White Teacher Fails: Part 1- Labs

The bell had rung for third period and I was late for class. I frantically moved my things out of the incoming teacher’s way, then sprinted up the stairs to my next classroom. I was at an underfunded school in the South Bronx, the poorest congressional district in the country at that time. That fall semester I taught environmental science from four different classrooms on two different floors. The year was going poorly for me. I was a NYC Teaching Fellow. I had only finished undergrad in May, but by September I was a full-time teacher with no real guidance. I was the only environmental science teacher in the building and there was no curriculum, just old textbooks that discussed global warming as a “controversial idea.” If I wanted to do an observational study outdoors, we had no space. Our school was surrounded by streets. Our neighbor had the only lawn for blocks. But it was separated from us by a tall fence with barbed wire. Our neighbor was a juvenile detention facility.

At least my cart with the lab supplies I needed was already upstairs.

As I ran into the room, the smell hit me. Fumes. Somebody had mixed together the chemicals I’d gathered for our acid-base lab.

I was livid. As I strained to open the old warped windows, I said something like, “What the hell? Mixing chemicals is dangerous! You all could have gotten hurt. And I bought all these supplies with my own money. This is disrespectful!”

It was okay to express my anger, my fear, my disappointment. The culprits should have been given a reasonable consequence. But what I said next was not okay.

“Your behavior is so bad. I can’t trust you. We aren’t doing labs anymore.”

It was probably only one, or maybe two students who had messed with the lab supplies. But in that moment, I had decided to punish the entire class. Would I be so quick to judge an entire class based on the actions of just one kid, if they weren’t all black and brown kids? Was my decision to stop labs not actually made on safety as I claimed, but rather on my own implicit bias?

This happened in October. The rest of the year, students “learned” science from lectures and worksheets.

I am embarrassed and ashamed of how easily I gave up on my students. I may have had real negative consequences on their lives. STEM jobs are often the ticket out of poverty. Labs are the most engaging part of science class. Who knows how many potential doctors, researchers, and engineers lost interest in science due to my failure?

I need to share this, because it happens all the time. I am constantly hearing from my students that their previous science teachers didn’t trust them and so they weren’t able to do labs. Before my current job, I was a substitute teacher for Seattle schools and saw many worksheet-centered classes where the lab benches were full of dust. The only factor in common among the classes who didn’t do labs were that they were majority students of color.

Here is my plea to other teachers: don’t deprive students of meaningful learning opportunities as a disciplinary technique. Studies have shown that students of color are much more likely to be given harsher disciplinary consequences than their white peers. Punishing the whole class by taking away learning experiences such as labs only widens the achievement gap.

For the last four years I’ve taught at a public school in Seattle: gen ed chemistry (mostly black and brown students) and IB environmental science (mostly white students). I make sure to do labs in gen ed chemistry. I use materials that are scary even to me: Bunsen burners, hydrochloric acid, and hydrogen gas. But I’ve found that when I trust students with a big responsibility, (along with a lot of safety training) kids rise to the occasion.

I still make mistakes. This winter, students were doing a double replacement lab to observe precipitates. The harsh chemicals necessitated the use of goggles. I noticed one of my students was holding his goggles up to his face instead of strapping them on.

I initially viewed this as defiance and wanted to go over to correct him. But then I noticed that he was observing his lab group a few feet from the crowded lab bench (my class of 35 students made it impossible for everyone to be at the bench at once), so he wasn’t in any danger. He also wasn’t being disruptive. So, I decided to let it go.

I only just realized that the student probably didn’t want to put the goggles on due to his Afro hair style. I’d never thought about the fact that goggles better accommodate hair that lies flat.

There are so many barriers to students of color feeling comfortable in the science lab: the criticisms and mistrust of their former teachers, lack of the opportunity to run experiments, and a lack of representation of scientists of color in the media are just a few. I don’t want to add one more thing that makes it harder for students to step up to the bench.