Bernadette Lambert
Those Who Can
After my first disappointing assessment of my writing by a high school teacher, my father attempted to comfort me by saying, Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I found this difficult to believe since it came from a man who was raised by educators, was unknowingly raising educators (each of his four children has been an teacher at some point), and who was known to raise a curious eyebrow at his baby girl when she was taught teaching a room full of attentive, but lifeless dolls.
I wanted both to do and to teach. The thing I wanted to do was writing, and the thing I wanted to teach was reading. After all, I couldn't fight destiny. I was conceived from the union of two poets (my parents met during a college poetry contest - Mama won) and named after the main character in a book my father was reading on the day I was born (this was before fathers could go in the delivery rooms and cheer mothers with those annoying words, "you can do it. Push!") It was literacy that gave me life and a name.
So I began to read and write for nourishment, yet I never remember being taught to read or write. Assignments were given, and I obediently completed them. But no one ever showed me strategies for comprehension or vocabulary building or writing organization. So in an attempt to make meaning of what I had read, I began to teach myself by explaining the text I had read and the words I was learning to imaginary classrooms filled with dolls, books, and occasionally a younger brother who would escape at the first chance. (I wonder why he hates to read and write today.)
As I moved to high school, I ceased the inventive classroom teaching, but I continued to question the methods of the real teachers I daily faced. Something was missing, and I didn't discover it until almost twenty years later when I began rereading several of the texts "assigned" to me as a high school student. I also read several texts that were never assigned, but perhaps should have been. Maybe it was because I was a member of a practically all black school system that was allowed to stay that way even after the infamous 1954 Brown decision. There wasn't much busing done in the "city that was too busy to hate." I'm not sure just what Atlanta was too busy doing , but is sure wasn't raising scholarly minds or planning for diversity in the futuristic international city. Although I passionately absorbed a few works by James Baldwin and Richard Wright, and I began a long-term love affair with Malcolm X's autobiography, I don't recall reading Huck Finn, Little Women, or any of the other "classics." I attempted Gatsby and searched for Cliff Notes on Hawthorne, but my literature background was limited.
For me, college was worse. (But then what else would the University of Georgia be for a non-football fan?) The literature and English classes were basically self-taught, so I decided to tackle the journalism approach to write. When searching for a minor, I was discouraged from pursuing an educational degree. I was told I was too smart. Remember, "Those who can, do!"
"Do what?" was my question for the next fifteen years as I traded jobs and careers like baseball cards, hoping the one I finally kept would eventually be worth a lot of money. But two children and one divorce later, my soul called me back to my original dream of writing and teaching. I wrote, I submitted, and I accepted rejection in a cycle that became as frequent as presidential election years. However, I did find success in the education classes I was taking, and I thought, "Oh, no. My father was right. Those who can't, teach."
So I began teaching, and from day one I considered myself a worthy contender for Teacher of the Year. I always kept the every-child-can-learn attitude, and was proud when students would sing praises of the way I made learning fun and meaningful. I went one-on-one with the most challenging student (and parent), but I never lowered my expectations. It was a rare occasion when a student passed by me without finding and expressing his or her own voice through written text or oral presentation. I was overjoyed to share with sixth graders that the world was not just filled with white men who discovered everything and white women who always needed saving. I enthusiastically planned lessons within various genres or themes that connected at the least three cultures, two continents, and both sexes.
One of my favorite studies was this year when I introduced my sixth graders to the word "epistolary." Each student selected one of four books written in a letter or journal style. I then coordinated secret pen pals between classes, and the students wrote letters to each other as they responded to the texts. These students were anxious to "talk": to each other about the boy who wrote a famous writer (Dear Mr. Henshaw); the true story of a slave girl who escaped and hid in a tiny attic for several years (Letters From A Slave Girl); a Russian girls who almost died as her family escaped to America (Letters from Rifka); and a real life diary of a child from Sarejevo (Zlata's Diary).
I love it when another teacher or administrator suggests to me that the text I have chosen may be too difficult for sixth grade students. I consider it a personal challenge. Often I win, like last year when I gave students a copy of King's "I Have a Dream" speech. They had only heard bits of it and never read any of it, but together we took it apart and made meaning of the text for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Occasionally I am not successful, however, like this year when I gave students a copy of Kennedy's inaugural address. We tried to find meaning in pieces of the speech, but I gave up after the discussion in each class kept oming back to Marilyn Monroe. They lost focus, and I lost patience. Maybe next year.
Next year I want to concentrate more on publishing by way of some of the technology available at school. My students love to create newsletters, and the computer is the best way to manage that activity. Last year students worked in groups to publish an abolitionist newspaper. After listening to a few slave narratives, acting out a play about Frederick Douglass, and reading Virginia Hamilton's House of Dies Drear, the students were ready to write headlines, straight news stories, feature articles with make-believe interviews, editorials and editorial cartoons, and even advertisements to produce an impressive newspaper that would make Douglass proud.
Of course, I was taking a chance with that assignment. Most of the schools in the south, especially in this county, love to have children read and write about the Civil War. However, the studies usually have a Gone With the Wind flavor about them. I was convinced that that lesson I designed was needed after my own son's fifth grade teacher had him write a Civil War journal from the perspective of Johnny Reb, a private who "doesn't own any (slaves) but would like to someday" and whose "moonshiner" wife thinks "blacks are dumb and can't be trusted." After two days of phone calls and letters to the county office and school principal, I began to understand where that saying had come from. "Those who can't, teach." I just don't believe we can afford to allow them to even teach anymore.
So I have returned to my literacy roots that call for me to not only teach, but to write - to write about teaching, learning, and surviving. I am not sure what form I will select to deliver my message. I want to do more than nonfiction. However, no matter what genre I choose, I know my challenge is to write about truth. And the truth is that those who can, do, and often they do by teaching others.
Return to 
Introduction
