Teaching with Tim

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.