This was before I knew what "sight word vocabulary" was. At the time I was 19 years old, a college student-athlete with a 3.5 GPA. James was 17, in a juvenile correctional institute for robbery, with a prior record. We were both involved in a weekly tutoring program between Villanova University and the Sleighton School. The room in Mendel Hall where I would later learn about "inhibitory postsynaptic potential" and "semi conservative replication" in Biology class, was the same room where I tried to help a boy two years my junior learn about "silent e."

James is a large part of the reason that I became a teacher in the first place. When we allow such discrepancy in the quality of education our children receive, we all pay later in the form of taxes for correctional agencies, police, and welfare. It is also immoral. During crew practice every morning for three years, I rowed under one of Philadelphia's Schuykill River bridges where someone had painted the bumper sticker phrase, "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem."

As is with most bumper sticker phrases, they are easier to agree with than live with. Back at Clairemont Elementary I quickly had a disproportionate number of African American children failing my class. I had entered teaching to equalize the inequities, but I was part of the problem. I was not doing my job, partially out of lack of knowledge, and partially because I did not truly understand what my job was.

Asa Hilliard cautioned educators in a speech he delivered at Emory University:

Many educators have come to doubt the learning capacities of and the efficacy of teaching for African people. Many have also come to see African people as if their conditions, social, economic and political, were their identity, leaving aside any cultural or ethnic identity (Hilliard, 1995, p.29).

I had to remember why I became a teacher in the first place and learn how to be an effective teacher for all children. I did not acknowledge my responsibility from an activist point of view. In the past, if two or three children were not fitting my standards, I still had 25 children who did. But I could not ignore fifty percent of my class who came from a different race and socio-economic class than myself. I had to learn more about being a successful teacher for all children.

I had to remember about Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development that acknowledges that children are naturally at very different places. In order to help build extensions, or bridges, or scaffolding as Vygotsky uses, teachers and parents must know where the children actually are. Rather than expect my students to be at what the City of Decatur and I deem an appropriate first grade level, I had to accept my students from where they were. To do that I had to find out where they were and who they were.