“I sat in the night regretting the decisions I made,” grand ma said to Flat Anna.    A mixture of hatred, admiration, jealousy and love swirled in her heart when speaking about Joetta.  Joetta’s family would have everything while grand ma’s family would be buried in shame and struggle just like the childhood I tried to escape from.    Grand ma remembered sitting at night with her arms wrapped around her knees that were bent, sitting in the dark, the permeation of fried onions and beer filled the house along with an undertone of the smell of mold coming up from the basement.  This house and her husband became an assault on her senses, an odious reminder of her predicament as a woman married to a hick going nowhere.    My life will be no different than my mother’s.

In the fear of facing her fortieth decade soon upon her, grand ma fell for some get rich quick schemes.   She could make some money selling real-estate on the side, on the weekends sitting in some cold house, her real-estate sign on the front lawn with her name on it in capital letters, BEVERLY RACINE, waiting for a buyer.  At least she would be making money instead of watching Ronnie‘s silhouette as he reclined in the chair illuminated by the din of the television where he spent every Sunday.     I am still attractive that’s an asset in sales, grand ma remembered.     Women who are good looking make money in real estate.   Grandma thought about her body, her beautiful thick brunette mane, her large brown eyes, her neck the length of a swan’s and her figure maintained by the discipline of dieting and belly dancing.  What she found disappointing about her body was her lack of breasts.  That could be fixed too when the commissions come in.  She could not miss in real estate- her persistence would pay off.    Money would be the salvation, money would be the act of forgiveness and the moment of redemption for a life of uninspired choices, a life defined by the innumerable resentments of “I will show them,” a life as empty as the cold barren room,  Ronnie’s silhouette, and her weekend steeped in the futility of a real-estate sale that was not going to happen.   Just stay positive, grand-ma thought.  I have everything it takes to make money in real-estate.  Real-estate would become her ticket out.

Thoughts of Joetta intruded on grand ma who often resisted thinking about her sister whose brilliance, grace and charm inspired curiosity and connection with everyone who met her.  Grandma remembered watching Joetta arrange her room, choose her clothes, assess the value of the boy she was considering at the moment, as the tilt of her head revealed the wry smile and the brilliance of her brown eyes contributing to the mystique of Joetta who made one feel special being the object of her attention.   Joetta possessed star quality.  Remembering Joetta standing in front of the mirror wearing a white blouse, the little black jacket, with the ribbon that tied at the waist inspired a glimmer of admiration.    Joetta moved like a gazelle.   Whether she was choosing her clothes, diving off the diving board at the lake in a perfect execution, her shapely thighs taut and strong as Joetta hit the water.  Poetry in motion as she spoke to people with such delicacy and care that to be in Joetta’s company buffered one against the monotony of the ordinary.    Grandma thought her of her sister as a contrivance.    When Joetta walked into a room, my mother’s face lit up recalled grand ma.  Sometimes she wondered if Joetta belonged in the family, if Joetta were not some hologram, a spirit or satyr presenting a vision, a welcomed interruption to the tired and predictable.   Joetta would triumph, like an artist with a block of clay,  Joetta would mold out the best possibility, would fail to  be defeated by the obvious, whose imagination would transcend the limitations of life imposed by the mill town.   Joetta’s cultivation became the answer, the resistance to a life that seemed base and small.    Grand ma sighed in the recognition of the resentment, envy and love she felt for Joetta, her older sister.  I am getting out of poverty; I am divorcing Ronnie and getting out of poverty.  I will marry a professional man like my sister did who will get me out of poverty and I need to do it soon.

  

Flat Anna listened intently as grandma recalled  those days of her  enduring the stirrings of discontent while reflecting on  her marriage at a young age to her high school "sweetheart."  Grandma spoke about how the innocence of first love filled with the aspirations of joy and promise could descend to the cold recognition of what was visible and ignored as one blindly jumped into love.  The heady giddiness of young women who responded by marrying the boy  who listened to them in the front seat of the car while pouring out their  hearts out about the  father leaving the house at the slightest bit of tension coming  from the wife and mother who could not be  pleased by him or by  her second daughter.  How many stories like this become the kindling to passion, young  women marrying to escape familial indifference to the illusion to the  imagined promise of love ever after by their skinny greasy haired saviors.     "What does any woman know at the age of eighteen in a small mill town?" grand ma asked out loud.  Remembering those days when the doubts began to surface and the attention to the details of motherhood and keeping house for a man who did not appreciate it could not blot out the anxiety clawed in the pit of grandma's being, as she sat alone at night with the kids asleep.  The tears running down her face unabashedly  thinking about her young foolishness and what a better choice Joetta made.   Joetta rarely made bad choices as her world contained a self-possession that remained solid in the face of criticism and maternal influence.  Joetta married the lawyer whose ambition shown in stark relief to the complacency of the snoring drunk in the younger sister's  bed.  The contrast of her life to Joetta's continued to eat away at grandma. 

Flat Anna wanted to go to Louisville, Kentucky, having become  enchanted with the  stories told to her while sitting with her cheek pressed against  grandma's knee.  " A city can afford a woman  certain opportunities whereas a mill town has its limitations," grandma lamented.  Flat Anna loved the way grand ma talked about life, "I guess it comes from all those years of teaching Theory of Knowledge," thought Anna.     Although Flat Anna traveled extensively, often she  felt that she only apprehended  the surface of things.  Hours upon hours in school libraries could not compete with this admonition of grandma's, "you can be young without money but you cannot be old with it."    Flat Anna came to appreciate that mistakes made in youth can cost one dearly, particularly for a woman on the verge of arrival  to her fortieth decade.   Nothing like  self-reflection in the din of late night snoring in a miserable small bedroom permeated with the smell of alcohol and tobacco rising off the surface of the skin of the man sleeping it it, a woman could begin to feel a restlessness inspired by her  fear of suffocation and a life going nowhere.  Although young and quite precocious, Flat Anna entertained this observation that a woman in her forties garners a kind of intensity, in her recognition that if the mistakes of youth were to be rectified, it would have to happen soon while a vestige of one's attractiveness was still on board. 

FLAT ANNA VISITS LOUISVILLE

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Book

You and Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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Description

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (written by educator Paulo Freire) proposes a pedagogy with a new relationship between teacher, student, and society. It was first published in Portuguese in 1968, and was translated and published in English in 1970.
Dedicated to what is called "the oppressed" and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults to read and write, Freire includes a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between what he calls "the colonizer" and "the colonized". The book is one of the foundations of critical pedagogy.
In the book Freire calls traditional pedagogy the "banking model" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggybank. However, he argues for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge.
According to Donaldo Macedo, a former colleague of Freire and University of Massachusetts Amherst professor, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a revolutionary text, and people in totalitarian states risk punishment reading it; Arizona's former Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, objected to its use in classrooms. The book has sold over 750 000 copies worldwide.

Summary

Translated into several languages, most editions of Pedagogy of the Oppressed contain at least one introduction/foreword, a preface, and four chapters.
The first chapter explores how oppression has been justified and how it is overcome through a mutual process between the "oppressor" and the "oppressed" (oppressors-oppressed distinction). Examining how the balance of power between the colonizer and the colonized remains relatively stable, Freire admits that the powerless in society can be frightened of freedom. He writes, "Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion". (47) According to Freire, freedom will be the result of praxis — informed action — when a balance between theory and practice is achieved.

BAD TEACHER TRAINING

The  stature of  the teaching profession continues  to diminish  exponentially as the profession continues to be comprised mostly  of people who performed at the bottom third of their class in undergraduate school.  Teaching in a public school insures that teachers, bolstered by the teacher's union, can work to minimum standards with impunity.  Most teachers come from the working class; therefore,  lack  the  cultivated experience to recognize that their education was mediocre at best since working class children are educated differently than upper class children.  Working class children,some of whom will be future teachers, receive an education predicated on obedience to rules since those are the values that the ruling class wants inculcated in the working class. Working class education with its adherence to rules and conformity fails to be the fertile incubation  for the development of  brilliance and rebellion required of a great teacher.  The essence of great teaching remains the ability to inspire in students the passion and desire to question the status quo even if that could mean questioning the teacher who could be perceived as its embodiment. .  Unfortunately, teachers benefit from the statusquo where the unions insure job safety for most teachers who have no incentive to be anything  other than mediocre.

THE BEST TEACHERS

How stupefying, that a teacher would participate in teaching language arts in the IB program providing rigorous academics denied to her and her own children as members of the working class. Isn't that teacher ever troubled by the incongruity that she has to produce results day after day in a private school, teaching the children of the rich in stark relief to her meager education and that of her children? Who are these people who only want their children educated with the upper class? How ironic  those parents and their working class  teacher pay lip service to the IB philosophy emphasizing a global community, social constructivism and attention to multiculturalism as they insure it remains upper class multiculturalism. Such hypocrisy. So at the end of her teaching career what will remain will be the teacher's identification with the oppressors.


It takes no talent or effort to teach upper middle class kids. They come to school riddled with resources knowing how to learn, most of them know more than their teachers due to their superior cognitive development, the end product of their enormous financial resources. The real teachers, young people in the” Teach for America “program, college graduates from Harvard and Yale,  go into marginal schools and advocate for the resources to educate the marginalized, the disenfranchised in the spirit of social justice.   The Teach for America program remains this country’s best effort to remediate educational inequality.  The Teach for America program continues to define how to educate,  upper middle class  college students educating the poor.