Teaching with Tim

     I return to Seattle today, and that always fuels introspection.  I’ve been teaching for a year and a half now.  All things considered, I’m doing well—most of my kids are learning something, the classroom is under control, and I don’t want to stick a knife in my eye.  I still have struggles—my sixth period class doesn’t do homework, my vocabulary instruction is failing, and my journalism class is sluggish and unmotivated—but the victories outweigh the defeats.  I reached this point last year beaten and exhausted, unsure about whether I had made the right decision in joining the teaching profession. Now I feel fine about my classroom, and, while not exactly “excited” to return to teaching in January, certainly prepared.  I like my kids, and I have succeeded in creating a stable learning environment.  Seattle will be wonderful—family, salty air, pine trees, and polite drivers.  I can’t wait.  But this year, I won’t look South and see a hellishly hot, smog-choked metropolis full of juvenile delinquents.  This year, I will see home.  And that’s something new. 

     I have begun to build my teacher identity—the foundations of the teacher I will become when, a year or two from now, I actually know what I’m doing.  Having begun to establish a sense of confidence and stability about myself as a teacher, I have also gained the ability to look at the LAUSD school culture with some measure of objectivity.  I used to analyze the situation and try to fit it into the mold that Teach for America had built for me: the students are the victims of a deeply racist, segregated school system, most of the teachers in that system are jaded and/or incompetent, you and your overachieving self are God’s gift to American education, etc.  Don’t get me wrong—the schools are segregated, and educational inequality is absolutely a reality.  But so far I have found that the real picture of LAUSD’s schools and students is complex and multi-faceted, strongly resistant to any subjective, blanket characterization.  There are over 700,000 students and 40,000 teachers in LAUSD, and I have seen schools, teachers, and students, whose stories could confirm anything from “This system is completely broken” to “It’s not perfect, but it’s working.”  That’s why I prefer to describe my experience using writing “snapshots”—if I limit my scope, focus only on what I see in one situation, and then see how that single situation might be reflective of some wider realities, I feel that I am less likely to paint false pictures, to lie by unwarranted generalization.  So before I head home, I want to share one more “snapshot” of the TFA LA experience.  A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting at an outdoor picnic table, waiting for my Students Run L.A. kids to finish running the Southern California Half Marathon.  A teacher and her friend were seated at the table next to mine.  I was grading papers, but they were talking loudly, and eventually I grew more interested in eavesdropping than in evaluating my students’ understanding of organizational structures.  Here is what I wrote in my notebook as I listened: 

Teacher and friend grading inner city sophomore quizzes.  The friend reads student answers aloud.  The answers are attempts to use vocabulary words in sentences correctly. She is reading answers, then laughing about how wrong they are:“The skunk has decorum.”  Ha ha ha! “The gesticulated went to the store.” ha! ha! (and so on).  The teacher herself seems young.  She laughs at all the absurd answers that her friend reads aloud, but some part of her rebels against the exercise.  She reads one student’s work to provide a counterpoint to all the wrong answers that her friend has been lampooning.  It is an answer that the student provided in rhyme—poetry—just because he wanted to.  Because he loves poetry.  The poem is very good.  I didn’t catch the whole thing, but it rhymes, demonstrates some awareness of meter, and includes the phrase “the silence dances.”  The guffawing, jocular attitude of the friend evaporates for a moment while the poem is read.  There is silence afterward.  It dances. Then the friend abruptly reads another mangled sentence from a student paper: “The USC vs. UCLA game was completely blatant.”  And another one: “I am impalpable.”  They both begin laughing and joking about the students again.  About their truancy, their ridiculous behavior, their inability to complete the simplest academic tasks.  All is said with an implicit attitude of “God, I love them, but what can I do?  Really, what can I do?”  This is not the attitude of all inner city school teachers.  Some set high expectations, demand excellence.  Others don’t even like their students at all, but simply stick them in their chairs and mark off another day on the retirement countdown calendar.  But this laughing, patronizing head-shaking is a dominant culture among inner-city educators.  Not all schools.  Not all people.  Not all the time.  But I would claim that it is a dominant culture.  It is a masked form of oppression.     

Jorge is a seventh grader on my Students Run L.A. Team.  He’s a skinny little guy with these big, wide brown eyes, and when he talks to you, it’s often in a series of questions that lead like stepping stones to the point he wants to make (The new adidas?  The ones with the stripes on top?  Those are cool.  And the ones Kobe wears? With the net stuff on the side?  Those too.)  So it surprised me when he asked a question expecting an answer.  We were sitting outside by the track with a few other runners, and he had been staring at me as if I were a hatching lizard’s egg for about a minute. 

“Hey Mister.” If you aren’t familiar with Los Angeles student dialect, “Mister” and “Miss” are accepted abbreviations of teacher names, in part because the Spanish “Señor” and “Señora” do not carry the flippant undertones of their English counterparts, and in part because that’s just the lingo around here.  “Hey Mister, you got a girlfriend?”

 “Yup,” I said.  I don’t really bother keeping my personal life secret from students anymore.  Thinking of new ways to avoid middle schoolers’ blunt personal questions gets tiring.     

“Oh,” said Jorge. “That’s cool.”  He ground an old piece of popcorn into the cement with his toe.  “I forgot my deodorant today.”

I saw the source of this apparent non-sequitur.

“You mean, deoderant to get a girlfriend?”

“Yeah.  But I forgot it today.”     

Ah, I thought, here was an opportunity to give my younger self the words of comfort that I had always needed.  A chance to ease the pressure of imagined peer expectation, to defy the tacit code of adolescent males that demands at least one girlfriend for every year you are old. 

“You know,” I said, “you don’t need to worry about that.  You’ve got tons of time.  I didn’t even have my first girlfriend until the end of high school.”  I paused, gazing reflectively into the distance for what seemed an appropriate length of time.  “Don’t rush that stuff.  You’ve got all the time in the world.”

“You had your first girlfriend at the end of high school?”

 “Yup.  You don’t need to worry about girls.”  Then again for good measure:  “You’ve got all the time in the world.”

I had hit home.  These were just the words Jorge had needed.  Like some sort of Christ in khaki pants, I was easing his burdens.  A mysterious shaft of sunlight pierced the clouds and illuminated my face.  

A few moments passed.  Henry passed by on the track, and I called out his lap time.

“Huh,” said Jorge.  His lips were pursed, and he was looking at me intently.  “Well I got mine in third grade.  Two of ‘em.”

The mysterious shaft of sunlight faded. 

“Third grade?”  

“Yup.”  He nodded and smiled.  “Two of ‘em.  And they followed me everywhere.” 

I shook my head.

“Jorge.”

“Yeah?”

“You still owe me three laps.”