Chapter 9: Student-Teaching As An Emerging Marxist

—Howard Zinn, 1969, p. 52

—Karl Marx, 1990, p. 230

Pre-service teachers commonly experience a “reality check” when beginning their careers: naïve idealism meets bitter, practical wisdom. The cliché stands that novice teachers want to change the world while experienced teachers simply wish to retire (to be sure, there exists numerous exceptions to this trend; many career teachers have not grown sour and continue to passionately work for social change). I spent the 2010–2011 school year student-teaching at Queens College. As the program required, I taught one semester of 10th grade global history at a high school in Jamaica, Queens, and another semester in 7th grade United States history at a middle school in Rego Park, Queens. My personal confrontation with the harsh reality of teaching in public schools coincided with my awakening as a Marxist educator. I began to re-examine the writings of Karl Marx while at the same time I met the wildly inaccurate portrayal of socialism and capitalism in New York secondary education. What is more, I witnessed repeated teacher apathy on the matter, the reasons for which I intend to explore in this chapter. Most seemed wholeheartedly dedicated to the neo-liberalism cause (at one point I was reading Chomsky in the teachers’ lounge when a colleague saw the book and asked if I was a “f’ing communist”). As my goals to combat neo-liberalism solidified, I was met head on with American education’s indoctrination into the capitalist story. The experience overwhelmingly convinced me of the need for an alternative in American education. In the following chapter, I discuss some examples of the challenges facing beginning Marxist educators in New York public schools, as well as some solutions and methods used during my experience along with strategies moving forward.