Teaching with Tim

A snapshot of my second year experience.  (Please don’t take this the wrong way; the second year has been much better overall, but I would rather describe it with a written snapshot than undertake the futile task of reconstructing it for you in its entirety):

“This burning in the back of my throat,” Sabrina says, “the doctor said I can’t run.  I have to take breaks.” 

As she tells me this, a dry, exhaust-filled Los Angeles wind turns an empty bag of Cheetoes on its side.  The atmosphere sounds like it smells–a vague roar of traffic surrounds the expansive field and dirt track behind Southeast Middle School. The surrounding network of steel factories and four-lane arterials have granted this one concession.  Yes, they say. Here is your empty space.  Here is your field to run and play and grow in. 

            Sabrina is massaging her throat with two fingers and watching the five members of my seventh and eighth grade Students Run L.A. team circle the track.  I had been trying to inspire her to keep running, to finish ten laps before quitting.  But now I relent.

            “No, no, just take it easy.  Just take it easy.”

            Los Angeles Unified School District is on a building spree.  Over one hundred new school projects are in the works with one problem in common: where to build if not next to a freeway?  Regulations prohibit it, but several projects within five hundred feet of major roadways are in still in the works.  Superintendent Brewer suggests investing in better indoor air filtration systems.  But those won’t protect the lungs of my runners.  

            I want to create some kind of oasis for myself and for my students in this poisoned environment.  American mass media poisons the culture, poverty poisons the quality of life, and the City of the Car poisons the atmosphere.  And if I sound like an old curmudgeon, so be it.  But I’m twenty two.  Their culture is my culture.  I know all the artists they listen to, I drive a car to work every day, and my childhood was funded by the same market economy as theirs—but now I’m their teacher.  I’m one of only a handful of adults in these students’ lives responsible for looking after their well-being.  I am getting at least some handle on the basics of teaching—managing the classroom, organizing the students, submitting the grades, etc.—and I am finally in a place where I can feel the full weight of that greater responsibility.  Teaching is rewarding, but sometimes that weight dominates every corner of my internal vision, filling the empty space from fence to fence.