My very first tenure-track job was connected to teacher education: I worked with undergraduates who were trying to secure a teaching certificate to work specifically in urban schools. In the early part of the program, before students were turned off by the curriculum and faculty (the faculty simply thought themselves too difficult and interesting for the students), the classes were full and enrolled mostly first-generation students of color who wanted to go back and teach in their urban communities. I loved the students, especially the early entries, and especially one young woman, who I will call Maya.
Maya was/is an amazing singer who chooses to use her talent for sacred music. As a high school student, she attended a predominantly black performing arts high school and that is where she did her student teaching. As a singer/composer/pianist and history major, her goal was to incorporate the arts into history education so that her black students did not experience their talent solely in their art classes but also, intellectually, across the curriculum. She was teaching American history and her cooperating teacher allowed her to implement the Civil Rights curriculum. I visited when students did their first presentations.
The presentations were a kind of acting/ singing/ music-playing extravaganza with every group member making speeches also. Each group was responsible for researching and presenting some central issue that galvanized black communities in this moment and had to use their talent to represent the depth of that galvanization. One young man, bless his heart, took the podium. It was obvious he had not prepared anything, but that did not stop him from talking. Before he finished his first sentence, one young woman started singing these words:
Oh Lord, I’m strivin’,
tryin’ to make it through this barren land,
but as I go from day to day,
I can hear my Savior say,
“trust me child, come on and hold my hand.”
I’m comin’ up on the rough side of the mountain…
I have always liked Bill Withers’s song, “Grandma’s Hands.” He takes what is seemingly part of mundane, everyday utility and reads an entire history and philosophy of life there. I could do the same thing with my grandmother’s words, though I am ashamed to admit that it is really only at this late stage in my life that I am truly understanding them. She gives me an explanatory model for things. I actually named my dissertation based on one of her expressions: running with the rabbits but huntin with the dogs. 
Like I said, I have learned these lessons very slowly and today is no different. I decided to look for videos from someone in my field who marks himself as a radical Marxist of color; I thought maybe I would add his work to one of the modules my students get to choose this semester. I found some self-aggrandizing performances of really bad poetry (and that’s bad meaning bad) and more than 100 videos of his daughter with more than 50,000 views on youtube alone, posted by him and the mother of the child (also a self-proclaimed Marxist). Now, really, I should have known to expect this foolishness from them but I felt a certain kinda way to to see this biracial family raising a little brown girl to publicly dance and sing in outfits like a pink, Mickey Mouse tutu with two kittens who she has named after Disney princesses. 
These have all been hard lessons for me to learn. As strange as it may seem, I would prefer my students to come at me, in full force, as the next kingpin of the G.O.P. rather than think/act like the G.O.P. but then turn around and call themselves Howard Zinn. My GOP example is extreme because I have never actually had such students, but the point remains. Today when I have to explain to my students the kind of writer that I want them to be, I think of my grandmother’s life as an example:
My father’s mother is the only woman who I have ever called my grandmother. She passed away a few years ago but I think of her always and talk to her often in my dreams. As I get older, I see the intentionality that guided her life in renewed ways.
