student from inner-city DC whose name was Travon the quarter Trayvon Martin was killed who had a manic break as he heard everyone, on the television and news and even in my class saying his name—he needed more grace than an extension and a few waived absences. I was not being taken advantage of—I was doing the bare minimum.
But every lesson learned is one easily forgotten. One quarter, in a bracingly loud and engaged class, I had a student named Emilio who was outspoken and funny and loud, who seemed always to have an angle. His eyes had a sort of sly spark—every teacher knows his type—and he and I were always sparring, which is to say, he was always busting my self-image and schtick. He was lanky and tall and had hip-hop style—and wondered, more than once, why I was wearing a belted collared shirt like an old white dude. He also, always, was talking in Spanish with his friend Juan, quiet enough that he never disturbed class, his eyes on me as he talked, but that very awareness was what bothered me, that he knew what we were doing and that I cared about it and that he was choosing instead his discretionary and private conversation. His work was good—not perfectly grammatical (I didn’t grade on grammar, the poetry of those nine year olds speaking in dialect in Mississippi having taught me the hard way about the difference between eloquence and rubrics of standard correctness), but forceful and distinctive in voice and opinion—and so I wrote things to encourage him, about how much potential he had if he tried, about what he needed to break through and work on.
Yet as the quarter wore on, and the rain settled in, more days than not, his chair beside Juan was empty, and the space he’d taken up was reinforced by his absence. I asked Juan if he’d seen him, and he shrugged, told me no, but said that didn’t mean anything since Emilio didn’t live in the dorms. Emilio didn’t answer my emails. He missed a draft of an assignment, a reflection, and then didn’t turn in his final essay. I wrote him an email and begged him to get something in, told him it was his last chance. I wrote the counselors I worked with, including Rosa, the Latinx-retention specialist, for a second time, asked her to check in on him. I graded other student work that had come in, and then finished it. I wanted to go to break, to turn in my grades. I wrote him a last time, sitting in my office, and was surprised to get an immediate response. “I’m downstairs and I have my paper. Can I bring it up to you?”
“Sure,” I typed.
A minute later, after two and a half weeks, there was Emilio at the door, grinning that sly, sparkling smile. “Got you your paper, Mr. Mike,” he said, and presented a folder presumably carrying his final portfolio.
I took it, opened it and shuffled through, saw that it had the basics even though Emilio hadn’t been in class.
“I talked to Juan, to make sure I had everything.”
“Ok.” He was smiling at his diligence, here when he’d ignored four emails I’d written, had shrugged off my class and my care and wanted me to be glad about it.
“You know, Emilio, I’m going to accept this, but you were really, really close to being cut off here, just so you know. It doesn’t work like this everywhere. You could have done—you could do—amazing work, if you really tried, you know?”
He pursed his lips, shrugged. “Sure. Ok. See you around, Mr. Mike.”
He turned, made it to the door, and then turned back to face me, and suddenly the smile was gone and there was only a boy with hurt in his eyes.
“You want to know why I wasn’t here? I live with my parents, and they’re real Catholic, and they kicked me out because I don’t believe in what they do. Three weeks ago. So I’ve been living in my car and its hard to sleep and I don’t have internet and I can’t take a shower to come to class, you know? But I still wanted to finish this cause I like your class. So I did my best.”
He had done his best—though I had not done mine. And it is not exculpatory to say that I didn’t know. There is no silver lining that in the aftermath, I connected him to campus resources that found him temporary housing. There is only the gut-punch and the guilt, the inadequacy of “I didn’t know,” the violence I did with my tough-love lecture about policy and expectations and potential for achievement. That, and the necessity of transmuting guilt into a commitment to do better.
I believe as educators, we must ask ourselves:
What does it mean to trust our students?
How can we teach with integrity even when we do so in systems which are inherently hostile to the success of students without privilege?
What policies and practices will honor the uncertainty inherent in what we cannot know of their lives and circumstances?