MIA ROBINSON
The future of education
I've always been the only one.
In the A class, I was the only Black girl within. I was the only Black girl within Honors English. The sole student with a Mercedes at Cal State LA got pegged as a drug dealer.
I grew up in Ladera Heights, but I've spent most of my life in spaces not designed for me. Private schools. Gifted classrooms. Rooms where I was representing something before I even understood what I was representing.
I didn't know if I was Black enough. That question haunted me from elementary school to college. I overcompensated. I put rims on my car. Tinted the windows. Added subwoofers. Locked my hair. Tattooed my body. I was, like, a character, someone's idea of what Black was supposed to look like to someone.
Upon getting my first car, my mom made me sign a contract saying that I could not drive past Crenshaw Boulevard. I did not know the reason, until the day I did it. I was reintroduced into the culture that I had kept myself sheltered from. I immersed myself. I got close to a lifestyle that wasn't mine to claim.
And then I picked up a camera.
Ten years behind the camera shooting for Amazon Prime, I learned how to tell a story, how to control a narrative, how to make people see what I wanted them to see. I learned all that doing miniseries, behind the scenes videos, and live events.
But I kept thinking of that girl in the A class who felt like she had to act as though she belonged. Nobody handed her tools, and she just figured it out and hoped she was doing it right.
Later, I went back to school to earn a Master's in Teaching from USC, and helped develop the new high school Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine opened in Inglewood: a school built on the philosophy that students learn by doing.
Now I teach ninth graders who remind me of myself. Smart. Capable. They can navigate spaces not designed for them. I don't hand them worksheets. I hand them real problems. They investigate problems in their community and present solutions to adults who listen.
I'm not teaching them to tell someone else's story.
I'm teaching them how to build their own.
