CELS Spotlight: Creating and Influencing Education with Lamar Ok ’12

KIPP Infinity Elementary School is located on West 133rd Street in Harlem, right next to the City College of New York. It is a part of the Riverside Park Community, a complex of buildings in Harlem that includes over 1,000 apartment buildings. KIPP Infinity takes up one of the floors of one of these buildings, where it serves students from kindergarten to grade four, a group of over 500 students, mainly young students of color. According to their website, 92% are on free or reduced lunches, and, as explained by Lamar Ok ’12, nearly all are from Harlem. Some even live in the Riverside Park Community buildings.
I met with Ok over spring break, though classes at KIPP, which stands for Knowledge is Power Program, were still very much in session. Ok teaches third grade math and social justice (a curriculum he designed himself) in the orange University of Texas room. His classroom is spacious and heavily decorated with posters and drawings, and though classes had finished for the day, KIPP Infinity was still buzzing with students participating in after school activities. Ok helps facilitate an after school running program for girls, and because the school is laid out in a loop, the students run, jog and walk through the hallways with their friends. Towards the end of our interview, Ok and I walked a slow lap around the school, with students constantly stopping to talk with him; their admiration for him was evident each time they asked him if he would run a lap with them after he was done talking with me. Ok didn’t grow up in New York City but is a native of Providence, Rhode Island. He attended Conn at age 16 on a full scholarship after a mentor and alumni encouraged him to consider it. He recalled the peaceful and safe feeling he had when visiting, the attraction of Tempel Green and the close proximity to home. As a student, Ok was heavily involved in campus life: he was a youth coordinator at Unity House, worked back- stage for Eclipse, studied modern dance under Associate Professor of Dance Heidi Henderson and was a driver for OVCS. Ok cited his narrative non-fiction class with Professor of English Blanche Boyd as especially transformative.
In 2011, Ok came out as trans- gender during his junior year at Conn. Though he described the experience as tough, he felt especially supported by his professors and created one of the first transgender student support groups on campus. He documented these experiences, along with another trans student, through the writing and performance of a play in front of a packed room. In looking through the Voice’s archives, I found the article writ- ten about the show by then-Editor-in-Chief Jazmine Hughes ’12, during which Ok joked about expecting perhaps 50 people to attend the showing in Cro’s Nest, but instead per- forming for over 200. He felt as though he came out of his shell while at Conn, describing these experiences as letting him “live a little.”
As a Human Development major and a student in the elementary education certificate program, Ok excelled academically, specifying in particular Professors of Edu- cation Michael James and Sandy Grande as crucial in his development as an educator. They “shaped my view on education,” said Ok. Knowing his passion lay in the education of young students of color like himself (“My calling is black and brown kids,” he told me), Ok was shocked when he had been placed in a predominantly white school district for his semester of student teaching in the spring of his senior year. He admitted to having trouble empathizing with white people, but said the experience changed his life. Teaching a class full of young white students (there were only two or three students of color in his class) “changed my view on whiteness and white privilege.”
A precursor to the curriculum he would later use at KIPP, Ok created a unit on racism and privilege during his time student teaching. The students were not only receptive, but took matters into their own hands: Ok described a day where the students wrote letters to Arizona lawmakers in response to the controversy over anti-immigration sentiment. “Teach the hard things younger,” Ok told me afterwards. With graduation approaching, Ok strug- gled with his decision on where to go and what to do after graduation. He knew he wanted to continue teaching, but coming from a low-income background, he couldn’t
wait weeks — perhaps months — for a teach- ing position to become available. Though hesitant, Ok considered the controversial Teach for America program, which had of- fered him a position, as well as a strong ini- tial salary.
TFA has been a topic of much conversa- tion on campus recently, with SGA contem- plating passing a resolution to forbid TFA from recruiting on campus. Critics of TFA view the program as taking students with limited teaching experience and placing them after only a summer of training into some of the country’s most underserved schools. Alternately, many Conn students had TFA teachers as young students, and feel connected to the program. Regardless, multiple Conn students per graduating class chose to teach through TFA for the required two years after graduation.
Between academic years at Conn, Ok was sleeping in his car. He was determined to not go back to to that, but with the fear of not being able to find a stable teaching job right away, Ok did what was best for him- self and accepted a position with TFA.
For two years, Ok taught at a charter school in the South Bronx. He continued to expand his diversity training; this time, he wasn’t teaching young students, but his TFA peers. Ok trained over 60 white teachers on issues of privilege and power, and, when I asked him about the differences between teaching elementary students and adults fresh out of college on this topic, he paused for a second to consider his experiences. Though younger students are more recep- tive right off of the bat, he decided, older students come with prior experiences that inform their thinking. Regardless, both are equally important. Through TFA, Ok earned a Master of Education, before leaving the South Bronx for Harlem.
Though Ok’s classroom is empty as we talk, it’s easy to imagine it filled with eager students. As a charter school, KIPP uses a lottery system to accept students, though Ok says that he “serves the same students” who would be in public schools in the Harlem area. Ok described KIPP as being the “least militant” of its peer charter school systems in New York City, and feels as though his relationship with KIPP is one of “working with, not for them.” He explained that in past years, feedback from teachers (such as the desire to have the start of class pushed back an hour, or to hire more teachers of color) has been used to create real, tangible change — more teachers of color were hired, and students had an extra hour in the morning to start classes on a better, more awake note. KIPP, according to Ok, knows they’re not perfect — no institution ever is — but he feels as though KIPP listens to his, and his fellow teacher’s, desires, and strives to make positive changes.
A typical day for Ok at KIPP starts with the students eating breakfast at school, fol- lowed by a casual morning meeting (“[We] kick it before school,” said Ok with a laugh). Ok then teaches his first class, which is two and a half hours of math, but with plenty of breaks and times to refocus. The students then have recess, lunch and their daily spe- cial — dance, music, art or gym. Ok then teaches a reading class, a special education math class, as well as his social justice cur- riculum, brought with him throughout the years to its current form, twice a week. On an average day, Ok is home by 7:30 p.m., and back at school at 6:15 a.m. the next day.
Though Ok’s current students are only in third grade, KIPP prides itself on the ways in which it prepares students for college. All students receive a mentor from their KIPP days as they traverse four years in college, a tangible connection to the place they started at. And though it’s far off, it’s possible that some of his students now will be his men- tees nine years down the line as they prepare to become undergraduates.
With his place at KIPP firmly established, Ok can’t help but look towards the future, and he wants to bring his ever-growing and ever-adapting social justice curriculum with him. Ok hopes to earn his Ph.D. in social justice education, and told me, “I want to show folks behind me and my students that I got everything.” Somewhere down the line, this may include opening his own school for young students.
While not in the classroom, Ok enjoys working out, cooking and watching bad TV (from a sociological lense, he insisted), but believes that teaching is nothing short of a lifestyle, he says. He is always thinking about his students, and says that they are “invested in me, because I am invested in them.” •