Punk Teacher - August 15th, 2009 in Commentary 2 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

If I had a soul, this is what it would look like.

Who is the Punk Teacher?

I decided to create the pseudonym “Punk Teacher” first and foremost so that I could write frankly about my new teaching career without risking drama, or worse, my job.

I am literally started my teaching career this year, summer 2009. My first experience was doing about a month of student teaching with Latino 5^th graders who had failed my state’s standardized test.

I am completely thrilled to be a teacher. It is my dream career. Yet there are a lot of problems with the educational system, and I have no intention of turning a blind eye. In fact I think my perspective is uniquely honed in such a way as to cut through bullshit in a refreshing and relevant way.

Even in my limited experience I already have much to say and many stories to tell, but I will try to stay focused on introducing my motives and myself.

I am a 29 year old Latino male who has lead a sketchy enough life that I feel that “punk” is the best adjective for it. The word “punk” has many connotations which include everything from French situationism to homosexuality in gang culture. But I hope the word invokes some more common imagery. I hope it calls forth images of angst ridden dirty kids with mowhawks, of anarchists and skinheads, full of rage at a society that they are struggling to understand. I hope that it invokes this imagery because this imagery describes my own youth, which still permeates its influence into my adulthood.

My own story with education is mostly a failed one.

I am the middle son of a college professor.  By the time I was 13 I had enough traumatic childhood experiences which ranged from just growing up in a repressive Latin American dictatorship to being sexually abused. By the 5^th grade I had been psychiatrically hospitalized, by the 7^th grade I had been placed in a school for troubled kids who’s security was so high that teachers watched the students urinate to prevent the smuggling of drugs and weapons. My classmates were hardcore gangsters.

By 9^th grade I was going to school drunk or on drugs, by 11^th grade I dropped out with a GPA beneath a 2.0.

I had but one refuge in life; it was the punk subculture, which I will define as the collective youth cultures, which based themselves in anti-establishment music, clothing, philosophy and lifestyle. My favorite bands growing up were the Dead Kennedy’s, The Misfits, Black Flag, Bauhaus, Skinny Puppy, Last Resort, Brutal Juice,  The Business, Neurosis, and other classics of hardcore, Oi!, industrial, and old school punk.

By the time I was 18, I was working professional as a tattoo artist and facing felony charges for organized crime. Though the two are completely unrelated it does give a good impression of what kind of background I have.

A few years later I underwent an intense religious conversion to fundamentalist Christianity. This may seem like a strange dichotomy, but if one reads the book Righteous by Lauren Sandler , it is clear that the evangelical religious right has invested a great deal of resources at massive campaigns to co-opt anti-establishment youth cultures and is quite good at it. I never quite fit in well with my fellow fundamentalists due to bad habits like identifying myself as a Christianarchist; I reasoned that the Christ like life should lead one to an anarchist utopianism.  My brothers and sisters in Christ did not agree.

Right smack in the middle of my evangelical Christianity I panhandled my way across the United States, and enjoyed a great deal of volunteer work with the Anarchist community of Santa Cruz, California. I will never forget attending a training camp where many of the attendees where veterans of the notorious Seattle WTO Riots, where anarchists basically shut down Seattle, Washington in protest of globalization.

At the tail end of my evangelical Christianity my politics took a slightly right wing shift when I became a member of the Progressive Labor Party, a Communist party which counts among its slogans “Don’t Vote, Revolt!”

So don’t assume that in my religious days I was somehow wearing my trousers up to my chest with coke bottle glasses sitting around in pews singing 100 year old hymns. Though my education was marginal I was a voracious reader and studied Church history, and varying and competing theologies, including the Liberation theology of Latin America and the Social Gospel espoused by Martin Luther King. I also merged these ideas with a traditional southern Pentecostalism which teaches that God is a very active and evident supernatural entity which manifests miracles on a regular basis. The traditional view of this latter theology is called by its proponents “Charismatic Christianity.”  If it sounds like I was insane and dangerous I will not disagree.

But I will say that I believed that poverty was the product of social immorality and I wanted to fight it. I just happened to believe, like all Charismatics, that Jesus was talking to me inside my head and guiding my actions.

It was working with a youth ministry at my church where the congregation was mostly white middle class and the youth and children’s ministry was mostly black neighborhood kids that I began to develop my current worldview about education. As I got more and more involved with the kids and got to know their families, situations, and attitudes I realized that what they needed was a way out of a cycle of poverty and that education was a more realistic vehicle for that than prayer. This caused conflicts with my church and me and caused me to leave, never to return to a Charismatic congregation.

Shortly after that I started college, realizing that I needed to take my own advice.

College changed everything. Learning became my new addiction. It was hard as hell to get in and the whole process terrified me. I had no idea how I was going to pay for it, but the financial aid turned out to be enough. I made the lowest possible ACT score to be accepted into the University, but I was accepted nonetheless. Within 1 year I had a high GPA, laboratory research experience, and was the member of two prestigious academic organizations including HHMI, which is one of the world’s biggest supporters of biology research.

This December I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience.

What college did for me was powerful. My formal science education along with my own voracious reading habits caused me to abandon my religion. This was not a passive process for me but a deep internal conflict about the ethics of truth, the death blow to my religion was inflicted by Richard Dawkin’s book The God Delusion which caused me to accept either I believed science and evidence were the best and most reliable road to truth or that willful faith was. The two were epistemologically incompatible, and anyone who has a science education and denies this is like an ostrich with its head in the sand.

Since I came from a punk-anarchist background it was deeply entrenched in my habits and worldview that when I see such a major problem with the world as the destructive power of religion I had to do something about it. So within a few months I became an active member of the secular and skeptical movements and remain one today. My activities have included podcasting, organizing campus clubs, traveling to conferences and blogs like this one. I don’t feel like I do enough and consider it one of my goals to increase my output; this is a very punk way to deal with a beloved cause.

I am now a 5^th grade bilingual math and science teacher.  As someone who believes that the most powerful force in democratizing our society is education I believe that I am in the trenches of the culture war.

In this blog I hope to communicate effectively what my experiences are as an educator and hopefully to inspire and inform people on how they might act to improve education in this country.

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