Teaching with Tim

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.