Learning in LA

In some ways, she could have been anyone’s grandmother.  She worried about stepping outside of the car in the rain without a plastic rain bonnet.  She invited me into her home and proudly showed me her late husband’s awards from work.  When a group of seventh-grade girls gave her a welcoming poster, she praised their artwork effusively.  She was sweet and polite.  Yet at the same time, Elisabeth Mann’s experiences in Auschwitz, where she lost her entire family to Nazi gas chambers, have left an indelible impression upon her, and I find it impossible compare her to anyone else I have ever met.

I left during the middle of the school day to pick her up at her home in Hollywood.  It was a bit like riding in the car with a time capsule.  That sounds crude, I suppose, but it’s hard to express the feeling I got while talking to Ms. Mann.  It was strange to be driving south on the 110, cruising by signs advertising an LA Erotica convention, as she told me about her liberation from Auschwitz in May of 1945.  She was released from a cattle car in a Danish village with nothing but the rags she was wearing.  ”God bless them forever,” she says of the Danes who took her in and gave her bread and milk and cheese.  This is a woman who speaks of Hitler, not as a distant historical madman, but as a living, breathing sociopath whose actions had profound and horrific effects on her life.  She speaks of FDR, Churchill, and the Red Army with the same immediacy.  In fact, every experience that she recounted held this photographic vividness that let me actually see the events and places she was describing.  She is an artist, and currently has a collection of her holocaust-themed paintings on display at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.  I think it was in part because of her very visual artist’s mind that Ms. Mann was able to speak of her experiences in a way that made her lister feel that they were actually living those experiences with her.  And it was clear when she re-told her story that she was re-living the experiences to a certain extent as well: as she spoke to my students, her eyes brimmed with tears several times.  She told the students that hatred is “the most powerful poison in the world,” and that they must be kind to one another.  One of my 8th grade boys, a popular football player who has ben failing my class for months, came up to her afterwards and hugged her, sobbing.  That was just one of the moments from that experience I know that I will never forget.  When I dropped her off back at her home, I was a different person than I had been when I picked her up. 

On this interview she gave to CNN, she tells many of the same stories she told the students.  It’s definitely worth checking out.

So I guess that this is probably my last blog post as an LA middle school teacher.  My life has been a tornado of activity:  selling furniture on Craigslist in preparation for my move back to Seattle for the summer, preparing for my trip to Costa Rica in July, learning Japanese for the big move to Nagoya in August, emptying out my classroom.  But in the midst of all these preparations for the future, I’ve been trying to find ways to value the present, to recognize the fact that an incredibly powerful and important part of my life is coming to an end.  I wrote all of my students short letters of goodbye and encouragement, and I created a video compilation of my pictures and movies from teaching for the past two years that I showed to one of my classes last week.  Several eighth grade girls were crying at the end–and a part of me felt like doing the same thing.  Likewise when the teachers in my department arranged a surprise goodbye party for me.  Looking back at all the words I have generated about my experiences here for the past three years, I now find myself at a loss.   It feels too big for words.  Teaching at Southeast has not always been easy, and I know I still have a long way to go before I become the teacher I really want to be, but I can think of no other single experience that has enriched me more as a person.  I’m excited for Japan next year, and the blog will certainly continue, but I already know that no matter what the future may hold, there will be many times when I miss this place, these people, and this phase of my life.  

A view from Mount Baldy, the tallest mountain in So-Cal, which I finally hiked last weekend.

Crossing a river during our return to Malibu Creek State Park on Saturday

Since my return from Ecuador, every day in the classroom has been packed with activity, and the weeks have been streaming by.  It’s hard to believe that I’m going to be leaving Southeast and Los Angeles forever in less than two months.  I’m excited about Japan, but in some ways the time seems to be going too fast.

A few quick highlights from the classroom.

My 8th Grade honors students recently read the novel Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros.  It’s about a Mexican-American girl named Celaya who grows up in Chicago.  All the family squabbles and fiery characters make it perfect for dramatic re-enactment–particularly by Spanish-speaking kids.  I asked the students to create and perform their own skits about selected chapters from the book.  The result was one of the most memorable periods I have ever spent in the classroom.  They memorized their lines, brought in props, and truly brought the story to life, chasing each other around the room, screaming at one another in Spanish, and fully inhabiting the characters of the book.  Not every skit was Oscar-worthy, of course, but watching them act made me wish that I would just sit down and shut up in my classroom more often.  I’ve been told many times that master teachers are usually facilitators of learning rather than lecturers, and that statement seems more and more true with each year in the classroom. 

One of the many characters who came to life during our skits.

Later on in the same week, I took my journalism students on a field trip to the LA Times building.  I am acquainted with a couple of the journalists there from when I wrote for the now-defunct “Homeroom” latimes.com education blog.  I can’t deny experiencing a bit of an ego boost when we happened to run into one of them during our tour of the building–in front of the students, it made me seem like some kind of insider, especially since she had written the front page article for the Times that was out on the day of our tour, and she took quite a bit of time out of her workday to answer my students’ questions about being a journalist. 

Later, Pulitzer-prize winning car critic Dan Neil walked by, and our tour guide called out “What have you got in your driveway this week, Dan?” 

“A Bentley,” he said, and then rattled off some statistics about its torque and horsepower.  My seventh-grade boys’ jaws dropped.  And from the teaching perspective, the pot just got sweeter when our tour guide told the students that Neil had majored in literature in college and then used his love of good writing to create unforgettable car reviews (Here’s the lead for one of his Pulitzer-winners: “Like many great beauties–Marilyn Monroe, for instance–the new Chrysler Crossfire has a faintly tragic air about it.  And like many consumers of beauty–Frank Sinatra, for instance–I’m only too happy to exploit it.) 

Our tour guide was an affable PR employee who called the kids “dude” and seemed to love his job.  He kept the kids fully engaged.  At one point, though, he pointed out the $600 ergonomically-sound desk chairs used by Times journalists–I felt proud (though also a little embarrassed) when one of my Eagle Times reporters asked why the company is buying desk chairs at $600 apiece instead of hiring back recently laid-off journalists.  Our guide was prepared with a solid response–something about carpal-tunnel syndrome and journalists needing good chairs like construction workers need hard hats–but I still liked the lingering look of journalistic skepticism on my student’s face.

It was amazing, though, how engaged they were.  “Deadlines” are sometimes treated more like ”suggested completion times”  at The Eagle Times, and some students can seem more interested in organizing the “Shout-Outs page (”Lakers Rule!” -Miguel) than in doing any hard-hitting journalism.  But when they were in the Times building, overhearing real reporters conducting intense phone conversations about missing documents and walking past secret service SUVs at the building entrance, they were all business, asking insightful questions and paying close attention.  I’ve been spouting vague aphorisms about what it means to be a “real journalist” all year, and I don’t really know if they’ve paid much attention–but for one day, at least, they showed that they had learned something, and they were embryonic versions of Terry Gross and Steve Lopez: fully engaged and critically aware young reporters.

Jobs: 1 Gates: 0

After an intense visit to the LA Times in the morning, we took a break and went to a Mac Store during the afternoon, where Mac “Geniuses” taught the students how to use media-editing software.

And there’s still more excitement to come this year–I just scheduled Auschwitz survivor (who cameos in the Freedom Writers movie) to come speak to my 7th Graders, who have been reading Elie Wiesel’s Night. I’m probably even more awed and excited about it than my students are.  And my journalism kids will be participating in a city-wide Model United Nations simulation in early June… my only regret is that all of this seems to be rushing by so fast.  For some reason, I keep wondering what to do  with all this.  In other words, how can I wrap up my Los Angeles living and teaching experiences in brown paper and take them with me? 

Our Sierra Club Guide took us to the filming site for MASH on our hike, and the kids goofed around on this rusted-out Korean-War-Era Army Jeep.

My urge to write this blog came out of that nagging question, but looking back at a meandering, scattershot entry, I realize that the impulse itself is probably misguided.  I can’t take time with me.  I have to enjoy it and live it fully while I’m still here–and that lesson, at least, is something I can take with me.

First glimpse of Ecuador from the window of my plane.

A street in Quito. Famous statue of an angel caps the hill in the background.

A marine iguana takes to the water

     A few more examples.  On our second day, we went snorkeling around the tiny island of Bartolome, and I saw sea lions, Galapagos penguins, and a 3-foot-plus white-tip shark.  White-tips aren’t aggressive, but this one still had a distinctly shark-like look to it, if you know what I mean, and it was a weird thrill to swim within a couple feet.  It felt totally unreal, like I was watching a 3-D movie about oceans at the science center.  I had the same feeling when I swam underwater with a turtle near Isabella Island the next day.  The turtle was only a couple feet away.  It hovered above the ocean floor on its four green wings like a graceful underwater zeppelin (though when it started eating fish, I saw things from their perspective for a moment, and the peaceful zeppelin turned into a malevolent fish-gobbling spaceship).  

The crater was too large to fit into the frame of a single photo.

      We saw the second largest volcanic crater in the world, Isabella Island’s Sierra Negra, then hiked over to the smaller Chico volcano, where our guide pointed out holes in the ground that were venting hot air and steam from the magma just below the surface.  Feeling that hot, wet air rising from the rocky ground gave me a strong impression of the Earth as a living, breathing thing (this was not, however, the volcano that actually did erupt on the islands a few days later: that was La Cumbre, which we did not visit).  On Isabella we also saw blue-footed boobies.  The name of these birds has inspired countless T-shirts sold to tourists on Santa Cruz, all in varying degrees of poor taste.  But when I actually saw the birds, corny puns were the last thing on my mind; all I could think about was those feet.  I didn’t know that nature had that particular color of blue in its palette.  And why just the feet?  No doubt another one of the mysteries that fascinated Darwin during his stay on the Islands.

Sea lions like to commandeer abandoned ships in the marina.

Craig, Miriam, and me on lava rock.

At the beginning of this month, I became one of the 8,500+ Los Angeles teachers who received a pink slip from the district.  LAUSD is facing massive budget cuts next year, and they basically just went through their list of employees and sent a pink slip to the 8,500 who were most recently hired.  11 other teachers at my school got one.  My administrators have made it clear that they do not want to see me go, but there’s not a lot they can do–in fact, their own jobs are on the line as well.  There is a pervasive feeling of uncertainty and dread about how L.A. schools will be funded next year, and it seems like everyone is looking for letters of rec. and revising resumes.  Next year, it looks like I will be teaching English in Nagoya, Japan–an exciting new adventure (I’m working a new blog title–Gringo goes to Japan?).  I’ve started taking elementary Japanese at UCLA.  At the same time, I’m trying to make the most of my last few months here at Southeast.  The kids and teaching continue to be great.  One of my 8th graders somehow heard that I had gotten a pink slip, and she sent me this message, which I found really touching.  She’s been collecting signatures around school protesting the situation.  What else?  I just started a class website, which has been fun to play around with.  It will be hard to leave Southeast. This job has been an incredibly powerful and rewarding life experience, and it’s not one that I feel entirely ready to leave behind.

Shopping in Baja, Mexico

I ended up feeling like I was in some kind of science-fiction dystopia when I crossed the border from Tijuana to the U.S. in January.  Liz and I sat in long line of cars, about four lanes across and a mile or so long, for three hours.  I slowed my car to enter the line at the border a little after dark, and a guy with a squeegee and a wet cloth immediately started cleaning my windshield.  I made it clear that I did not want my windshield cleaned, but he finished the job anyway, hoping to guilt me into paying for it. This would happen a number of times during the three hours we spent in line, most poignantly when a kid who couldn’t have been more than eight took out a bucket of water and started splashing it on the windshield, then found that he wasn’t tall enough to wipe all of it off. While we sat there, literally hundreds of people asked us for money in one way or another–people selling Jesus statues and Sombreros, taco/churro/burrito/tamale-making short-order cooks , a pregnant woman carrying a child and a cup, etc.  It was after dark, so the glow of the video-screen billboards, which were everywhere, cast a strange, flashing blue strobe light over everything.  They advertised luxury vacations, cars, and tequilla.¹ 

Our trip through the line ended in the following conversation with a U.S. border agent:

“What were you doing in Mexico?”  (said as if “buying cocaine” were the only reasonable answer).

“We went to Ensenada for the weekend.” 

 “What you do for a living?”

 “I’m a teacher.”

 “Where?”

“Southeast Middle School.” 

“What do you teach?”

“Los Angeles.”

“I said WHAT do you teach, you idiot.” (last two words implied).   

“Oh.  English.”

He grunted and made a dismissive gesture that I took as permission to enter the United States of America. 

After crossing the border, everything opened up into the generously-paved, well-lit luxury of Interstate 5.  As if people so desperate for money that they would carry their children around among idling cars for several hours a day didn’t exist.  As if Mexico itself didn’t exist.  It struck me as unjust, wrong, in a way that I hadn’t expected.  They say that the U.S.-Mexico border is the only border in the world that directly separates a first-world country from a third-world country.  For me, crossing that border was like actually acting out the inequality and injustice of global economics: I played the white American male safely ensconced in his two tons of metal, loaded with cash and health coverage and two-day Mexican car insurance.  And everyone else was arrayed around me, desperately trying to convince me to buy, buy, buy.  Granted, realizing that the socioeconomic arrangement of our world is unjust is hardly groundbreaking, but as I sat there I knew with unfamiliar certainty that this isn’t the way things are supposed to be.  

A week or two after getting back home to L.A., I was inspired by my border-crossing experience to participate in the 2009 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count.  Basically a bunch of volunteers just wander the streets of L.A. late at night and count the total number of people who appear to be homeless (they trained us on the criteria for making such identifications-layers of clothing, shopping carts, drug-dealers-don’t-count, and so on). During our training they told us that the 2007 count, which included people living in shelters or in their cars, found that there were more than 77,000 homeless people living in Los Angeles County.  That number is amazing-a homeless city nearly the size of South Gate.  I walked the streets with a couple of older guys, one of whom was actually the director of United Way Los Angeles.  It was inspiring to talk to the other volunteers and hear about their reasons for participating-a few actually claimed to have been inspired by Obama’s Inaugural address. I only counted two homeless people in my search area, but the area only included a few blocks and there was a homeless shelter full of people sleeping nearby.  The area also included several multi-million dollar homes:  thousands of square feet dedicated to housing only a few people.  Clearly, extreme economic injustice exists within our borders as well as outside of them. 

One other experience in the same vein: today, my team history teacher organized a field trip to a workers’ advocacy center in Downtown Los Angeles for some of our kids, and I came along to help out.  Theoretically, the workers’ center is a place where the men and women who live in Los Angeles and work in the garment industry come to get support and get organized.  So far, unfortunately, the garment industry has stamped out most attempts at unionizing garment workers, who frequently work for multiple hours a day at far below minimum wage under sweat-shop conditions.  One small victory came a couple of years back when Forever 21, which has a factory just a couple blocks from Southeast Middle School, settled a lawsuit with a group of garment workers who had been protesting their poor conditions and unpaid overtime for years.  But the settlement included a hush clause, so those garment workers were not allowed to talk about their experiences after receiving their settlement money, and since then, the movement to organize workers seems to have faded a bit (though there is a great documentary about the Forever 21 protests which I purchased at the center: Made in L.A.).  Despite the challenges involved in this kind of activism, hearing from people who are working hard to unionize local workers was really powerful.  A volunteer talked to the students for about an hour about where their clothes come from and the conditions under which they are made, and a few students shared stories of parents and other family members’ experiences working in the garment industry.  An 8^th grade girl talked about her mother bringing home a sewing machine and clothing every day, then spreading her work all over the living room and putting in hours long after dark.  The volunteer also told the kids about how to shop responsibly and stay involved with the movement to support fair labor practices.  The students were fantastic, listening and participating enthusiastically.    

Like everyone else, I’m still trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, how to make it matter-but I’m pretty convinced now that I won’t be satisfied unless I’m doing work that improves things in this messed up world of ours.        

¹ Footnote: I recently heard a story on the radio about “CuervoNation“-an actual place somewhere in the British Virgin Islands that was bought by the Jose Cuervo Tequila company as a promotional stunt.  Apparently, it is literally an independent state, with its own declaration of independence, dedicated to “parties not politics.”    Maybe I’m just being a party pooper, but the fact that such a place actually exists seems pretty sick… sad… or something.  Definitely doesn’t ease all the Sci-Fi dystopia paranoia I’ve been having.

The pressure's on.

      We’re finishing up the first semester in Room 311, and that has meant a lot of presentations.  7th graders are presenting PowerPoints about their “significant event” research papers, honors students are giving long delayed “book talks” about the novels they read over winter break, and the Room 311 Class President candidates have been making their stump speeches.  It’s always fun to watch what happens when you put middle schoolers in front of the room.  Each student’s uniquely quirky personality is under the white-hot light of peer scrutiny.  Understandably, some wilt in the heat, looking at their shoes and mumbling their way off the stage.  No amount of lecturing about eye contact and voice volume can prevent this.  But some really shine in the spotlight.  One 7th grade honors presidential candidate, Raymond, started his speech with a question:

     ”How many of you guys have roaches at home?” The class giggled and a few hands went up.  “Yeah?  Yeah?  Well, I’ve got so many roaches in my apartment.  And whenever I wake up in the middle of the night I catch them playing poker, smoking cigars”-here he pantomimes a poker-playing cockroach.  The crowd goes wild.  “And then I say get out of here you nasty roaches, get out!” 

     Now he’s got the whiteboard eraser in hand and is capering up and down in front of the room, driving the roaches away. 

     “We don’t want our classroom to be like that.  When I’m president, I’m going to make sure everything is clean.  No roaches in here.  I’ll represent us well to Mr. Schlosser and make sure that everyone gets the job they want” (the President has the power to choose his or her “cabinet” of whiteboard sprayers and paper passers).  “I’ll be the best president yet.” 

     Raymond sits down amid a cascade of applause. 

     Another competitor followed, and he made a touching, awkward attempt to slipstream off of Raymond’s success:

     “Um, well, I have roaches in my house, too…” 

     Needless to say, Raymond won the final vote. 

     I’m glad I have students like him to put chinks in the armor of my fuddy-duddy teacher persona.  When I saw Raymond up in front of the room, grinning and chasing invisible cockroaches with a whiteboard eraser while the class cheered him on, I thought: that’s the way to live. 

   The following statement, made by teacher/psychologist Haim Ginot, is ubiquitous in the schoolteacher world.  I’ve seen it on classroom walls, in the syllabi of Ed. classes, and on the pages of teaching manuals.  I will quote it in full, but I promise not to use it to launch into a treatise on the student-teacher relationship and its nature:

   “I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom.  It’s my personal approach that creates the climate.  It’s my daily mood that makes the weather.  As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous.  I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration.  I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.  In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or de-humanized.”

   Let me just say that, from my experience, this statement is very true.  When they function as a group, students are reflections of their own teacher’s behavior to a profound degree, and a teacher’s power of the emotional feel of his or her classroom is immense. 

   This same type of relationship-the group reflecting and reacting to the behavior of its leader, for better and for worse, exists between a country’s people and a country’s leader.  It is a more subtle and tenuous connection, trickier to observe than the teacher/class relationship, but it’s there, even (and sometimes especially) for those who claim to ignore politics or to despise the current President.    

   I was a pretty avid Obama-phile from the beginning-I have a bumper sticker and a T-shirt, I went door-to-door during the primary and attended a fundraiser during the general election-but I maintained a certain critical distance.  I thought Obama was easily the best candidate in the Democratic field, but I had my reservations: I don’t like his position on Israel, I think his positions on gay rights and environmental regulation are too weak, and he shouldn’t have reneged on his campaign promise that he would take public financing.  And these things are still problems, I suppose.  But as I watched the inauguration with my students last week, I felt that Obama briefly transcended policies and positions, that he really did become a sort of “Educator in Chief.”  He changed the emotional weather in our country.  Like the millions on the Mall, the 60 students crammed into our classroom were watching the inauguration with rapt attention.   Maybe they didn’t understand all of Obama’s speech, but they still sensed its importance.  “Just wait,” one student said.  “Maybe soon they’ll elect a Mexican.”  Because the man on the screen had dark skin, and he was in charge of the country, the students sitting in front of me were seeing themselves and their own potential differently. 

   I’ll try not to indulge in inauguration rhapsody here.  I’m sure everyone has heard enough of that from Chris Matthews, Brian Williams, Gwen Ifill, et. al.  (and let’s not forget NPR, which has been completely beside itself for weeks).  Obviously, it was not a perfect event-the botched oath, the recorded music, Obama’s nervous giggle while taking the stage-but something real and important happened.  The nation’s symbolic moral leader, its “teacher,” changed, and the emotional weather in our country changed, too.  I think that Lincoln and JFK, despite their personal flaws and political imperfections, have shown that this may be a President’s most memorable power: the power to set the tone of our national discourse.  My inner cynic suggests that Obama will turn out to be a pushover.  My inner tabloid addict suggests that Obama has a love child, keeps coke in his cufflinks, and wants to bomb Pakistan for obscure personal reasons.  My inner radical suggests that Obama is even more dangerous than Bush: a palatable persona to cover up the sins of our Evil Empire.  But for now I choose to ignore those voices and remain happily illusioned (opposite of disillusioned?).  I am happy believing that this new President, a thoughtful, well-read person who wrote poems in college and considered writing fiction for a living, who refers to segregation as “bitter swill” and speaks of fallen soldiers “whispering through the ages,” really will make the country a better place.  He calls us to community service and involvement in local politics, and it feels right.  I know that if I feel a desire to rise to the call, others might, too.

   Anyway, I still live in L.A. and teach Middle School… Here are shots from last weekend’s trip to Ensenada and this weekend’s hike with my kids in Malibu Creek State Park.  Good times both. 

An Ensenada street-the city was a strange mix of U.S. and Mexican influences

La Bufadora ("The Blowhole"), a methane vent off the coast of Baja, blows water 80+ feet in the air.

8th graders enjoy scrambling up a muddy hillside in Malibu Creek State Park, filming site of MASH and Planet of the Apes.

(PS:  Here are two fun articles on Obama as reader and Obama as writer.) 

The legs of an overturned deck chair are just visible

My Journey Home:

7 PM Saturday, December 20^th: I depart LAX on Alaska 471, the last outbound flight to Seattle that has not been cancelled.

11 PM 12/20: After circling Olympia for an hour, our flight is diverted to Spokane because of snow and”insufficient traction” on the runway at Sea Tac.

12 AM 12/21: We find ourselves on the ground in Spokane (a 5-hour drive from Seattle in good weather). The ground is snow-covered and six other Alaska flights are lined up at the gate, also diverted, also waiting to get in. The captain  kills any hope we had of refueling and heading out to Seattle, telling us  that the weather there has continued to deteriorate (in that chipper-airline-pilot-on-the-PA tone). We wait on the tarmac for an hour.

1 AM 12/21: I de-plane in Spokane. TSA has gone home for the night, so if we leave the gate area we won’t be able to return to it. Six-jets-full of disgruntled passengers are swarming the three Alaska employees on duty in Spokane. The employees seem a little panicked, trying to subdue the crowd by saying that they are just as unhappy that we are on the ground in Spokane as we are. This statement hits a nerve for some. Everyone is shouting questions at them, and one woman repeatedly shrieks “What about monetary compensation? What about monetary compensation?” The Alaska ground manager promises that the Red Cross will arrive with pillows and blankets for us, but this only seems to add to the unruly atmosphere. “No planes are leaving Spokane tonight,” he says again and again.

2 AM 12/21: I abandon the Alaska gate situation. I find my bag and go to the arrival parking zone, which is full of people trying to find hotels and taxis. It’s dark andwindy. The air temperature is well below zero. I jump a Hilton shuttle, though I don’t have a room there yet. I ask the driver to radio and see if there is any vacancy.  He confirms a room for me.  I eat two bananas and two apples off the complimentary fruit table in the lobby, then go to bed feeling like I’ve cheated fate somehow.

7 AM 12/21: I overhear someone at the Hilton’s continental breakfast saying that the airport has added a new Alaska flight at 10 AM out of Spokane. I buy a ticket online and rush to the airport.

11 AM 12/21: I find out that this flight, along with all other Alaska flights out of Spokane that day, has been cancelled because of weather. Another browbeaten Alaska ticket agent over the intercom: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I have no flights out of Spokane today. I have no flights tomorrow. I have no hotel room compensation. I have no flights on other airlines. Do I need to do this Green Eggs and Ham style? Go home! I’m sorry, please go home!”

2 PM 12/21: I have been waiting in line for a refund and to make other travel arrangements for three hours, watching Southwest Airlines shoot off plane after plane, including flights to Seattle. Alaska, for unclear reasons, is unable to do this. I call and hold one of the last Southwest Air tickets out of Spokane for the following day.

3 PM 12/21: I start talking to Mary Ann, the woman in front of me in the refund line. She and her husband Jerry are from Montana, and they have driven to Spokane to in order to catch a flight to Sea Tac and then to Santa Barbara to see their daughter. They offer to give me a ride in their truck to Seattle that day. I happily accept.

8 PM 12/21: Road conditions are terrible. The dash of Jerry’s truck tells us that the battery is not charging. I consult the GPS Liz got me for Christmas, and it tells us that there is a truck stop in three miles.  A trucker looks under our hood, hits the engine casing with his screwdriver a few times, and announces that we have a broken alternator. Inexplicably, he laughs at us a little as he says it. We book two rooms at the Holiday Inn in Moses Lake, Washington.

9 PM 12/21: Dinner at Denny’s with Jerry and Mary Ann. They regale me with stories of their children and their lives. Extremely nice people, and I am eager to please because they are giving me a ride, so I offer no objections to the far-right political views that they wear on their shirtsleeves. Jerry owns a timber business, and one of their children is now working for a “free market thinktank” in London. They believe that environmental radicals in Montana are trying to re-populate the forest with wolves to “keep the people out.” These radicals have an “eco-centered” religion instead of a “God-centered” one. Jerry and Maryann tell me lots of things like this, and I nod and smile most of the time, either tacitly agreeing with them or trying to redirect the conversation to easy shared ground (”Bloated bureaucracy doesn’t help anyone,” I say, shaking my head grimly). They have some unusual opinions, but they are also smart and cultured–they know Spanish, they read Malcom Gladwell and Isabel Allende, and they lived in Chile for ten years (While Jerry was working in the timber business there. I didn’t ask for details on that.) 

8 AM 12/22: The mechanic at the Moses Lake Dodge dealership tells us that our alternator is fine–the truck’s computer was just thrown through a loop by weather conditions. We check pass conditions and start driving west again. Mary Ann tells me an absolute torrent of stories during the trip, filling almost every second of the six-hour drive. One favorite was about her daughter’s terrible experience giving birth in the  British world of “socialized medicine” (”They didn’t even give her towels or food! Nothing that isn’t absolutely necessary, they told us. This could be what we’re headed for in the United States if we don’t watch out”). She also told me about a time that Jerry hit a deer with his truck. “You know Jerry,” she explained, “he doesn’t slow down for deer.” I ask polite follow-up questions and tell them a few things about teaching in L.A., but mostly I just repeat variations on “Hmm, interesting!” “Oh no” and “Oh jeez”.  I should be honest, though: listening to her actually was pretty fascinating.

2 PM 12/22: After a pit stop at the Osh Kosh B’Gosh outlet in North Bend to buy clothes for Jerry and Mary Ann’s granddaughter, we arrive in Seattle. I’ve never seen the city quite like this: well over a foot of snow, and everything seems quiet and magical. We pull up to my house, and I invite Jerry and Mary Ann in for lunch with my parents. They stay for a couple hours. Mary Ann tells my mom many of the same stories I heard on the ride over, and Jerry and my Dad chat about microfinance in developing countries.  Their opposing ideologies rub up against one another awkwardly a couple of times, but otherwise they get along famously. We exchange contact information and wish them a warm  farewell–I try to give them money for gas, but they ask me to spend it on my students instead. I’m happy to be home: a blizzard has hit Spokane, and flights aren’t getting out.

In retrospect, I wouldn’t have traveled to Seattle any other way.

Honey in the backyard.

Honey and Sophie like peeing in the snow, eating it, then throwing up

Oreo observes this activity with contempt.

     Around 3 PM on December 1^st, an 18-year-old named Eduardo Rojo bought some spray paint at a store on Firestone Boulevard, several blocks northeast of Southeast Middle School.  He and a friend allegedly huffed the spray paint, then got back in their van and started driving west.  A few blocks away, Louis Salazar, 14, and several of his classmates were waiting for their bus under a shelter in front of South Gate Middle School.  Rojo’s van jumped the curb and plowed into the students, killing Salazar and hurting four others before wrapping itself around a pole. Tragic beyond words. A student who witnessed the accident also fainted and suffered a head injury.  Rojo’s passenger jumped out of the van and escaped, but Rojo was arrested.  Here’s the original LA Times Story. 

     None of the students involved went to Southeast, but the accident shook the whole South Gate community-several of our administrators spent the next day at South Gate Middle coping with the aftermath. When I initially broached the subject with my journalism students, I wasn’t even sure how many of them would have heard about it, but before the words “how many of you heard–” were out of my mouth, the class erupted in chatter, telling me that they knew all about it, that they knew Louis’s family, that he had been on his cell phone asking his mom if he could go to McDonald’s when the van struck, that they wanted to write an article about it.  Moments like this-when all my students have been thinking and talking about something without my knowledge-often lead me to reflect on the community in which I work. 

     When I started teaching at Southeast, my mentor teacher told me that South Gate is like a small town in a big city.  “In a couple of years,” he said, “you’ll be a fixture around here.  Everyone will say ‘Oh, you should take Mr. Schlosser, he’s a good teacher,’ and you’ll be getting all your former students’ little brothers and sisters.  Everyone is related to everyone in South Gate.”  This was hyperbole, of course, but he was right in a lot of ways.  I have taught quite a number of sibling and cousin pairs.  And South Gate did act like a small town school in the wake of the tragedy: people papered the bus shelter where Salazar was killed with mementos and condolences.  Our school collected donations for the Salazar family to help with funeral expenses.  The incident was discussed over the PA and in the school paper-and Salazar didn’t even go to Southeast. 

     But South Gate is a low- to middle-income “small town” in the heart of the nation’s second-largest urban area (LA Basin = pop. 17.7 million).  One of my friends who just moved to the L.A. area told me about how her Orange County family had given her a color-coded map of L.A. County, with “dangerous” areas colored red, borderline areas colored orange, and safe areas colored green.  South Gate was orange.  Liminal.   

     Last year, a student at our school was murdered in a domestic dispute.  Later in the same year, another student was critically injured on campus after accidentally falling from a stairwell to the cement three stories below.  Each incident brought an adequate and appropriate response from administration.  At the same time, though, the school did not stop its day-to-day business.  There were no school-wide assemblies or discussions–at least none that I heard about.  I’m not blaming anyone for this.  It’s a symptom of a larger reality: Southeast Middle and Southeast High serve several thousand students a day, with students moving in and out all the time.  This adds a degree of anonymity to every student’s educational experience that is difficult to combat.  Students are removed from the school regularly, and others move in.  This often happens with virtually no fanfare-one day “withdrawn from school” just pops up on my attendance screen next to the student’s name.   

     This week I had an intense wave of déjà-vu while standing in the elevator that I take to my classroom every morning.  I remembered standing in exactly the same position, listening to exactly the same metallic whine of the elevator’s hydraulic lift, almost two years before.  I remembered that I used to associate that sound with extreme anxiety, that I used to see every day as a battle from start to finish, a massive challenge that I wasn’t sure I could handle.  For a second, a sensation of remembered anxiety crawled up the tendons in my throat.  This feeling is common to every rookie teacher, I think, but mine was also akin to the fear that Southeast’s sixth graders must feel when they see the massive yellow edifice of the building and hear the loud thrum of conversation coming from hundreds upon hundreds of students in the quad each morning.  The industrial sound of the elevator seemed deeply connected to the size of the school, the impersonal weight of the task I was undertaking.  And Southeast only has about 1300 students.  The enrollment at South Gate Middle School is almost 3000. 

     I don’t feel that terror much anymore.  I’ve gotten to know and like my colleagues.  I feel more confident in my teaching abilities.  I know how to control the emotional space of my own classroom, greeting each student by name at the door, meeting their parents, tailoring my lessons for specific groups.  I can see the school in the way that my mentor teacher does now-as a community, a secret small town in the middle of a big town. 

     Yet that big town is the one that Kerouac’s Sal Paradise called the “loneliest and most brutal of American cities.”  Even in New York, he said, you feel a kind of “wacky comaraderie” with the people around you.  Not so in LA: “It’s a jungle.”  And that was in the 1950s. 

     Southeast’s 8^th grade class during my first year of teaching wanted to make its class slogan “Smile Now, Cry Later.”  This phrase has its roots in gang culture.  It is supposed to capture the ideal attitude of a gang member, pushing pain to the side with a stoic smile.  The principal eventually nixed the idea, but I do think that the phrase captures a certain facet of the South Gate gestalt-South Gate thinks of itself a tight-knit community, but it has all the problems of a low-income inner city neighborhood.  The community rallies and moves on, draws together and splits apart, which points to a paradox: choosing to be “a small town in a big city” can seem both admirable and heartless at once.   

     I guess that’s where I am with South Gate right now-it’s a place of contradictions.  At its best, it really does seem like a tight-knit community, a secret treasure of communal spirit in the vast wasteland of low-income L.A. County–and at its worst it seems like a place that hides its problems instead of dealing with them.  An industry town without any sidewalks next to its factories (lines of workers walk in the middle of the street to the shipping plant next-door every morning).  It feels too big, too volatile, and too much a part of the wider, colder L.A. world to really be called a tight-knit community.  It can even feel like a dystopia where that strange credo, “smile now, cry later,” is secretly obeyed by every resident. 

     But I’m still an outsider.  I’m still an Anglo in a Spanish-speaking community, an NPR-and-granola Seattleite among Angelinos of Latin-American descent.  I don’t claim to understand the community.  After the bus stop tragedy at the beginning of this month, I felt an urge to reflect, a need to learn something from it somehow.  That may have been a knee-jerk reaction, a desire to make meaning out of an event that seemed senseless.  So everything I just wrote is meant as an articulation of my ongoing struggle to understand this community, not as a judgment.  I love South Gate.  It feels far warmer than the community I grew up in-I can hardly imagine an outsider in Magnolia being made to feel as welcome as I have in South Gate-and as time goes on, I will continue to revise my perceptions. 

     You can click here to see the paper that my Journalism students published last week, including their article about the accident (and check out their podcasts if you want). 

     And here’s a surreal message I recently received on my phone and wanted to share.  A dispatch from this small town (it will direct you to the another server, then just click on “South Gate Message”).   

     Current overall status: glad to be heading home for Christmas, but also happy to be returning to the same group of students in January.  Not a bad way to be.

     Parent conference nights are held in LAUSD several times per year-teachers open up their classrooms for about two hours, parents sign in and wait their turn to talk with the teacher.  Almost invariably, parents are interested in their student’s grade above all else.  If the grade is good, the parent is happy.  At my school you rarely hear about parents getting cantankerous over curriculum or Catcher in the Rye. If the grade is bad, the parent usually chastises the child, whose “I don’t have any homework” refrain is now revealed for the lie it always was.  I hear that sometimes parents go after the teacher for a child’s low grade, claiming that the teacher has it out for their child, but I haven’t experienced this yet.  Parents do sometimes make a fuss when they have to wait too long for their turn.  I can’t tell you how many different ways administrators have told me to “move them along”-the furtive glance at my waiting line, the hand-on-shoulder conference, chatting up the line to keep everyone happy-but it’s hard to say “yes, your daughter is an interesting case, but two-minutes interesting, not five.” I understand their concern, though-I started 10 minutes early and stayed 20 minutes after, but I still didn’t get to speak with every parent who signed in.

     Nonetheless, I left parent conference night on Thursday feeling buoyant, self-satisfied, rejuvenated.  I think it’s kind of like the satisfaction you feel as a host who has just thrown a good party-I set up snacks, student work, suggested reading lists, newspapers, and an art area for the younger sisters and brothers. All of this was well received.  Even though I’ve been at it for a few years now, presenting myself to the world as “Teacher” still feels just a little strange.  Inevitably, I get at least one “you’re so young” comment, though it isn’t every five minutes like during my first year-most parents know me at this point.  During my senior year of college, while taking classes like “The Humanistic Foundations of Education,” I was developing a revised self-concept: Tim the Teacher.  I was imagining what I wanted to be like, how I wanted to carry myself, what I wanted to represent to students and to their parents.  In a way, Thursday’s parent night represented the actualization of that self-concept, something close to the realization of my romantic “Tim the Teacher” ideal.  Parents seemed happy to have their kids in my class, and I left feeling appreciated for the work I do.  One lingering frustration is that I can’t quite bridge the culture gap-I don’t speak Spanish, and about half of the conferences are conducted through my infinitely-patient translator-but I’m taking a class in the Winter through UCLA and traveling to Ecuador in the Spring, so I’ll give my gringo Spanish a test drive during May’s conferences. 

     Now that I’ve got all that self-congratulation out of my system, I should add that a well-executed parent conference night did more than just boost my ego.  I’ve mentioned before that kids seem to slowly evolve from generic “students” to individualized human beings over the course of a year.  Parent conferences are a big part of that process.  I found out that one student whose absenteeism was frustrating me was actually staying out of school for a series of painful skin operations.  I discovered that another student has a long history of serious social anxiety.  It didn’t surprise her parents when I told them that she hides out in my room during lunch and works alone while other students talk and use the computers.  Over and over again, especially with students who I didn’t have last year, I got the sense that I was jumping in at chapter twelve of a long story that the parents had been following from the beginning-that I would have to learn about what happened during those chapters I missed if I wanted to change the direction of this one.  Talking to parents face-to-face made me feel more optimistic about being successful with my students this year-like I had allies in the struggle. 

     I shouldn’t end this entry without mentioning that Los Angeles is on fire.  Below is the view from my apartment balcony two days ago.  The palm trees in the foreground are now obscured by smoky air, which filters the sunlight and suffuses the sky with a vague orange glow.  After being outside for a couple of hours, my eyes and throat hurt from the smoke, which smells like a campfire but with the smack of something dusty and arid thrown in-like a cloud of that light brown dirt you find on the ground where cacti grow.  Mayor Villaraigosa declared a state of emergency yesterday, and if you’re interested in a shocking slideshow of fire photos, check out latimes.com.  No danger in Echo Park just yet, but the whole city has this kind of on-edge, spooked feeling, like we’re all holding our breath until the air clears.   

Photo Credit: Liz