We Do It In Your FACE!

One of my students asked me to come to her step competition. Since it’s Saturday, I can’t make it, but I went to her practice this evening. I rolled into Clanton Park, the usual scene of the gang fights that spill over onto our campus, with slight apprehension. But around me, the park was full of kids playing and adults watching. I was proudly introduced as her history teacher, and then plopped on the grass to watch the step routines.

Step, I explained to my mother earlier this evening, is to dance, what rap is to music. The girls stomped and clapped fiercely, shouting in rhythm and creating a cadence I couldn’t resist nodding to. There were three coaches: the head, named “Coach,” walked and spoke slowly. His track pants sagged and his gait matched it in mellow, artistic coolness. Then there was Robbie, a frenetic youngish guy in skinny jeans and a baseball cap that fell off when he showed the girls the steps. Lastly, a man named “Pop-pop” in a baggy pinstriped suit with red lining poking through took individual girls aside for coaching.

They kept telling the girls to show more attitude. The girls looked mean, and fierce, and screamed, “we do it in your face!” to end the show. They combined discipline with a street style. I could have watched all night. My favorite was the very serious girl of eight or so, standing to the side of all the high schoolers and matching their every motion. After practice, I noticed, walking back to my car, that the parents were standing in a circle with the coaches, having a town hall about the way the step teams were broken up. Even though it was clearly a confrontation of some kind trying to solve an issue, there was a nice feel about it, as though it was a town meeting and everyone was invested.

Earlier this morning, a student of mine looked morose as he walked into the library to wait for health class to start. I headed over to the table where he had his head buried in his elbow, and parked myself beside him.

“How about you tell me what’s been biting you since yesterday, and I tell you that you can handle it because you’re awesome?” He looked up.

“Look, I know there are some things... I can’t solve everything. But it’s killing me to see you so sad, and I have to know if there’s something I can do.”

He waited a second, then answered. “A kid’s been riding me about my skin color.” A pause. I knew who it was. In fact, he’d written an essay about it earlier in the year. Being told he’d been baked too brown so he was black, and comparisons to dark animals. I’d shut it down in class, and called the perpetrator’s mom, but apparently it was still going on: the kid acting up is too much of a funny-man to know when someone’s hurting.

 

“He’s still doing that?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s not going to do that anymore. I’m going to take care of it. You don’t have to worry about that.” There’s something else I want to say, what is it? Oh, there it is.

“Listen, only you can give someone permission to make you feel bad. You’re the one who thinks they’re legitimate. Man, you have beautiful skin—people would kill for skin like yours. But there are going to be times in the future out of school, where people are going to ride you about your skin color, or your accent, or your nationality, or whatever—the basic parts of you that you can’t change and don’t want to. But you just have to remember that you are wonderful, that you are one of my most beautiful students, inside and out, and that if they’re so cracked they can’t see it, well, that’s their problem, not yours. Because you are above that.” Pause. “Okay. I’m going to copy your guys’ work today, and then I’m going to work it out with that kid.”

He went, and I pounded out some frustration on the copy machine, and then sat and waited. And waited. And waited. Sure enough, a good half hour after school started, the culprit strolled through the library doors. I called his name, and beckoned him to follow me to the back tables by the media specialist’s office. He’s a smart kid. He saw my face, and said, “uh-oh.” We walked towards the back tables, and again, “uh-oh.” I cocked an eyebrow at his apprehension, and he let loose another, “uh-oh.” It was those uh-ohs that told me how to approach it. The sweetness of them, the awareness that he knew this was something serious, something he couldn't mess with, allowed me to just talk to him straight. We sat at a table and I watched his expression.

“Look. I love that you’re funny. You make our class funny. But there’s one joke that you took too far. Making fun of this guy’s skin color. I know you’re friends with him, and I know you josh him about it, but it’s become too much. He’s feeling really bad. That’s something serious. That’s race—he can’t change that, and shouldn’t want to.” He was watching me intently, not making a joke, just listening. Probably a world record for him on not interrupting. But the way to seal the deal was with participation.

“Did he say anything to you? Let you know how he was feeling?” Implied: If he had, you are a good person who would stop doing that.

“No, he just joked back. I didn't know.”

“Yeah, he keeps a stiff upper lip. But I know right now that it’s added up and he’s feeling bad about it. So I want to make sure you’ll cut it. There is no place for that in our class. Okay?”

Serious nod. If this kid’s not talking, he’s got it.

“Okay. Get to class.”

We stood up and I felt the joy that finally, finally, I'd run up against a problem that could be solved merely by words. 

“Hey, Ms. W?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you tell my teacher I was with you? So I’m not marked late?” Smart kid. Excuse all that half hour of late with one teacher’s nod.

“Sure.”

And school rolled smoothly on.

A Metaphor

Scene: Empty bus lot, middle of the day. Today, to be precise.

A gaggle of teachers sit on the curb, sunning and eating lunch. A student of mine perches on the railing near us, strumming on his guitar. Some birds flutter above the concrete in the distance.

Teacher 1: I think that bird has a broken wing. Should we…

Me: What? Should we what? What can we do for it?

Teacher 1: I care a lot about birds. Birds are my thing. That poor bird, it’s trying to fly.

Keen-eyed Teacher 2: No, I think it’s two birds. They just look like one because of how they keep rising and falling together.

Teacher 3: Oh, yeah, they’re fighting.

Me: You know, that could be a metaphor for our whole experience here. We think we see a bird with a broken wing, rush in to help it, and realize when we get closer it’s just two kids beating each other up.

Scene.

Today was flies. Lots, and lots, and lots of flies in my classroom. My first block got creative and made flycatchers out of scrap paper and tape, which were incredibly useful. They caught nary a fly, but they kept the kids from swatting and screaming, the two activities they’d been most engaged in previous to fly-catcher-building.

We played a game with points to get students to understand the difference between capitalism and socialism. It’s amazing how staunchly my high-flyers defend capitalism and my low-achievers advocate socialism when I suggested averaging all their grades together to be fair. 

Fourth block today my inveterate talker wouldn’t shut up, so I beckoned him up to the board to deliver a rousing lecture on socialism vs. capitalism. He did a great job, coached a bit by the over-aged student, W, who sat in the front row occasionally heckling with questions geared to get him around the difficult issues, and the class both laughed uproariously and listened intently, so it was a win all around. I walked to my car surrounded by the sound of students calling goodbye to me, sad that I won't have the same children next year. 

Everyone Has Their Toes Out

Today one of my slower, sweeter students walked in early. She cast her eyes around the classroom, and then glanced appreciatively at my feet.

“Everyone has their toes out,” she observed.

Yes, my toes are out. And my legs in sundresses, aggressively displaying that I am five miles into my half-marathon training and more muscled than is quite feminine in our day and age. And my smile, because the past few weeks have been so good. I told a friend that life’s been too good to blog about, and she responded, “people want to hear about the good stuff, too.” Do you? Do you really?

You want to hear that I spent two days at a SIOP workshop where I learned fantastic strategies for engaging my English Language Learners, that I tried one of them today and the kids were all over the drool-and-pass (my name for it)? That the obvious nugget of wisdom dictating that graphic organizers must get turned back into text hit me with a crack of joy?

You want to hear that I invited teacher friends over for Shabbat dinner and chilling with these people was the loveliest Shabbat ever, even though they kept asking me what food was? Challah and matzah ball soup they knew. Falafel they had to ask about, and babaganoush gave them pause.

You want to hear that a student nominated me for a best-teacher contest at the local mall and I won? That I gave my best doodler and my most inveterate story-writer a sketchbook and a journal after class, and the glows of their enthusiasm stayed with me all day? That my kids spent all Friday deeply immersed in their essays on the atomic bomb, weirdly intent in ever single class?

You want to hear that I spent motzash playing bananagrams with friends at Ben & Jerry’s, that I bumped into my favorite security guard while jogging the McAlpine Greenway, that I’m reading my last George Eliot novel for the first time, that the TFA 2013 corps is creepily forwarding to me the contact information of every Jew or maybe-Jew in the 2014 corps so I can call them and welcome them to Charlotte?

You want to hear that I survived my last TFA session of the year, despite an agenda that listed:

·      Ice Breaker (5 min)

·      Reflection on failure in general (20 min)

·      Reflection on personal failure (55 min)

·      Closure (Reflection on reflection, obs. Mine: TFA fails well.)

And in which I managed not to projectile expel my disgust with TFA catchphrases too violently, though eventually the repetition of “honesty and vulnerability… pushy reflection… fullness to the conversation… move us and our leadership forward…” without any regard for connecting sense moved me to a vocalized mockery.

You want to hear that I attended my first Charlotte Teacher’s Institute seminar on human agency and met a delicious old, ancient, antediluvian math teacher (the only male in the seminar) who tickled every bone in my body with his assumption that because I said things that were intelligent, I’m neither a Humanities teacher nor a Democrat?

  

You want to hear that today I shared my grandfather’s testimony with another class learning about the Holocaust and they stared, open-mouthed, silent, unbelievably fascinated while I spoke, wrapping the magic of something I care about around them and nodding in tune when I laid on them the responsibility to never forget and never let it happen again, anywhere to anyone?

You don’t want to hear the lazy birdsong outside my window, the ice cubes clinking in my sweet tea, the soft susurration graded papers make as they slip onto my carpet, the text alert from a happy parent, the slow click of the clock telling me that it’s 6:00 and I’m done, done, done with every single thing that had to be accomplished today. Now for a jog and a swim and a slow rendezvous with George Eliot on the porch. You see? Too good to blog about.

A Body in the Ceiling

This is what my inbox looked like today, minus the 150 regular emails about student discipline:

Re: Computer issues

Re: Phones down

Re: Maggots in Trailer Ceiling

Re: Student theft

Today, like yesterday, the computers and phones were down in the trailers because of the recent storm. Have you tried to teach without a powerpoint when you’d planned your lessons with a powerpoint, or a printer to print your handouts from? Have you been in the same room with numerous people with a jail record, and no way to contact the office? It’s not as much fun as it sounds. I spent my planning period frantically scrabbling around with my thumb drive and cords.

This morning my students noticed that small white maggoty-looking creatures were falling from our ceiling. “Noticed” is misleading—actually they screamed and bolted from the classroom. I kept my cool, but inside, I was screaming too. Custodial staff enlightened us—these were wood-eating worms, not maggots, because maggots need a body to gnaw on. I admitted that the notion of a body moldering above my ceiling crossed my mind as a likely probability.

When we moved to another classroom, a student who was on his way out with security stole the remote control to the projector. I gave mine to the teacher of that classroom, and am pretty sure I will be teaching without a powerpoint even once the computers are hooked back into the system.

During lunch, one of the older teachers was talking about how our school isn’t so bad. “The grass isn’t greener anywhere else. You’ll always have disrespectful kids who won’t work in any class.” He looked at me. “Except for you. The grass is definitely greener for you. I’d quit if I taught 9^th grade standard.” Thanks, buddy.

Oh, well. It could be worse. There could have been a body in my ceiling.