Sonia Sotomayor confirmed in the U.S. Senate but will classrooms do her justice?

August 6, 3:14 PMDC Public School Teacher ExaminerT.S. Grant

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Truth be told, it was a little disappointing to return to class after the Barack Obama inauguration.  Man, I had my official ticket as evidence of my historical participation and my wife went to an official inaugural ball and glowed when she talked about the First Couple dancing together.  When I returned to school the day after the inauguration, I expected some sort of “thing” with my African American students.  I thought this thing would be my “in” to really getting my students to dig deeper into issues of import in this country. To my chagrin, this thing was nowhere to be found.

Now that Sonia Sotomayor is the newest Supreme Court Justice, please do not overestimate the impact that this new position will have on students, and in particular, our students of Spanish descent.  First of all, you will find that a great number of our student have no idea of this historic moment—a potentially deflating classroom moment for a teacher.   How do we get them interested in important matters if they do not even know that for the first time in history a Hispanic woman has been nominated to the United States Supreme Court? 

Actually, you got ‘em right where they need to be.   

Excitement over race or gender is not a sine qua non to grasping the true significance of a historic moment.  This brief period should be a pedagogical means to more profound end.   As educators, we should want to inspire Supreme Court justices.  So, will pointing to Sotomayor’s race or gender do that?  

Regardless how you answered that question, would thinking critically about controversial issue help prepare a student for the Supreme Court? More of us probably answered the same way on that last question.  Well, justices debate controversial issues, so let them do just that.  

Pick a controversial case over which Judge Sotomayor has presided and find a way to go through it.  The case must be controversial, or they will not care! I recommend, as an example, the “douchebag” case (Doninger v. Niehoff).  In this case, a student, Avery Doninger, on her blog—and most importantly, off school grounds—called her administrators “douchebags.”  School administration consequently banned her from running for Senior Class Secretary. The question is this: Should she have been “punished” for her off-campus cyberspace/electronic communications?

Finally, after reading the case (or if they are much younger, summarize it for them), ask them if reading the case helped them get a sense of how she would make decisions in the future. Write down their responses, and when cases are decided, find their answers, go through the new case and compare.

This is how our students should come to appreciate Judge Sotomayor and be inspired about being a lawyer and next Supreme Court Justice.  This approach stacks the building blocks to progressivist teaching. Race should be a parenthetical insertion into what makes this new justice, and gender should be bracketed within those parentheses.  

Why not bring up Sotomayor’s race or gender? Because the media have nauseatingly hyper-focused on these characteristics. Surely, in our classrooms, our valuation of a historical figure must transcend, “She was the first Puerto Rican to . . .”

Some may argue the opposite, thinking, “This serves as a shining example of the American Dream. If she can do it, other women and Hispanics can too.”   If that is the version of the American Dream being pedaled in our schools, it should be banned for its cruel implausibility.  There are about 40,000,000 Hispanics and about 150,000,000 women in the U.S.  So, to my young Hispanics I should push the ideology that “if one out of forty-million can do it, so can you”? Or, “if two women out of one hundred fifty million can sit on the Supreme Court, so can you”?

Do not get me wrong, one cannot ignore that Sotomayor’s selection was partly based on her narrative, which serves as a contrast to the life stories of the other Supreme Court justices—with an exception, of course. But, once again, is the statement, “Two people (the other being Justice Thomas) from single-parent homes made it as Supreme Court Justices, so you can, too”?  Magnifying the exceptional is not the best course of action unless one can extract some meaning behind the uniqueness.  Remember, it is higher order thinking we are after, right? Comprehension.  Application.  Analysis.  Synthesis.  Evaluation.

Look, I am all for ephemeral elation over celebrating the pioneer.  But, for our students, educators should go deeper than skin or chromosomes if we are to 1) honor Justice Sotomayor, 2) serve our students, and 3) keep them interested.  We can’t get them to think critically by merely highlighting the obvious—“Look a Hispanic woman on the court.” We cannot help them scale up to the highest stage of Bloom’s Taxonomy by parking at prima facie characteristics of history makers.  So, yes, it is okay to mention it, but her gender and ethnicity should, at best, be a warm-up in our Socratic lesson plan.  Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor would want to be remembered for her judicious, intellectual contribution to law.  

Allow our classrooms to do justice to Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor.