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.

Hesped

The candy in your hand

Tasted of sunbursts dragged from deep beneath a tallis,

Of lime lingering in the lint,

Of forays across the mechitzah,

Of fearless childhood darting through its realm

To receive its rightful due.

The orange lozenge on your palm was each time

Traded for an unpleasantly wet kiss

(But one can excuse a Holocaust survivor many things),

And an update on our affairs of state.

I sucked on lemon and

Yiddish words fell away from

The sweet.

I unpeeled them from our conversation

And left them on the floor with my wrapper.

Cutting my tongue on a crack in the candy,

Savoring the blood and the sugar together,

I licked the wound again and again,

Ear half-cocked to eavesdrop on your stories of Auschwitz.

Bashful, blushing, beckoned to stretch across the mechitzah,

Where we sat directly opposite from you so our prayers

Could ride piggyback on yours straight to heaven

(Because my ima said G-d can deny you nothing),

I grasped the candy with all the gracelessness of a teenager

Who doesn’t want to break boundaries,

Still pleased you’d called me from the ranks of flirtatious kibbitzing

The women gave you as your due,

And thanked you from my awkward heart.

Rumor has it you reached one hundred years,

And two,

But nobody really knows—

The shul feels rather that you have earned one hundred,

Than any certainty that it’s countable.

You gilded our childhoods with honey

Against the trauma of growing up.

Nu, already.

We should be grown.

But the bite of hard candy revives you in our prayers.

The Things We Carry

Behind me, a child was shouting my name with urgency.

I stopped mid-sprint, and turned to respond.

“Happy holidays to you, too,” I answered him. Now, to my car.

I literally sprinted across the parking lot. I heard kids calling behind me, “Ms. W! Ms. W! Happy Hanukkah! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! Happy Holidays!” I waved and shouted it back, and finally, to the last call, didn’t even turn around, just joyously waved and shouted, “I’m free!”

Three days later, I stood at the Kotel, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, ruefully admitting that I am not.

The Kotel is all that we are allowed to access of the Temple Mount, and millions of people around the world gather there to pray. On the way down to the Kotel plaza from the Rovah, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, I always find myself whispering the iconic words of the recording we have from the ’67 liberation of the Temple Mount: “Har Habayit b’yadeynu! The Temple Mount is in our hands!” As I brush past the American and Asian tourists, and thread between seminary girls in long skirts and yeshiva bochrim in various degrees of kippot, I ignore the people in favor of the place.

Standing in the women’s section (my sister: “it’s bigger!” me: “Nope. Same pathetically small deal compared to the men’s”), after pushing through the larger thoughts in my mind, I always come back to the people not standing there with me. My family, of course, and those friends who need to be especially thought of. And then, like a dam breaking with just a trickle of water, I thought of one student, who will both give birth and pass her classes this spring, if all goes well.

It opened the floodgates. So much for being on vacation, on a different continent, free. Three hundred children were pounding through my mind for attention, to be thought of, just briefly, at this special place. These are the things we as teachers carry with us:

The child who is failing her senior year of high school and refuses to speak to her mother.

The child who emails me every other night for extra work because she never makes it to class.

The child who has had to leave our school, and the IB program, because her house, for some unexplained reason, is no longer safe for herself and her family.  

The child who told me, “it’s coming up that time again.”

“Christmas?”

“Yeah. And the other anniversary.”

“You and…?” I nodded towards his girlfriend across the classroom.

“No. My dad died a year from tomorrow.” Oh.

The child who is a lapsed drug dealer, who suddenly exploded in class because he didn’t have a pencil with which to write (my stash is long run out), but who wouldn’t tell me what’s wrong.

The seven children of mine from last year whose names appeared in the list of suspensions after last week’s gang fight.

The child of mine from last year whom I just found out is in jail for the foreseeable future.

The troubled child from last year whom I connected with and haven’t seen since October.

The child who always greets me with “Hey, W in the house!” and whom I’m personally cheering on towards graduation this year.

The child who only shows up in my class every other week, and only understands less than every other word of the foreign language of English.

The child who talks freely of her jail record in class, who has learned so much in her short life but still has so much to learn before she will be a productive, safe member of society.

I pressed my thoughts of them against the stones of the Kotel, asking for I know not what… I don’t believe that G-d will change anyone’s path without their own input. But I prayed for them anyhow, for all the little lucks and moments of fortune that He can throw in their way, and for strength for them when they ask for it, and myself and the other teachers when we need it, too.

As I backed away from the kotel, and began to climb the slippery worn stone steps back to the Rovah, I heard gunshot after gunshot from East Jerusalem. People startled, then continued about their business. Same in America; same in Israel. Some things need prayer and people both.

I'm Not As Cool As I Thought

I woke up at 4 am last night with a start. Relief hit me as I realized it was just a nightmare; there weren’t hordes of teenagers running through my parents’ house, smashing things. My best students weren’t hiding in the cupboards, terrified. Just a nightmare.

And yet, the nightmare disappointed me. As my little sister pointed out, it broke the “you have nothing to fear but fear itself” line, because clearly, somewhere deep in my subconscious, I’m afraid. That fear terrifies me. Being completely unafraid is one of the best defenses a person can have. Students who see this year that I am absolutely unafraid of their misbehavior soon cease to pursue it. But my uncertainty about Monday has bred an anxiety that can cause its own justification.

Kennedy has nothing on Hemingway.

I lay awake, wondering if my nightmare meant that students were even then running wild through the campus, hurting each other and destroying our school. As Jake Barnes notes, it’s awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing. I wrote out the students’ tests for this week, a few lesson plans, and eventually, I let Henry James comfort me to sleep. This morning I awoke groggy and vaguely uncertain of myself, moving through my day with weak motions. My hope is that Monday, and my students, will refresh my stamina, and allow me to roll out the last five days before break with pep.

If

Today we made it onto Channel 9 News.

Riots are actually a much calmer sight than you’d imagine. Waves of children surge slowly, then pick up speed, their brawls rippling outwards until it seems not a single child remains peaceful, except for the few dotting the outskirts with their phones, wild to record the scene. Perhaps it just feels like slow motion because that’s how the adults react, gently moving towards the widening epicenter until they hit the melee and vanish into the crowd, to re-emerge later with black eyes, bruised ribs, and ripped-off id cards clutched in their hands.

The front of the school

Today our campus resembled nothing so much as precinct headquarters. By the end of the lunch riots, the parking lots were cluttered with cop cars, and by the office building, a paddywagon was stuffed with children (“What’s a paddywagon? … Oh, that’s a paddywagon.” “You ain’t been here long enough, Ms. W”). Long enough to reflect that maybe the word “paddywagon” has racist origins? Huh. 

A policeman poked his head into my IB class, in between lockdowns, while my students stared at him in trepidation.

The back of the school
(yes, those are all cop cars. you'd think it was the precinct parking lot)

“What grade is this?” he asked.

“Juniors,” I responded with confidence, certain that none of mine were the ones he was looking for. He nodded and moved on. The kids returned to work, as I pondered their tremendous strength to ignore their surroundings.

Ten minutes later, a facilitator who had been on duty all morning came in. He gave me some things to sign, and then sighed, loathe to leave.

“It’s much calmer in here than it is out there,” he told me. I nodded in commiseration: my duty post seemed a joke, as fights surged around, too many to even comment on, let alone stop.

Before we knew why we were in lockdown, some of the students
got a little nervous... and hid under the table. Adorable!

As I walked through the school, everywhere I went, I heard teachers picking their students out of the crowd: “You stay out of trouble, you hear? That wasn’t you, was it? And it won’t be, will it?” We’re all checking up on our most at-risk, well-aware that come Monday, some of our kids will have vanished into suspensions and the courts. The vibe is still cheerful, however, as even in the midst of the chaos, teachers teach and students learn, and every teacher delivers this lesson in some variation to the students who need it most:

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

"Only White Schools Have Shootings"... Wanna Bet?

So, this conversation happened in my trailer:

Student: Ms W., what is this you handed me?

Me: It’s a tardy warning from the office.

Student: Does it matter?

Student 2: No, they give it to you when you have 20 tardies.

Student 1: Oh, okay.

Now, our school may be crazytown, but our policy is not that 20 tardies get you a warning. It’s one tardy, a warning; 2 tardies, a lunch detention, 3 tardies, a parent meeting, etc. But my students haven’t heard about the policy; they’re just drawing off of what they see. And they’re right: this year, twenty tardies means a warning. Maybe.

In other news, several of my third block were bundled back into class after I dismissed them today. They said they’d been told to return to class. A few minutes later, we were put in lockdown. My kids started texting; I started grading. Then their texts yielded news. Six students shot behind D Building. Nope, six shots fired, nobody hurt. Nope, two rounds fired by students. Nope, a neighborhood man angry that kids keep trespassing on his property fired shots in warning at them.

After school, and we’re still in the dark, except that we know that nobody was hit. I think back to this morning, when a student researching abnormal psych told me he’s so glad we go to a minority school, “because, Ms. W, no offense, but only white people shoot up schools" (another kid: "She's not white, she's Jewish!"). While it may be an assertion that needs a little bit of critical examination, it kept me feeling safe during our lockdown today. Sure, we might have proportionally more shots fired than primarily Caucasian schools, but we don't need to fear a mass, school-wide shooting. My student said so, and he knows.

Look for Me

No cake, though.

Today my TFA coach surprised me performing the Norwegian Happy Birthday song for a student. It involves hopping, marching, skipping, and dancing, and I told him to close the door and count to 30 before he came back in: there are some things you can do in front of a class of high school students that you just can’t do in front of adults.

I recently volunteered my classroom for use by some math tutoring groups during my planning period. Today, for the first time, I was in the classroom while they were there, and I got to observe the adorable little freshmen vying to answer questions and get the reward of chocolate.

They had a lot of questions for me: What class is this? What is psychology? Are you a therapist? Where did you go to college? What grades do you teach? When can I take this? What’s that on the wall?

The tutor told me that every group that comes in here wants to take psychology. It makes me feel good—it means that my classroom gives off interesting, warm vibes even when nobody’s in it. Even without a projector or all of the ceiling tiles in their proper positions.

One student remained behind when the rest walked back to their regular class.

“You staying with me?” I asked.

“Yuh-huh,” he said.

“Okay. Make yourself comfortable.”

There was a pause, in which I continued grading and he looked down at his phone.

“I gotta go.”

Good. I made it boring enough. Go to class. I looked up and nodded briefly, then threw in a wave.

“But I’ll be back. In two years, when I’m a junior, I’m going to take this class. Look for me. I’ll be here.” He ambled out, and I thought about the stability that such a request implied. In this school, teachers last on average one year, with several quitting mid-semester and a dedicated few sticking it out for two years (TFA for the win), and then those amazing people who have been here for years and would never leave. Many of my students have already begun to ask me, plaintively, if I’ll be here next year; they know the odds. "Look for me," is an increasingly unrealistic thing to say to a rapidly revolving staff. The children are the only ones likely to remain for a full four years, and even they are beating the odds when they do.

But wherever I am, students o' mine, look for me, and I'll be looking out for you. 

Student-Teacher Communication

I don't quite recognize that part of the brain

Do you remeberize stuff good?

Hahaha! Points for creativity.

=)

Yes. Me too.

Oh. My. Goodness. Yes, you have the definition of resilience down.

The most perfect mini-DSM booklet ever.

It's no coincidence I opened it to the OCD page.

Always wanted to be awsome. Not to be confused with its cousin "awesome," awsome is an adjective that
means, "sharing the properties of an adjective invented by Lewis Carroll."