Flying Chairs, Angry Stares, and Lessons (Not?) Learned

It’s Takeima and Larry that worry me. Larry worries me because of his exhaustion. When it’s my turn to teach, Larry puts his head on his desk and declares that it’s naptime. Takeima also shuts down…she sits there, stony-faced, unwilling to speak to me or her classmates. They worry me, but mostly because they are the two students who make me visibly frustrated. I try all that I can with Takeima and Larry—I use positive reinforcement, I encourage them, I give them choices. I am also stern and dole out consequences and stop their behaviors in their incipient moments. I try everything I can think of, but nothing seems to work with Takeima or Larry. I am worried because they do not respond to me, and by the end of every period I am flush with frustration and helplessness.

I had my worst day yet on Friday. Takeima decided that she is in love with Mr. Ramirez and so was livid that she had to be in my reading group. Not only did she refuse to read, but she refused to let her classmates read: she clicked her pen and hummed and muttered under her breath for the entire class period. And Larry…Larry threw a chair on his way to the Principal’s Office. Within fifteen minutes, I had exhausted every trick I knew, and by 20 minutes into the hour, I had lost all but two of my students. They called each other “guacamole head,” they hummed “Caroline” by OutKast, they insisted they were going to go #2 in their pants if I didn’t let them go the bathroom, they kept losing their pens and notebooks and handouts. By 30 minutes, my face was burning red and Raven and Elvira were doing a better job of controlling the class than I was. For a moment, their classmates would actually quiet down when one of them implored, “Dang! You’re wasting our time!” or “But I want to read.” By the end of the hour, we’d gotten through about fifteen minutes of the lesson…and this was the rest of the lesson from the day before. Two days to cover thirty minutes of material. I felt like the worst teacher ever.

And so after school on Friday, near tears, I thought to myself, “Why am I putting myself through this? I could be teaching at a school where the kids want to behave, where they know how to behave. No wonder no one wants to teach in Watts.” The moment I let myself acknowledge those feelings, however, I was smacked in the face by the gravity of the situation. That very frustration is the reason I have to keep doing this. I have to continue because no one else wants to. Because everyone keeps giving up on these kids, writing them off as problems, as no good, as lazy and misbehaved. And while that may be true on the surface, I know that it is not the entirety of their situations.

There are moments when I break through to Larry and Takeima. Moments where Takeima is jumping out of her seat to participate and moments where Larry stays awake and isn’t drawing pictures of guns. There are moments when I see that they do, in fact, want to learn. These are the moments that keep me going.

Takeima and Larry—and everyone else in Room 56 at Markham Middle School—have far more complex lives than I can imagine. Larry’s father is infamous at Markham for showing up at school at 8am, sloppy drunk, cursing, and looking for Larry. And Larry, for some reason, doesn’t sleep at night. His bed is in the living room right now, and he’s lucky to get two or three hours of sleep a night. And Larry—tiny, twelve-year-old Larry who doesn’t even come up to my shoulders—is one of the angriest people I’ve ever met. He walks around with his shoulders tensed, brow narrowed, ready to spit out venomous insults at anyone who tries to penetrate his angry armor. And Takeima has apparently suffered unfathomable tragedies, the details of which I’m not allowed to know. But I have been told that she’s dealing with a lot.

There are moments when I worry that my frustration with Larry and Takeima and all of Room 56 will derail me this summer. But then I think of the complexities of their lives, their frustrating and dehumanizing school experiences thus far, their 12-year-old faces getting excited about a story or a lesson, and I am refocused. I am refocused on holding them to high academic and behavioral expectations and on finding ways to inspire them to work towards these high expectations. My true frustration is not Larry, and it is not Takeima. My true frustration is that I can’t think of ways to reach them, to inspire them. I can’t think of ways fast enough, and I worry that four weeks will pass and Larry and Takeima will simply have lived through yet another uninspiring school session. I worry about it, but I will not let that happen. I just hope that my determination is enough to make a difference to Takeima and Larry.

Learning to Teach (Again) in Watts

There is truly power in numbers, I’ve learned this past week.

I knew the Teach for America movement was big, and I knew it was ambitious, but I didn’t really understand how big and how ambitious it was until Monday morning. Walk with over 500 other people, carrying the same red TFA lunch pail and wearing the same blue TFA key holder, and you feel the enormity of your movement and your mission. It was our own march for educational equality on Monday morning as all 500 corps members swarmed out of the Long Beach dorms to a fleet of yellow school buses, waiting to cart us off to some of Los Angeles’s most infamous neighborhoods. At 6am on Monday morning when I left the dining hall, I was exhausted and nervous and introspective. But at some point I looked up from my feet, and my breath was taken away. Do you know what 500 people looks like? It is nearly two Lake Forest Academies, it is twelve busloads, it is a sea of eager faces filling up a parking lot. 500 people here to do the very same thing as me. 500 people committed to the same ideas of social justice as me. 500 people as eager to teach as me.

And then it hit me: this exact scene is also happening right now in New York and Houston. 1500 of us heading to work this morning to eradicate the achievement gap. And when school starts in just a few short weeks, there will be 3000 of us. That’s six times the number of us here at Long Beach, six times this enormous crowd sweeping me off to LA on a wave of purpose. 3000 following in the footsteps of nearly 10,000 alumni who have affected over 1.5million children. 3000 of us working to narrow the achievement gap of three grade levels that separates low-income children (most of whom are African-American and Latino) from their more affluent peers. 3000 of us teaching over 300,000 students—who are seven times less likely to go to college than their more affluent peers—that they can read, they can write, and they can succeed.

I am teaching in Watts, a neighborhood I only know for its riots. I am teaching in Watts, a neighborhood that conjures up images of violence and racial tension and poverty. Maybe this is all true about Watts, but it is my mission in these five weeks to know it as something more than that. To know it in the complex way that my students are bound to know it. The Watts I see from the school bus and the schoolyard looks a lot like Soweto, with similar stucco houses and steel-fenced yards. And the school itself looks a lot like a township school near Cape Town, with brown dusty pathways and layers of fences and barrack-like buildings. It is like no school I have ever attended, I thought to myself repeatedly last Monday. But all week long, we were reminded: It should be just like any other school. We must expect that it can and will be just like any other school.

And so for all of our first week here, we—adults of varying ages and life experiences—went back to school. And in our schools, former corps members drilled into our heads that we must have high expectations for our students. And then they modeled how, from maintaining a positive, encouraging tone and celebrating every small success to giving every lesson plan serious thought and always striving to usher students to the highest cognitive levels. There are moments where I pat myself on the back, pleased to see what I incorporated intuitively into my classes at LFA. And other moments turn a light bulb on for me; in retrospect, I understand the ways I was too unflinching, too serious in my lessons, too oblivious to behavioral expectations. Indeed, every day has taught me something astoundingly important, about my style, my self, my students, and my assumptions.

For a week, I got to be a middle school student again, shuffling between classes with my lunch pail, participating eagerly as our instructors model for us engaging lessons, creating planning, and genuine concern for and encouragement of our success.

For a week, I went back to middle school, but today, I began teaching middle school. My students this summer—all nine of them—are spunky and sassy and challenging.

There is Takeima, who bounces out of her seat to participate. There is Ricardo, who quietly but deliberately offers on-point observations and analysis. There is Juan, who eagerly looks for affirmation of his thoughts at each step of the way. There is Willneisha, whose mischievous smile alludes to a world of complexities behind every comment. There is Larry, who wants to be an artist and can describe in detail every event in “Around the World in 80 Days.” There is Albert, who has such practical and funny ways of improving life at Imperial Courts, his housing project in Watts. And there are Raven and KaldeRome, both brilliant, both beautiful, both sullen and ready to test me. I feel lucky to work with them this summer, but also a little daunted. They are all failing English. How am I going to get them to succeed? How am I going to get them to want to succeed?

I am a little daunted, but I am also exhilarated. This summer is going to be difficult…the next two years are going to be difficult. But, for the first time, I am part of something bigger than myself. In addition to the communities that are allowing me to join them, I am a part of this corps, this TFA. I am one of 3000, supported by nearly 10,000 alumni and countless advocates. I am “building the movement,” in TFA speak. We are a corps, a movement 13,000 strong that is devoted to social justice. I am part of a movement, and that is what will continue to inspire and exhilarate me. That, and KaldeRome and Raven.