Chapter 11 of “Unbalanced: Memoir of an Immigrant Math Teacher”: Lived Experience
(This is part of my memoir as a high school math teacher, after working for twenty years in the U.S. as a software engineer at Microsoft and an investment manager battling Wall Street. If you are interested, please go to the for all available chapters.)
CHAPTER 11 LIVED EXPERIENCE
Mira was an African American instructor passionate about social justice with cool practicality, rare among our teachers at ULW. We were about the same age, both biking enthusiasts, and we enjoyed intellectual conversations with each other. I took a required class from her for this program before the campus was shut down.
Mira attended Duke University, where she witnessed her African American friends being expelled for certain rule violations, while a white student repeatedly escaped punishment for more serious offenses because he was related to the Duke family. She was grieving hard after George Floyd but had to leave work early every day to get her daughters from school. The tension and animosity in the aftermath of the demonstration and looting made it unsafe for her muscular African American husband to walk on the street by himself.
The final project for Mira’s class was to watch one film from her selected collection. For the first movie, I chose Moonlight, which won the 2017 Oscar Best Picture award. It was a movie I had watched before but felt little connection with. Watching it again, I was moved by the understated and personal way of telling the coming-of-age story of a poor black gay boy. The picture was more authentic, complex, and truthful than most materials of this kind constructed with an overt moral message. It touched me deeply and left me pondering the topics I had learned in classes: poverty, race, family, sexual orientation, bullying, and the school system.
The abrupt ending of part two, where Chiron was escorted to the police car, followed by the beginning of part three, where he emerged as a strong drug lord, spoke more powerfully to the “school to prison pipeline” phenomenon than the abstract papers assigned. The mother’s hinting language, the puzzled looks, and the awkwardness, longing, and fear in Chiron’s eyes revealed more about the mental state of a gay boy than any LGBTQ statistics presented in class. The classroom scenes and counseling session showed how little the school system was able to change students’ life circumstances in a more visceral way than the academic articles we read.
The second movie I chose was Paris Is Burning, a culturally influential documentary depicting the 1980s black and Latino LGBQT ballroom dance scenes, interspersed with interviews in undramatic tones. Only when one listened carefully did the everyday struggles surface: “A lot of these kids in the balls, they don’t have two of nothing. Some of them don’t even eat.” “In real life, you can’t get an executive job unless you have the educational background and the opportunity.” “Black people have a hard time getting anywhere, and those that do are usually straight. In a ballroom, you look like an executive, and you’re therefore showing the straight world that you can be an executive.”
Despite the constant rejections, violence, and even murders, there remained a sense of resilience, pride, and belonging in the community where the “children” could go to the “mother of the house” for refuge and comfort. I didn’t know much about these people living on the margins of society before. Although we lived in the same society, I didn’t even try to know them deeply as people. I was living in my world as an immigrant climbing the socioeconomic ladder with my own dreams and struggles. I couldn’t understand, nor could I imagine the struggles of people who were so different from me — whose daily challenges were safety, respect, and the dignity of living in their own ways.
Fascinated by the collection, I watched all the films Mira selected, including Crip Camp, a 2020 documentary produced by Barack and Michelle Obama. It started with the daily lives in a hippie camp for disabled youths in upstate New York in the 1970s, where they felt fulfilled as human beings, and followed their lives in later years. Through effectively organized activism, they started a revolution and forced the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, a major milestone for people with disabilities.
Through Felix, Mira, and the films she suggested, I was allowed into the world of people whose life experiences I had little understanding. I was starting to feel how they felt and understand their daily struggles in life. It is easier to understand and connect with people similar to oneself, but a teacher must connect with students from vastly different backgrounds to see, understand, and care about them.
When I see a homeless person on the street or a recalcitrant student in the classroom, I need to not immediately shut off but try to understand what circumstances have driven them to their situations and behaviors. Once they feel seen, understood, and respected, they are more likely to communicate and cooperate. It is a teacher’s skill that needs developing, and moments like these contributed to my growth.
It is undeniable that what we have lived and experienced influences us more deeply than what we have heard from friends or seen in the movies, and we need to be humble about it. These words from David Brooks perfectly captured how I felt: “I am beginning to see you. Certainly, I will never fully experience the world as you experience it, but I am beginning, a bit, to see the world through your eyes.”
It turned out that our program would teach an academic theory called “lived experience,” which elevated this idea to a new level. As teacher candidates, we were taught that “lived experience” gives one a unique vantage point to discuss issues of social justice and oppression. People lacking the authority of lived experience should stay silent or be separated from such discussions. For example, white students should not hear the discussion of racial issues by the students of color.
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