AIAIAIIAIAIAIIAIAIIAIAIII!

Lately, my prayers seem rushed, wordless, blissful things, enormous volts of thankfulness that I fling heavenward as I scramble to enumerate all the blessings of life to the God who casually tossed them down. Or deliberately placed them exactly where they're needed.

Today was just that kind of day. The sort where my smile hurt my cheeks, and yet, as soon as I stopped concentrating, my mouth fit itself back into a grin. I Cheshire-catted my way through all my blocks, and even mandatory unpaid substituting during my planning couldn’t bring me down.

One of my favorite students showed up at my door five minutes before classes started, utterly radiant.

“Ohio State!” My neck snapped up as I turned to stare at her.

“Ohio State and Chapel Hill and Howard!”

“Oh my gawd!” What do you say to a kid who has been through hell and rides at the top of her class and has now been accepted to three great colleges? I put all my words into my hug.

Her story is astounding. It’s more than I can share on this blog post. Last week, she got one question wrong on a quiz on development, because she wrote, "deprivation leads to greater strength of spirit. It makes people better, stronger, more resilient." She refused to use the studies we'd covered, instead drawing on her own experience. Damn straight, girl.

That’s the tip of the iceberg on both her awesomeness and obstacles. So I’m going to end this post by simply saying how ecstatic I am right now, and giving my Columbus friends a head’s up that if she ends up choosing Ohio State, you must personally adopt one of the most incredible human beings I have ever had the privilege to meet.

Title I Triumphs

As this semester started, smoother than any semester ever has before, I found myself pondering how lucky I am to teach at my school. I realized it has taught me to teach better than any other place could have.

At the end of last semester, while in an ending conference with one student, she pointed out that she was so glad our projector got stolen, because it meant we did lots of fun projects we might never have done. That pretty much sums up the wonder of teaching at our school.

Right at the nadir of our conversation.
Check out my kid's "methinks"!

\At our school, projectors get stolen. And in a weird way, it’s fantastic. It pressures the teacher to think of creative ways to get students information, ways that challenge them to trade for notes and read on scavenger hunts and build things, instead of being tied to a slideshow. Now, there are a ton of things that you can do with a projector that you can’t otherwise (today my IB class had a long online class chat about the best styles of parenting, a la Mary Ainsworth, complete with long-winded digression on who had made their nickname “God” and kept challenging everyone’s statements—my kids are pretty dumb sometimes and apparently still can’t recognize my style of wit), but for a beginning teacher like me to be forced to teach without it for three months, utterly changed the way I see teaching. The focus had to be on the students, and their interactions, rather than on me and the front of the classroom. The ratio of frontal teaching to group projects and discussions spun rapidly in a positive direction, and I'm going to keep it there even with a projector.

At our school, children often lack a stable home life. The adults who are supposed to take care of them quite often are in jail, or dead, or simply gone. This is tragic and causes all sorts of obstacles for their development. And yet, every day is a triumph. The child who walks into my class forty minutes late makes my heart leap; I know he missed the bus and walked two miles to get to school. The child who slams out of class silently gives me hope; just last month she would have screamed vulgarities, but now she’s using the coping techniques we worked out. The child who takes his father’s death and uses it to fuel his educational drive; the child who learns from her time in prison and is four months from graduation; the children who demand that we talk out Ferguson and the children who challenge every psychological study on the effects of poverty on development by citing their own experiences and the children who school me in what is possible for them make me a better person each and every day; they erase the prejudice from my heart and tolerance for injustice from my worldview. Those who succeed, succeed wildly and celebrate their successes with more elation than my entire high school had at graduation.

I see you taking a selfie. And I will photobomb it. And make you email it
to me. And put it on as the background for the class slides tomorrow.
Have we learned our lesson? No phones in class!

At our school, students don’t always bring their own drive to class. Sometimes it’s the pressure of having to provide for their family, sometimes it’s a history of failure, sometimes it’s a simple teenage lack of giving a care, but students don’t always come ready to learn. The one thing that can push them past that, on a really bad day, is their relationship with their teacher. If we have built up our compassion for them, if we really know them, if we share ourselves and our own stories and make time to prove that they matter to us, then they will do what is right for them simply because we ask it. Sometimes because we beg it. But we are forced to get to know our children, and that is a blessing. Because they have mystic stories, and extraordinary talents, and quirky selves, that enrich every passing second.

So, yes, a day at our school feels much more challenging than it might at another. Growing up, I didn’t have near so many helicopters circling on a regular basis. Growing up, my alma mater never made it into the news except for announcements about the school play. Growing up, we didn’t walk into school to see our state flag flying upside down by accident, and point it out to hear the principal comically comment, “Huh. Just that kind of day. I guess that we are in distress.” (He’s a funny man. I think his sense of humor is keeping us afloat).

But a day at our school is also always a day of extraordinary, a day when hundreds of children face unbeatable odds, and some of them, inevitably (because after all, they don’t know the math), beat them. And we teachers, we watch it happen, and cheer ecstatically on the sidelines, and try to spur kids up off the bench.  And sometimes, just sometimes, they win the game.

College-bound wall of pride: the small crew of seniors I teach are already hearing back and making plans.

That Boy In Your Classroom

127 “That Boy In Your Classroom”

My family is pretty much a set of professional feminists at this point. As two of them visited over the past week, both inquired about the salience of gender in my school. Whereas our teenage identity issues revolved strongly around our womanhood, for the students in my school, I think race and class are the primary issues. Women tend to achieve academically where their male counterparts won’t, and although every position on the matrix of intersectionality is fraught with its own issues, Black womanhood has a strong voice and Asian womanhood a determined scholarship that steer them towards success (Latina women are, I think, more at risk for academic failure than Latina men, in our school—but that’s purely anecdotal. Gotta check the data). However, for me, gender still throws regular curve balls.

Student-teacher communication at the end of a test: commentary on the state of society.

 Friday, I showed up at 6:30 am for a conference with a parent. Of course, she was a no-show. That early in the morning on a teacher workday, it was just me and the security guards chillin in the office. As I wedged my way between two of them to reach the copier, one appealed to my professional opinion as a woman:

“You like your man to open the door for you, right?”

“Ummmm, I dunno. Guys never really opened the door for me until I came south.”

“Oh, you from the north? So your man didn’t, huh? And you didn’t mind?”

“I didn’t really think about it.”

“And so he didn’t really think about it. But your man now, he better open that door for you.”

I coyly pressed the start button on the copier to avoid having to answer for all womanhood.

“And I know women. Women love hard. They love hard, but when it goes the other way, that goes hard too.”

You know what? I didn’t need those copies until Monday. Leaving sheets of IB essay outlines to froth forth from the copier for the next comer, I told the men to have a nice day and fled, terrified that anything I said would show the hard side of womanhood.

Lately, I keep anything I don’t want stolen from my classroom on a cart, which I wheel into a friend’s room in the building near us every afternoon and pick up every morning. On the first day of this semester, I knocked on the door of his new classroom, and entered to muted applause from the young men sitting near the door. Pretending I didn’t hear them, I began to thread the technology cord through its complicated thief-defying tangles.

“Ms. W. He’s got something he wants to say to you.” My helpful friend was directing my attention towards a student.

“You beautiful, meees.”  

I nodded graciously. “Thank you.” I made an effort to keep my eyes from narrowing as I bit the inside of my cheek. Beautiful, my ass. I’m a teacher. Don’t even start with me, child. And even if you were an adult on the same page as me, don’t go down that route. I’m smart. I’m competent and funny and even patient, now (at least, in the classroom). Beautiful doesn’t begin to approach it. No male teacher has to take this crap. Wait, do they?

I can never decide, in these situations, if I’m more uncomfortable because the student is abrogating a line of authority, or because they’re taking such a frankly male view of things (I’m a guy, and I can hand out accolades to women even if they are in charge of me), or because beauty is considered an achievement by our culture instead of an accident. All three thoughts stumbled around inside of me, and while I wanted to make it a teaching moment and somehow refuse the kid’s compliment, I also realized he just wanted to say something nice. So I smiled and walked out and reminded myself, “a child thinks I’m beautiful, and that’s okay, too.”

The next afternoon, all of the male students in the school were called to the gym for an announcement about football. It was during my planning period, so I went, and met the principal on my way in.

“It’s okay if I come, right? I want to see what it looks like to have all the boys in one place.”

“Oooh, boy,” the principal answered. “All the boys in one place? I did not think this through.” We laughed.

“What do you have for the girls?” I urged him. “If the boys get football as an incentive, the girls should get…” We thought.

“Softball? Volleyball?” Then our attention was turned to quieting the crowd.

Whoever thought that the football coach could contain the attention of 800 boys without a megaphone didn’t quite plan this out. There was the punk contingent, that didn’t give a hoot about football, and shouted every second they could. There were the nerds, hunched together over game consoles. There was a mass of boys who couldn’t fit on the bleachers, swaying and slouching by the walls. They ranged from little boys whose backpacks were larger than they were, to men with full beards.

I was one of three women in the entire room. A female security guard stood at one side, and the assistant principal sat on the floor. I don’t know if either of them felt as strongly aware of their femininity as I did. Both wore pants. I, in a pencil skirt and blouse, was staunchly keeping a section of the bleachers quiet, but some of the shouts unnerved me, so once things quieted down, I found my favorite security guard and stood beside him. We were privileged to witness the football coach stir up the boys with a ritual shouting: “it don’t take nothing to join something that already exists. But building something up that ain’t exist yet, that’s what books get written on and movies made on.” At the end the boys overwhelmed his speech with noise and stampeded out, impervious to the overtures made to their masculine teamhood.

On Friday’s workday, I attended a professional development on the black male and literacy. Titled “That Boy In Your Classroom,” it purported to be about how to reach an African American male demographic heavily at risk for failure. It actually just raised questions it didn't answer. Statistics showed that only half of African-American males in our district are literate by third grade, and overwhelming numbers of them are suspended compared to other students. When we saw the statistics on reasons behind suspensions, it seemed unequal.

African-American males’ most common reasons for suspensions were: disrespect, loitering, and talking back. Caucasian males’ most common reasons were: smoking, leaving class without permission, and abusive language. The second is much more objective, the first dangerously open to cultural interpretation. 

Yes! You go, kiddo!

The presenter opened with the question: “do you think African-American males actually misbehave at much higher rates than the rest of your students?” We thought it over, and agreed that at least anecdotally, it isn’t so. Then he asked whether he should, in a year, entrust his African-American male child to the public school system, when it only has a 50% chance of teaching him to read, and a high (can’t remember the numbers) chance of suspending him until he drops out. The African-American teachers who were also parents in the group weighed in:

“My child is very active. How will others see that? As inability to follow directions? Or just hyperness? As a threat? Or cute?”

“I’m not worried about my child. His education starts at home. He’ll do fine.”

“My child has a strong mind. If he thinks you’re wrong, he’ll say. How will that be perceived by his teachers?”

I listened to their fears for their children and pondered the larger question posed—why do so many young African-American men do worse academically than their peers? The presenter showed data that took into account class and location—it was apparent that even in the same schools, and classes, they were faring worse. Why? Is there an answer that people know, but aren’t telling?

I thought about the boys in my classes. They range in capability and achievement. Some of the most intelligent fail because they don’t show up enough. Some of the most ignorant work terribly hard until they pass. The most frustrating element in my classes each semester? That snarky but illiterate girl who needs to prove her street creds to a class that largely doesn’t care. The worst cases of burnout I’ve seen? Hispanic kids so frustrated by their inability to read English on an academic level that they give up from day one. Still, whatever happens in my classroom aside, statistically speaking, the African-American male is the most at-risk. What do you think is the reason? Whatever jumps to your mind first, most likely has something to do with it… it probably establishes his teacher’s expectations, too.

My class had their picture published on the James Madison U website!
Three college students volunteered, running a college application workshop day for my IB crew.
P.S. I know they look adorable here, but they're actually fierce scholars. Fierce adorable scholars.

Your Move, America

At my school, every day feels like Martin Luther King Day.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

Teachers believe it, too. We believe unarmed truth is ignited like a flame by the education we preach. So we teach a history of oppression out of textbooks that don’t exist in classrooms without heat or pencils or a sense of safety and our students look at us with jaded eyes that know more about the lived brutality of a national folklore than we can ever tell them. They light up when we mention a brother –probably Toussaint L’Ouverture, the books have no other—we know secretly that he won’t be on the state tests and so we’re stealing their time from them when we teach them what our conscience suggests they should know.

There are some things we can’t teach them about, at all.

 

They can’t really feel Rosa Parks. They crowd onto their cold buses for an hour’s ride across our oddly-zoned district that amasses children of color into certain schools. Dark-skinned children and tanned-skinned children and golden-skinned children can ride in any part of the school bus; they are the only ones on the buses that come to our school. They are segregated so completely that some think they have never seen racism, except when they wander into stores and are followed and heckled by thieves of their dignity. And across town little Caucasian children are taught that they will never see racism, either. They will never see African-American children, neither.

My students are not Dorothy Counts, nor Ruby Bridges, not the Little Rock Nine. Sure, they can get salty when they think their dignity is threatened, but they can’t see what’s benign and what’s malign, what’s education and what’s predestination, what to mock and when to talk. Their education, both in and out of school, has obscured that for them. 

They walk into my classroom to see Lassana Bathily’s picture on the wall and one after another the classes ask, “Is that a mugshot?” Because, you see, he is a young black man, and not smiling, and they know that dark skin on a man’s face means he is a criminal. They are smart, and have learned everything that they have been taught with consistency, even if it is rubbish. They run with their crew, angrily tattooed with statistics that put them in jail or worse in the next five years, branding every action asked of them as “dead” because once a thing is said it’s not so scary.

Hero, not criminal. Spread the word.

But I teach history, you know. And psychology, and writing, and I can’t do that without seeing the oppressive cycle that revolves silently, secretly, beneath the crust of America, and feeling the pain that is felt silently, secretly, beneath the proud profanity and lack of humanity, and hearing the anger that courses silently, secretly, in the suddenly-literate essays that my students gift to me. The great crack that runs down the middle of America severs the truth in half, and we teachers run around desperately, fiercely, trying to patch it for one, or ten, or a hundred of our best students, so that the children can grow up a savage army of peace that will spread the unarmed truth.

My student writes:

The flaming youth has understood that inspiration is not all it takes, to render on the passionate truth but knowing that it merely depends on the phase, when lies are present, boundaries are lessened, because in that presence there is a lack of respect in, it, which makes the situations to choose, harder to go through, with this improbable fiction we wish that we could just fix it, but we consist of dereliction because our willingness is missing, I'm eagerly ardent but equally charted and dreamily starting to focus of course on what is important but also what’s extorted, I guess I'm in a world filled with people who will never make it, and people who never made it, telling every body they're real but the truth is, those people are the fakest.

He’s talented, and smart, and barely passing school, and statistics give him a 29% chance of prison and five times more of a chance of being killed by gunfire than a young white man. Your move, America.