Push is an novel written by Sapphire which tell us the story of a 16-year-old black girl named Claireece in 1987. This teen is obese, illiterate, lives in the New York City neighbourhood of Harlem with her dysfunctional family, and has been raped and impregnated twice by her father. Moreover, she suffers constant physical and mental abuse from her unemployed mother.
There is a chapter in this story entitled “Challenges”, which make us understand better how she behaves towards adults such as her math-teacher. Moreover, we can observe in this chapter how she accounts for her being insolent, and why she decided to challenge her teacher.

At the very moment the teacher understood that Claireece was trying to challenge him, he tried to make her give in and assert his authority. Nevertheless, it remained impossible for him to seem serious while doing so because of his shyness. Indeed, his face immediately turned red and he started to shake as if he were powerless in front of her. According to me, the teacher’s main failure is the fact that he doesn’t take into account his student’s being rude and insolent towards authority. The school must be located in a deprived neighbourhood and the pupils must be quite tough and unruly. Teaching in this kind of school is definitely something very hard. Deciding how to react towards each reactions of each student is a hard nut to crack. Maybe if I were a teacher I would try and have fun with my students so that they be at ease in my class, and become a kind of friend. As a matter of fact, everybody obeys to his friends. That’s why it seems to be a good way to me to teach with such a behaviour, although there is no denying that it is something hard, especially for a shy teacher.

Let’s try and understand what happened in Claireece’s mind when she decided challenging her teacher. First of all, we may take into account the fact that she didn’t want anyone to know that she was illiterate, and understand that she feared her