Episode 18. A Conversation on Teaching

Yeah, just getting to that point where people are ready to sit still and listen and be able to read something and absorb that information.

And you mentioned being a first generation student and both, you know, Morgan and I have fathers who are PhDs, who are college professors.

And so, especially for folks who become PhDs, who become professors, there's a lot of them, of course, that have parents that were in the same profession.

And so just to say that there is this kind of class bias, of course, within academia, and that it's really kind of oriented towards that kind of cultural expectation.

So therefore, when people are first generation, they might have this I mean, just difficulty navigating the system because you're not born into the system and raised into it and those kinds of advantages.

But, you know, for me, I went to public schools in my background and my father taught at an open enrollment state college.

And that's kind of like, you know, a caste system we felt kind of born into.

Like this is where we're at state college education.

And then, you know, he would make comments about like, oh, you know, Columbia University, would I even be able to walk across the campus there? Like that's too uncomfortable of a place.

And of course, we know higher ed is just based on elitism and hierarchy and all of those kinds of structures of benefiting your degree and stuff like that.

But I got my PhD from the New School, which is a private school and one of the few private schools I attended.

And then I taught in Texas at Texas Woman's University, which was an open enrollment school in Texas.

And my first job was at Florida International University.

And just for our paper, I was looking up the demographics of those schools and I was pretty struck by Florida school was only 8% white, but that of course means that the large percentage of the students at that campus were Hispanic whites.

And so they have they're either immigrants from Latin America or their parents were.

And that university is as yours is as a Hispanic serving institution.

And then in Texas, the school was 12 percent white students.

and about 30% for black and Hispanic students and also Hispanic serving institution, but a 90% female school as well.

But now most recently, and for the majority of my career, I'm teaching at a private Catholic school that has a good tuition price tag on it.

And so my students are predominantly white, 77% white, And so it's just quite a contrast, especially considering the school across town, SUNY Albany might have a 46% white student population.

And so just the students that enter your classroom really set up You know what what you're dealing with as far as any kind of behavioral or learning, you know issues and problems and the the background that you have to give so we're kind of just already in these segregated institutions, then it seems.

Yeah, it's interesting too that you, when you say white student, for example, then we could actually subdivide white students, the students that live in rural communities or suburban communities, or then those that are from the city and have, you know, always intermingled with people who didn't look like them.

So then there's a diversity.

It's almost like, you know, LA is broken off into just all these different areas and geographic areas and neighborhoods and Everybody knows who the predominant people that live in certain neighborhoods.

And so they all, even though they might look the same, if you're looking in the classroom, there could be quite different, you know, based upon their class, based upon what their parents do, and also based upon where they live geographically and who they've interacted with along the way.