Keeping It Together (Barely)

Breaking News: Three thousand civilians and nineteen foreigners killed in plane crash.

Imagine that headline after 9/11.

Wednesday, four men were murdered in a synagogue in Har Nof by two Palestinians with meat cleavers and a gun. CNN, in its first report, lumped victims and murderers into the headline, “4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians Dead in Jerusalem Mosque.” A fifth man, a heroic policeman, died after rushing in to stop the murderers. 

It seems ludicrous to fight a PR battle when five men have died while they were at peaceful morning prayer. But I think that if the PR battle is won, Israel would find it a lot easier to fight its actual battle and save lives. The whole world seems to know that Israel is to blame for "provoking" the murder of four men with its actions, while Jerusalemites cry out for protection from a government paralyzed by world opinion. 

I read article after article with suggestion after suggestion, and find myself shouting at my computer, “is that even going to work? What’s going to work?”  The Ashkelon mayor has paused construction work in the city by Arab workers, but even while that makes sense, after all the attacks in the past weeks, it also makes no sense, and penalizes people who just want to build, and to live their lives in peace. In fact, the one thing it does do is let the monsters know that their plan is working—Israel is under terror, and it’s terrified, and it’s shutting down the direction from which the threat is coming. Neighbors are turning on neighbors? Very well, we’ll fire them and post armed guards. Exactly what Hamas wants. Israeli society shut down, Arabs and Jews and Druse and Christians immobilized alike, maximum chaos and mistrust. A perfect vacuum for their twisted evil.

 

It’s hard to teach with a vise clamped around my heart. When there’s a lull in class, like today as students serenely made their Kohlberg morality cartoons, I fall out of the rhythm of the day and into a daze of contemplation. Everything seems imbued with an aura of pain. Sometimes I forget why I feel sad, and have to dig around in my memory to find the source of the physical twinges at my temples and in my chest. It makes it harder to deal with average things.

A student throwing shade seems a monument of sass. A two-minute lockdown after school hours spun into a quiet heart-racing panic alone in my trailer. A gurney wheeled to an ambulance stopped me short until one of my students explained: his cousin, shellfish allergy. My truant students seem more hopeless than usual, my class clown less funny and more desperate, Orthodox Judaism more sadistically delighted in misogyny, and even the beautiful frost on the trailer walkways a slippery accident waiting to happen. 

My students don’t know that I’m struggling to focus, nor that they’re the largest source of comfort that I have for a brighter future. Three students, in three different classes, asked me to teach them a Hebrew word this week. I gave each of them “shalom.” It means peace, and hello, and goodbye, and I also shared its Arabic cousin, “salaam.” The halls of the school ring with peace as my kids leave at the end of the day, and tomorrow, I am certain I will hear “shalom” usher in the morning. It gives me strength to rise up from my obsessive news-checking, and go back to work.

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

...

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

We Who Are About To Die

 “Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant. We who are about to die, salute you.” Thus spoke the captives before they died in the games of the Romans.

Tomorrow is Veteran’s Day, which matters to teachers, and government officials, and those whose family are in the army. The soldiers I know are not the ones in the news for the military rape epidemic or for callous cruelty. They are men and women who salute freedom and loyalty and human dignity, and they head to war to fight for something in which they believe.

We who are about to die, salute you.

Of course we will honor them not nearly enough on our day off, with parades and picnics and half-off JC Penny sales. We will return the salute by continuing to live the lives they have safeguarded. And their purpose will echo through the years of our living.

We who are about to die, salute you.

There’s a power in those words. This afternoon, as I stared at the computer screen, they flitted unbidden across my mind. I watched the footage from this morning, of a 25-year-old girl being stabbed by an Islamic Jihadist at a bus stop outside Alon Shevut. I checked the condition of the young soldier (now dead) who had been stabbed in Tel Aviv, and frantically flitted to the BBC to find some other, happier, news, from another country. No go. Forty-eight children were killed today by a Jihadist suicide bomber in Nigeria.

We who are about to die, salute you.

Terrorist victims never say those words. The awful glory of a soldier doesn’t belong to them. The dignity of choosing country or love or God over life is never given to them. Instead, they leave a puddle of blood and a frightened emptiness from which no salute can ever draw the venom.

As I stayed after school, waiting for a student to finish her test, I stared at the image of the puddle of blood by the bus station in Alon Shevut. After, I drove straight to the Red Cross. A smiling woman pricked both my middle fingers and told me I’m iron deficient; eat a couple steaks and come back in a week. No, I wanted to tell her, I want to give right now. I want to add something to a world in which so much has been taken away. I’m not even teaching tomorrow; I’m not even adding to the sum of the world’s goodness by one jot on this Veteran’s Day.

As I drove home with the childish feeling of wanting to balance an unjust equation with puerile math, I remembered that we will all die. That there’s no reason not to live with the same intense purpose of a soldier heading into battle. After all, the same values, the loyalties, the honor that send him to his death, are the ones we live for. And that we can use to create a world in which nobody thinks it a good idea to kill themselves and others to get what they want, in which we're no longer in ancient Rome, cheering as humans tear apart other humans.

So. We who are about to live, salute you.

Attitude Reflect Leadership

Today during our staff meeting, we were told that the widespread problem of behavior management on campus (today we had another student-lit fire, one arrest, and two fights) is not a problem. It is a symptom of a problem. And what is the true problem?

Head down, immersed in my grading, I knew the answer. The problem is teachers. The problem is always teachers.

Nope, I was wrong. The problem was, “engagement.”

Oh, wait. Same thing.

We’re not engaging enough. Our lessons are not riveting enough. If students are misbehaving, the rigor is low or there’s not enough technology employed or we haven’t ordered enough dancing bears. We suck. We are not engaging. We will never be as engaging as Snapchat.

On my right, the teacher beside me, an incredibly dedicated, creative, driven, tough woman whom I look up to, and who had been called a “slutty cunt” not an hour earlier, burst into tears of rage. On my left, the sweet, mild, soft-voiced teacher who teaches one of my students from last year curled her hands into fists and started spitting disbelief.

Always blame the teacher.

You know it’s true. You know it’s our fault that students are illiterate, that they don’t know how to stay seated for more than sixteen seconds nor have a vocabulary larger than four-letter words. As we listened to a litany of our derelictions, I realized that the message we were receiving is the same one society broadcasts: teachers suck. We’re just not good at our jobs, or the kids would be doing better. People demonize us but don’t ever consider that the society in which we operate cripples our effectiveness. Worse are those who idolize us, expecting unreal greatness, but don’t ever consider that the society in which we operate cripples our effectiveness. Forget society; we have literally run out of copy paper at our school. Everything cripples our effectiveness.

And yet those same people who pay lip service to education, who, when they hear what I do, say, “wow” with impressed eyes and somehow feel they have then paid their dues to education, yesterday voted 60-40 against a sales tax raise that would go to education in North Carolina. Let me clue you in: telling a teacher they are amazing and you could never do what they could do is not the same thing as paying them. It is not the same as buying copy paper for the schools.

As the staff meeting went on, and around me people succumbed to ulcers and chewed pens in half, I listened to us being told our attitudes were terrible, and I thought back to Remember the Titans. It's fitting for any situation, but this fit like green on an apple. Attitude reflect leadership, captain.

It also made me think of a funny scene from that gymnast movie where, to reassure themselves before the meet, the gymnasts imagine the judges doing what they can do. Sometimes, if an administrator seems particularly obtuse, I just picture them in my classroom, trying to get my students to attend and respect them. And I feel better. 

If you can perform the educational acrobatics that we do in our classrooms everyday for at least a week, you can have a say.

P.S. Two terrorist attacks in Jerusalem today. They’re saying we’re heading for a third intifada. I’m posting this here because a week from now, Israel is going to start defending itself and everyone is going to say, “Look at Israel, starting up a fight.” But I want you to know the truth, that Israel is under attack, that a week ago in the first light rail attack, a three-month old baby was killed, and an Ecuadorian tourist succumbed to fatal injuries, and today a Druze man was killed (unlike the IDF, terrorists don’t discriminate between military targets and civilians, or, indeed, citizens). So when Israel responds and people cry because the ones who attacked Israel are in turn under attack, remember that, just like teachers, Israel often gets a bad rap for doing the best with what it can.

Silent Treatment

Have you ever tried to command the attention of 30 teenagers without having the ability to vocalize, at all? I’m in that awful stage of a cold when my voice has completely vanished, and I was reduced to snapping energetically at a student who announced, “it’s like they want us to fuckin fail this year, with no recovery.” But she got the message, and proceeded to complain without vulgarity.

Another enterprising student decided he was my voice for the day. Shenanigans ensued. His impression of “Ms. W hype on psychology” was uncanny. His rendition of the scribbled message I wrote to him about different kinds of intelligence, I applauded. His unilateral decision to administer the class a pop quiz, well, I rolled with it. Tomorrow, we do station work.

New idea, after a series of game nights with teacher friends: let’s replace TFA professional development with rounds of Cards Against Humanity. I think it approaches identity, race, privilege, and sex with a great deal more sensitivity than TFA. Who’s with me?

Coming back from the Media Center during my planning last week, I noticed that pairs of my IB students were scattered across the quad, recording something for science class. I plopped down beside two of them and started an acorn fight. Two more approached, and got fussy at the girl beside me for throwing acorns at them. They simply could not believe that their teacher was doing it. Then one of my favorite kids, a cocky-yet-sweet, smart guy with the biggest sense of humor, ever-so-tentatively threw one back, and it was on. Halfway through I realized two of the girls had their phones up. I might just be featuring on WorldStarHipHop this weekend.

The acorn battle was benign beside the others raging on campus the past fortnight. One of my more gentlemanly students was suspended for a fight in which he, his sister, mom, and grandma (!) all participated. To be fair, he was chivalrously protecting his sister’s honor. In the trailer two down from me, seniors held a full-on brawl, in which they managed to not only destroy desks, books, and shelves, but also kicked out some ceiling tiles. Luckily, the teacher in that room was a veteran of five days, much better equipped to handle student misbehavior than the teacher who today, her first day on the job, ran sobbing down the hall from her class of freshmen. And yet I still kind of judge their predecessors for quitting: oh, you didn’t know teaching was hard?

I’ve been blissfully oblivious to the atmosphere outside of my classroom, and only recently heard about the threats to teachers, the rumors of a student who used the cafeteria as a bathroom, the fights too numerous to control. Things are flowing in my classroom, to the point where even without a commanding voice, students do good work (my deputy announcing that Ms. W would wipe her runny nose on the shirt of any slackers might have had something to do with that). There’s an upside to teaching in the far back of beyond: my trailer may be isolated, but it’s also far away from anything the freshmen decide to get up to. Still, today, I felt the repercussions of the student environment when a student came in to say goodbye.

After school, as I sat grading in my trailer, I was roused by a strong knock at the door. One of my best students entered, a scholarly, serious, studious gentleman who has unfazedly knocked every assignment I give him out of the ballpark. He sits quietly in the center of the room, occasionally helping other students but mostly just focused on his work. He wears a hoodie, tall socks and flipflops, in the cool way kids here do, and never really attracts too much attention, but in his essays and creative assignments he shares his drive to achieve everything he can.

After him ran a knee-high sprout, who made himself comfortable clambering on the desks I’d set up in stations for tomorrow. And then the wonderful mother who raised the child. She came to meet me because they’re transferring him to a better school, and so today was his last day. I said everything I was supposed to say, about him being at the top of all my classes, and an excellent role model for his little brother, and how good it will be for him at the new school, and to keep being him, but I doubt he knows how strongly I meant it. Sometimes there aren’t words for how impressed you are by a student, how much you hope they make it to the top, wherever that is. He’s one who, years from now, I could come across running for senator, and I’ll say, I knew him when.

It makes me very sad that he couldn’t stay at our school, that inequality of education is such that it drives the most promising students out, leaving the most difficult schools desolate. Someday… well, I won’t quote the TFA logo of #Oneday at you. It’s tattooed on enough flabby biceps not to need my stamp of approval. And I won’t tell you #Nochildleftbehind, either. But I’ll pull from that same poem to share the mantra that got me through today, through every sniffle and sneeze: I care, and I’m willing to serve.  For whatever it’s worth. Because hey, if I don’t dramatize my job a little, what’s going to wake me up at 5:30 am and send me to school with a hacking cough and dripping nose and jackhammer headache?

"I Care and I Am Willing to Serve"

by Marian Wright Edelman

Lord I cannot preach like Martin Lurther King, Jr.

or turn a poetic phrase like Maya Angelou

but I care and am willing to serve.

I do not have Fred Shuttlesworth's and Harriet

Tubman's courage or Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's political skills

but I care and am willing to serve.

I cannot sing like Fannie Lou Hamer

or organize like Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin

but I care and am willing to serve.

I am not holy like Archbishop Tutu,

forgiving like Mandela, or disciplined like Gandhi

but I care and am willing to serve.

I am not brilliant like Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois or

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or as eloquent as

Sojourner Truth and Booker T. Washington

but I care and am willing to serve.

I have not Mother Teresa's saintliness,

Dorothy Day's love or Cesar Chavez's

gentle tough spirit

but I care and am willing to serve.

God it is not as easy as it used to be

to frame an issue and forge a solution

but I care and am willing to serve.

My mind and body are not so swift as in youth

and my energy comes in spurts

but I care and am willing to serve.

I'm so young

nobody will listen

I'm not sure what to say or do

but I care and am willing to serve.

I can't see or hear well

speak good English, stutter sometimes, am afraid of criticism

and get real scared standing up before others

but I care and am willing to serve.