Teaching with Tim

     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.