I experience privilege every single day. I wake up in a warm house that I own with my husband. I get my four healthy children ready for the day, I eat the food that is stocked in my pantry, I drive one of the cars we own to my career that earns my family health insurance. Aside from vacation, I want for nothing. I work hard, and always did as a student, but getting a bachelors and masters degree was just something that was my next step, not something I had to fight to achieve. I teach Spanish, which is an interesting place to be as a white American woman. There is definitely a stigma attached to not being a native speaker of the language I teach. Because of this, I try to be very deliberate in making the cultural lessons I include, and images that are a part of my lessons anything but stereotypical. Working in a rural district in CNY, diverse is not the first adjective you would choose when describing the student body I teach. While I focus on the cultures and people who speak the language I teach natively, I also include examples that my own students can relate to in order to help them identify better with why they should learn the language. I almost have to do the opposite of what other subjects might need to. This made me reflect on the fact that students who are people of color, or have a different identity than the vanilla examples that fill textbooks and lessons, struggle to identify with their lessons in each class, every day.
