Web Site for the Official Student Newspaper of Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota Instructor works hard and demands same from students By Larissa Larivee A girl and her first boyfriend were walking down the hall together. He had his arm around her with his hand resting on her hip. One of her girlfriends walked by and grabbed her butt. She slapped her boyfriend before she realized that it was her friend. That girl is the youngest daughter of Starletta Barber Poindexter. Poindexter is an English teacher here at NCC. She works hard to raise her children with the values that she teaches. One value she teaches being that “they don’t take crap from no one.” For Poindexter being a woman of color, a teacher and a single mother can take a lot to juggle. She chose to teach English because she views it as “one of the skills lost in the Black community.” She said, “I have always felt that one of the barriers to education and employment was the inability for people of color and other disadvantaged individuals to communicate effectively.” It is still a continuing issue for her, she said, “The world has not changed so much for that to be a non-issue for me. It is always an issue, whether I want it to be or not. When I walk into a room full of European- Americans, the first thing they notice is that I am Black, and they notice I am a woman second. There are people who never guess that I have the education I do because of stereotyping.” Poindexter is divorced, and her ex-husband lives in Illinois. They met there because she was raised in Chicago. Her 15 year old daughter is “high minded” because she is influenced by her father. “He actually spends $125 for a pair of shorts!” said Pointdexter, “He and his wife live in a half a million dollar house. Also they took the girls on vacation to Hawaii a week before school started, and now they are going back to checkout timeshares there.” Pointdexter is the mother of two girls, Myisha and Star. Others observe that they take a lot out of her. She says that her daughters are always her first priority and they know that. Sometimes she feels that the girls take advantage of that. Like when she drove Myisha around when she was “sick as a dog” to find a dress for her school’s homecoming dance. Pointdexter has different values that she drills into her girl’s heads. Pointdexter makes sure to spend time with her daughters. “Sunday dinner was a big thing in my family when I was growing up,” said Pointdexter. She valued that time and wanted to share a similar experience with her children. So some days, said Pointdexter, “I get up and say today is family day. This means that they are not going anywhere without me or her sister.” She is sure to teach her daughters as well as learn from them. “I share my teaching experience with my daughters all of the time,” said Pointdexter. One of her students, Stephanie To said, “Starletta is consistent in her teaching, and she has good disciplining structures. She makes composition kind of fun.” Pointdexter is appreciated by her students. She believes that you get the grade that you earn. Pointdexter does not give you grades. Another student, Charles Seo said, “She is a good teacher! She is very informative and she knows what she is doing. She also makes an impact on her students.” When Pointdexter is teaching she walks around a lot and is loud enough to catch her students attention. Once, Pointdexter was waiting for her daughter after school. She was grading papers to pass the time but waited for so long that she started to doze off while she was grading. Finally her daughter woke her up. Pointdexter then realized that the last sentence she wrote on a student’s paper was a line from the song on the radio. “Sometimes I am told that I work too hard, that I am a good teacher, and that my students will learn a lot” says Pointdexter, “In the next breath I am told that they are so happy not to be in my classes.” Her daughters are proud that their mom is a teacher. She said, “I know that they have respect for the job that I do because they respect education. They usually know some of my students, so they know the situations, but not the individual students. They think it is hard to have an educator as a mother.”