"Through the Eyes of Children" by Lisa Pollock

I teach instructional resource at Douglass Elementary School in Memphis City Schools. Douglass is your pretty typical urban city school. A lot of great things happen within the school walls, but all in opposition to a ton of forces working against that greatness. The kids that I teach come from broken-families, live as victims of abuse, neglect, and drugs, and deal everyday with violence, hunger, and alcohol. It’s a far world from the sheltered, affluent, opportunity-filled town that I grew up in. I wonder a lot of days as I straighten my long, light brown hair in the morning how it is possible that a 22 year old white female from Midland, Michigan wound up teaching a class of all black students from inner-city Memphis, Tennessee. The variables certainly don’t stack up. We are crossing geographic, economic, and racial lines everywhere. Fairly apparent to see the way I look at it.

It was the last hour of the day and I was reviewing vocabulary with my 6th graders. We had already made the flash cards, looked up the definitions, and created illustrations to go with each term so it was time to create examples. One of our weekly words was the word shocked, so I called on one of my students, Arrius.

“Arrius, give me an example of something that would shock you,” I requested.
He paused for a moment with a look of deep consideration and then looked up at me slightly discouraged, “Miss Pollock, I can’t think of anything that would shock me,” and then in an instant the discouragement faded as he interjected, “but I can think of something that would shock you.”

Smiling to myself, only imagining what was going to follow I inquired, “Oh yeah, what’s that?”

He smiled too…”I bet you would be shocked if you learned that you were my mother!”

I laughed, mentally noting all of the reasons why that was an absolute impossibility, perhaps at the forefront of my mind the fact that Arrius was one of the darkest black students in my class and I have been described before as a white, white girl! “You’re right Arrius, that would shock me.” I looked over to see another one of my students, Taviyon, one of my brightest and most capable students, with his hand raised.

“Yes Taviyon.” I called on him.

“Miss Pollock, there is no way that you could be Arrius’ mom.” Taviyon called out.

I breathed a slight sigh of relief happy to know that someone else had noticed the apparent impossibility of Arrius’ statement. “Well, why not?” I questioned him.

“Miss Pollock- Arrius has braces and you do not!”

The honest, innocence, and absolute confidence of that observation still rings in my ears. To Taviyon’s eyes this was our greatest difference- I lacked the necessary braces to be Arrius’ mother. And it makes me wonder what we see and why we see it. As white families from the suburbs, white young adults who just graduated from college begin to move into this urban neighborhood in Memphis, a neighborhood populated primarily by black families, what makes us different? But more importantly what do we see as our differences? Taviyon’s response reminds me that I cannot count on all people to see the same thing, even those things which appear so obvious and apparent to me. And so I think it begs us ask ourselves the question as we seek to live in reconciliation, and community, and fellowship with our neighbors- whose eyes see the differences to be overcome and what do those eyes see?

May 2006