René SING-BROOKS writer/photographer

The Answer is in the Room

First published on OpenStax.org—Oct 29, 2019

My mother gave all of us short names. “So I wouldn’t waste breath shouting,” she said when I asked her why she named me René. I am a guy, by the way. I was born in Bluefields, on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast. Back in the sixties, my neighborhood had oyster shell covered walkways connecting our homes and at nighttime we moved around like homebound ghosts lit by kerosene lamps. I often saw, in the early mornings, neighbors taking out chamber pots and nonchalantly chatting with each other on the way to the outhouse.

My paternal grandparents raised me from year one. They weren’t chatty about education: you got up early, got ready, had your breakfast with coffee—yes, I was properly caffeinated at eight—and headed out to the Moravian school where, most likely, your parents, aunts and uncles had gone before. I remember a primary school teacher saying to us, “I had your folks here. You are no news!”

Our neighborhood street lights were rather dull, allowing the Caribbean night sky to pristinely reveal itself. Watching the stars from our veranda triggered my first career aspiration: astronomy. Later on, the chance finding of a piece of ancient pottery—or so I thought—led to archeology as a second and more firmly established ambition. I wanted to understand my world and my place in it; I wanted to explore the ‘what’s this place and why am I here’ riddle. Unfortunately, my schooling experiences felt devoid of magic: mostly mechanical big birds regurgitating chewed up stuff down my throat. It isn’t that there weren’t any encouraging classroom moments, just that they were few and far apart. When the magical moments did happen, it was as if the classroom walls dissolved and something deeper than words made its way into our midst. And this is, at its essence, my appreciation of vital education: it awakens one’s sense of wonder and invites co-discovery in a space nurtured by trust and compassionate respect.

I currently live in Jackson Heights, New York, and have been in the United States since 1992. I came for a one-year school-sponsored visit, to be part of an oral history program at SUNY (State University of New York) Buffalo. Well—this won’t surprise you—I overstayed my invitation by twenty-six years. A good chunk of these twenty-seven years (fourteen to be precise) were spent as a basic computer skills instructor, including seven years as the facilitator of a video production workshop at an organization that provides multiple services to people with history in the criminal justice system.

Now I am back to school at age 58, at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, NY. I am working on my associate degree in Commercial Photography, currently undertaking my second semester. And it has been a challenging stretch, mainly having to adjust my native learning process to the idiosyncrasies of teachers, to the demands of academic performance, and to the pervasive ideas about career and professionalism. It is a tricky journey and I can’t stop wondering whether this campus/classroom/lecture model is as good as it gets.

I have been asking myself lately, “If I had a truckload of money, or at least a half-filled Mini Cooper, would I still go to school?” My answer is yes, even though I long for a different kind of school. And the answer is yes because I believe we need to learn together; we need to realize the power of communal understanding and we need to connect to the magic of learning—of learning with a sense of deep caring. It is about bringing the ‘what’s this place and why am I here’ to a shared environment, one that calls up a multiplicity of inquiries into a diversity of knowing and of ways of representing knowledge.

As I write this piece, I am reminded of something a colleague — a man who spent over thirty years in prison — often said at his housing project’s community meetings. At each session’s end he would remind everyone that the answers are in the room and that we are here to invoke them. This is one of my more powerful takeaways from fourteen years working with people with a history in the criminal justice system: the answers are in the spaces we create together; they are in us to the extent that we are fully present to being in the world as caring agents, partakers of the wonders of all sentient life on this earth. The answers are in the room and the room grows with our understandings.

go to Love in the Year of the Plague || go to A Decisive Moment

go to Resilient Learning || go to Beyond the Twilight of Revolution