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Wrestling Windmills, Christopher Girman

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This manuscript explores the teaching process by following the protagonist‟s four year journey at a middle school in Edinburg, Texas. The narrator passes through four distinct phases: first-year angst, pedagogic subversion, converting the natives, and, ultimately, personal and professional acceptance. Daily interaction disrupts the narrator‟s worldview, complicating his relationships with peers, colleagues, family, and the local community. In a series of moves designed to make himself more accessible to students, the narrator encounters sexual, racial, and gender bias—much of it his own. Finally, after a serious accident in Central Mexico during Spring Break, the protagonist relies on his students to …