Be Her Lead Book Club:

Priska Reynolds is a trainee teacher currently on the Teach First Programme, starting teaching in September 2020. She is passionate about equipping young people with the skills to be more than what society tells them they can be.

Introduction: lockdown bookworm

At the beginning of lockdown, I felt as though I was losing a lot in my life: freedom, structure, sitting my final university exams, friendships, and opportunity. Zoom was not the fixture in my life back in March that it is today. And I did not know how I was going to get from March to the beginning of my teacher training year with Teach First.

I picked up a book again for pleasure in April for the first time in a long time. This is not a blog about what reading gave to me in a time when everything was uncertain and, honestly, terrifying.

Instead, I want to tell you how four books which I read over lockdown have shaped my teacher persona, and shown me how I can be a champion for my pupils.

1. Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay (in particular: ‘A Tale of Two Profiles’)

Gay describes the wider narratives around race, and what it means to be black and male – too often, a lethal combination. ‘A Tale of Two Profiles’ is Gay’s analysis of Trayvon Martin’s murder and the subsequent trial of George Zimmerman, where the question at heart was essentially: “did Trayvon Martin deserve to die?”. Unfortunately, the system answered ‘yes’ to that question when it let Zimmerman walk free.

I have already started to learn about cognitive and implicit bias, and how this works in our brains. The brain likes to create shortcuts and generalise, otherwise our lives would be purely exhausting; we would spend our days relearning how to eat a yoghurt, or how to hold a pen if our brains did not make things automatic. I come face-to-face with this fact of our brains when I overthink getting a bowl of cereal, and I can’t remember what goes in the bowl. So, this function is obviously useful, but also extremely dangerous – like when the brain makes automatic judgements and generalisations about people.

Images in the media, language in the news, characters in books and movies are telling our brains that black = danger; white = innocence (among other false narratives). Our brains generalise, thinking it must be true. It is why, in the words of Gay, “when Trayvon Martin was murdered, certain people worked overtime to uncover his failings, even though he was the victim of the crime”. If black were to equal danger, then these people worked overtime to prove that Martin was a threatening young man.

It is why, sometimes, teachers can think negatively of black students. Is it a coincidence that black students are excluded more often than many of their counterparts – even for their choice of hairstyle? As teachers, we have a great responsibility (with the glow of a fresh teacher, I say): to shape the minds of the future. If we don’t challenge our brains’ automatic conclusion of ‘black = bad’, then how could you ever give every child in your class a high-quality education? I will listen to my brain when it says 2 + 2 = 4, but I won’t be so quick to listen when it tells me that the black student at the back is not worth engaging. That’s just society’s false tape, playing again.

Additional note: for understanding the Black British experience specifically, and gaining some initial starting points for conversations about race in your classroom, Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish) is phenomenal. A lot of us are teachers in British schools, and it would be nice to know what the world looks like from the lens of some seriously marginalised students.

2. Educated by Tara Westover

This memoir demonstrates the power of education to create compassion, understanding and to break cycles.

Tara has a difficult relationship with her father, and her home life is, at times, terrifying – to read, let alone to live. However, she defies the expectations set for her and she goes to college and excels. While there, she learns about bipolar disorder and mental health, and comes to the realisation that her father has been living with bipolar disorder. Out of this realisation springs a whole new understanding and empathy for her father’s behaviour.

Westover’s life story shows the power of education and access to change lives, relationships and communities. Without that education, she may never have understood her father’s choices and behaviour, and she may never have come to terms with the trauma she experienced, either.

Today, a lot of people are calling on others to read about marginalised voices, and to educate themselves and this memoir speaks to why that cause is so important: education and books allow people to learn and be heard. Education will create a more compassionate, inclusive society that does not fall back on hateful narratives and gut reactions, but rather takes time to listen, care and understand. As a teacher, this is what I wish to promote education as, especially for those students who perhaps do not feel seen or heard in the curriculum yet.

3. The Places I’ve Cried in Public by Holly Bourne

This book is an exploration of an abusive teenage relationship, and how the protagonist Amelie comes to terms with her trauma and mixed emotions after it ends. This book explores similar feelings behind why I was particularly happy to find a organisation like Be Her Lead and their virtual coffee mornings, because the women in those meetings talk so sensitively, and so intelligently about issues girls face which often go unspoken, and how to empower girls to speak up when something does not feel right - regardless of whether everyone says she is “overreacting” about it.

For my entire reading experience of the book, I kept thinking; “I wish Amelie could see that feeling this way in a relationship - muting your own feelings and achievements so the other person feels better – should not be part of a ‘normal’ teenage experience”. Unfortunately, society has normalised the idea that love must be painful, that if your partner hurts you emotionally, then it must be out of love. Those ideas are packaged for young people every day from the age of 5: “oh, if he pulls your hair, he likes you”, “I’m sure he didn’t mean it like that, he just loves you so much”.

It should not be normalised. Quite frankly, we should be strongly inspecting everything society has deemed “normal”, because “normal” is quite a destructive word, in my experience. As teachers, we need to be aware of what being a teenager comes with today, what burdens come with “fitting in”, and work to reverse that damage – on an individual and systemic level. If just one teacher had asked Amelie why she was suddenly so withdrawn and muting her own achievements so desperately, maybe the story would have been different.

4. My Past is a Foreign Country by Zeba Talkhani

In the UK, there is a cultural assumption that we are progressive and have never really been on the wrong side of history (this blog post does not, unfortunately, have the space to unpick that either).

Talkhani describes her school experience, and how teachers, professors and peers needed her to be oppressed and miserable, because that fit their narrative of life in Saudi Arabia. When she did not fit into those boxes, people stopped listening to her and aggressively shut her out.

Again, this is a real phenomenon of the brain (our useful but flawed friend) named ‘the backfire effect’. Instead of accepting narratives contradictory to our preconceived notions, people hold ever more firmly on to their pre-existing beliefs. We all like to be right. We do not like to change our minds publicly.

This book showed me the damage that pre-existing beliefs do to young people who are just trying to be seen for who they really are, and trying to offer their viewpoint. The start of being a good teacher is wanting to create a safe space for all identities. Therefore, the most important thing we can do, as teachers, is to resist being like the people who left Talkhani out of those spaces. She found her voice, but how many other women like her were discouraged and decided to change their narrative to “fit in”? Inclusivity in the world, and in the classroom, means seeing and accepting everyone for who they are, not for what we need/wish them to be.

Interested in joining our fortnightly virtual coffee series and continuing this discussion with like-minded female teachers and educators? Email hello@beherlead.com for an invite.