Lesson One: Cover-Based Book Judgments and Their Unsettling Consequences

     I was starting to feel the slightest bit uncomfortable.

     It was the first day of the semester, and the students—some groggy, freshly out of bed, and others crisp and professional—were gathered around the door, waiting for the teacher to arrive. I had chosen to spend my wait next to two professional looking individuals who were discussing their expectations for the semester. They included me in their conversation and asked me about my major. I was envisioning the increasingly rare opportunity of having friends in a course, timidly nodding in agreement to whatever it was they were saying, when all of a sudden a voice came from the other side of the hallway.

     “Oh you're a Spanish major?!” it called.

     There was a momentary pause in my companions' conversation as they assessed the interruption. The voice had been that of a middle-aged woman seated amid her many bags and notepads. Tacitly voting me off of their own personal island, they resumed their conversation without me.

     Realizing that I had yet to respond to the lady across the hall, I blabbered something in agreement that, yes, I was indeed a Spanish major.

     Before I could turn back to the original pair, the woman continued. She told me about her many changes-of-major, the difficulties of being both a mother and a full-time college student, and—seemingly with nothing else to say—her excitement at having found another Spanish major in the class. Trying not to appear rude, but perhaps with no particular attention paid to saving face, I helplessly tried to get back on my original companions' island.

     The teacher arrived, barely unlocking the door before the flow of impatient students funneled inside. There was a hearty tug on my shoulder—not your average, first-day-appropriate tap, but a shake to a rattling degree of faux pas—as the eager woman from the hallway asked where I was going to sit. I moseyed to a spot in the front row, and the woman dropped her supplies next to my spot. It was obvious that I was going to get to know this person, like it or not.

     I'm glad that I did.

     Her name—for the sake of this blog entry—was Catherine, and she was a first-generation immigrant to the United States. She was born to white parents in Italy, where she was raised; she lived there until 2007, when she and her family immigrated to the United States for employment purposes. Catherine speaks five languages fluently with the desire to learn more, and her English was a second language, albeit flawless. A few socially-off interactions later, she and I exchanged contact information, and we currently chat on Facebook.

     Why is any of this important?

     I believe Dr. Dhonau once stated in class that teachers are never granted the privilege of assumption—a message that struck a special chord with me as I sat, attempting to hear a trace of a foreign accent in Catherine's English. She looked like me, she sounded like me, and she acted—for the most part—like me, save a few quirks. I couldn't help but believe that if she had engaged in conversation with me wearing a traditional Indian sari, or with German-language stickers on her laptop bag, I would have reacted far more positively to her interruptions.

     In my future classroom, the temptation to make the same blunder as I did on the first day of this semester will be a powerful one, if not a subconscious one. A room full of facial features, hair colors, and body languages will urge me to classify everybody instantaneously: this person may be a special-needs student, this person looks “normal,” I expect this student to do well, this person is this, this person is that. A roster full of names that I predict to be this ethnicity or another will precede even the classroom.

     It will be my job as an educator to do away with such instinctual classificatory assumptions. I won't be babysitting an assortment of strangers for an afternoon or two, in which such assumptions may be efficient and beneficial—I'll be teaching a relatively small number of students who bring their own personalities and experiences to the table, and I'll be doing it for the entire length of a year or more. To make general assumptions based on hardly anything at all—a name on a roster, the way a student seats him/herself, or an off-the-mark statement or behavior—would potentially damage the chemistry of the classroom, cause future speed-bumps in the learning process, and be a waste of valuable time, as the students would most likely prove me wrong.

     Catherine did.