![]() For the most part, subbing now pays less than it paid 30 years ago, and a sub can be dismissed for no reason.įor the first two decades that I subbed, I was usually the only person of color working at the school in any capacity. Subs and paraprofessionals are on-call workers, often for several districts at once, and have no real interactions with a manager, supervisor, or anybody else who might protect them from exploitation or wage theft. Today, many substitute teaching jobs are outsourced to private companies (that tend to be owned by retired school administrators). And while subbing has very low status in public schools, finding even this work was considered a major accomplishment in an area where off-reservation unemployment for Native Americans exceeds 99%. In my region, however, substitute teaching was the only professional work I could obtain in the field of education. I’d taught everything from prekindergarten through graduate school, including teacher education courses and recertification courses for public school administrators I had lectured on cultural competence for Michigan State University’s School of Social Work, and I had won awards for writing both fiction and nonfiction about racism in education and stereotypes in children’s literature. I’d never before dared to say anything about my dislike for hangman, but by this point in my career, I had established myself as an authority on teaching and learning. But when I worked side-by-side with the teacher, I kept my mouth shut about the hanging man. When the teacher was away and I took over the class for her, I’d use other spelling games with the children, or we’d change hangman so that when students guessed a letter that wasn’t in the secret word, I’d fill in a star-shaped, smiley-faced pinata dangling from the ceiling. It’s just there, part of the silent, implicit curriculum that normalizes such deaths or makes them invisible. Of course, the dead person isn’t really part of the game - nor is the historic context of lynching. ![]() But some underlying, unspoken norm seems to suggest that it’s fine for a children’s game to feature a lynching. No doubt, parents would object if the teacher drew a dog or a cat hanging, dead, from a gallows. The teacher often invited her students to play the game as a way to practice their spelling words. Students guess one letter at time, and if they guess a letter that’s not in the word, the teacher draws in a body part belonging to an anonymous human, who’ll be killed unless the players are able to identify the word before the fully drawn corpse appears. The teacher draws a gallows, along with marks representing the letters of a secret word. I’m sure you know hangman, the children’s game about lynching. Some underlying, unspoken norm seems to suggest that it’s fine for a children’s game to feature a lynching. ) This woman was a great teacher - thoughtful, calm, and soft-spoken - and I loved watching her work, even if she was sometimes guilty of (unconsciously) normalizing our nation’s historic violence against people of color. ![]() (Note the tentative, cautious nature of the verb consider. One day, while subbing as a teaching assistant in a 2nd-grade classroom at an elementary school in Benzie County, the county adjacent to the peninsula where I live, I suggested, politely, to a white teacher that we might consider brainstorming alternative names for the game hangman. ![]() Our presence here is an inconvenient carryover from the time before the region became desirable to other people. Yet, white people regularly toss the n-word about in public, especially in local high schools, and Native Americans are often met with war whoops and referred to as underprivileged. Where I live, white people so angrily deny their privilege that people of color have become hesitant to broach the topic of racism, or even to use the term white at all, much less cite statistics about local economic conditions and demographics. ![]() I am a Native American who lives in the northwestern part of Lower Michigan, adjacent to a national park, in a region where white-flight communities have grown exponentially since the late 20th century, as have minority unemployment rates. ![]()
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