Home Visits

9.02.11 By Rachel Singh

At Young Achievers, kindergarten and first grade teachers are required to visit the homes of their incoming students.  I remember home visits last year, when I was so new to everything—BTR and Young Achievers and teaching.  I admired the practice, but I worried about the awkwardness.  Since then, I’ve heard a lot of teachers talk about the practice and basically admit that although they think it’s a good idea, in practice it is just too uncomfortable.  Some feel that they are invading families’ privacy and worry that parents don’t really want them to come.  The point is, in a way, moot for me, since they are required at YA.  It certainly is more convenient to do home visits at a school where parents expect them.  However, I’m pretty sure I would do them anyway, and here’s why.

Home visits are a sociological dream: a collision of very different people with hopefully the very same goal.  Educated, middle class, white and Indian teachers drive around the poorest neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan seeking out students.  We stick out like sore thumbs, with our teacher clothes, our backpacks, and our clear confusion as we wonder where #15 might be.  The neighbors, sitting on the stoop or playing in the street, always stare.  I am trying to figure out what makes it so clear to them that we are so out of place.  It’s race, it’s class, and, I think it’s also the fact that the only time we come through their neighborhoods are to visit our students.  My co-teacher and I are both deeply committed to urban education; so why are the urban communities of our students so unfamiliar to us?  In college, I did a lot of work in Roxbury, so I feel totally comfortable there.  Now, I live in Fields Corner, and I am working toward a similar comfort.  It is important to me to live in a community that is demographically similar to the one in which I work and the ones where my students live.  But somehow, living in Fields Corner and working in Mattapan is not enough to acquaint me with the communities of my students.

Once we find the houses, the real fun begins.  Parents have a variety of reactions to us.  Some welcome up with warmth and chatter and watermelon.  Others are more skeptical; they’re testing us out to see what we’re made out of.  A few ask to meet at a coffee shop.  There is usually evidence that the house has been tidied, to make a good impression.  Siblings clatter in and out, sharing in the excitement and strangeness of having an actual teacher in their house, wanting to talk to us as much as our students do.  Awkwardness abounds. 

The location of the visit—the fact of it being in their homes—can for the parents be a source of both power and disempowerment.  Most of them seem to be trying just as hard as we are to diffuse the awkwardness and make us feel comfortable.  I suspect that one or two relish the awkwardness and seek to see what these middle class women will do outside of their comfort zones.  Others seem utterly cowed, as if having us there is an invasion of their privacy which they accept out of deference.  There is an intimacy to the poverty that I feel in their homes, something that separates those of us on the other side, even if we may live in a community that looks like theirs (like Fields Corner?), or in a house that looks like theirs on the outside (like mine?).  In any case, the parents don’t know where I live or what I believe, and they don’t ask.  But it’s impossible to ignore the feeling of difference that’s obviously mutually perceived, which creates—for both parties—the uncomfortable question/possibility of being judged.  (Do my students’ parents feel like I’m passing judgment on our differences?  Am I judging them?)

And then, there are the children.  They are always nervous.  (We’re always nervous too, though we try not to let on.  Will I like them? Will they like us?!)  I’ve had parents tell me that their children have been asking all day when their teachers will get there. (They hate when their parents tell us that.)  Some are shy and hide their faces.  Some are ebullient.  Some recognize us from the hallways, and squeal with delight at the recognition.  (That is my favorite reaction.)  Some are more at ease and chatty than their parents.  Some whisper in their parents’ ears and sit in their laps.  Those moments of intimacy are one of the most meaningful aspects of these visits for me.  I think I forget too easily that my students—for whom I feel so utterly responsible—are in fact someone else’s children, and I can never feel as responsible for them as their parents do.  So when I am feeling frustrated and at the brink of losing my temper, I hope I will remember the image of this student who is currently rousing my anger in the loving embrace of her mother.  And I hope that memory will help me bite my tongue, take a deep breath, and remember to always speak to my students the way I would want my yet-to-be children to be spoken to.  It seems strange to say, but I think I sometimes forget that my students are children.  I appreciate that in home visits, our introduction to our students is as children first and students second. 

A final word on the awkwardness: someone once told me never to confuse feeling safe with feeling comfortable.  Being safe is necessary; being comfortable is not.  We need to feel safe in order to take the kinds of risks that help us learn and grow.  But real learning only takes place in that uncomfortable threshold between what you know and what you don’t, that zone of proximal development (hey-hey, Vygotsky!).  So maybe, if I’m uncomfortable at home visits, it’s not just because I’m a deeply awkward person and because there are weird power dynamics at play.  Maybe it’s really because I’m given this rare, blessed glimpse into my students’ lives outside of school, lives that teach them much more than I ever can.  And maybe it’s because my race and class privilege are slapping me and my students’ parents in our faces in a way that it never does so directly.  So I think I’m going to embrace the awkwardness and see what I can learn from it: about my students, their families, their communities, and myself.