.the yard.

I have been making myself feel guilty for not updating this here blog for about 2 weeks now.  The initial 2^nd entry felt too full of frustration after an interaction with a neighbor of my dad’s who made statements like an ignorant person about my choice to teach in New Orleans. 

So, here I am.  Just ended the second week with the students and they continue to trickle in as reluctant and neglected children will do.  Our school staff made an effort today to do home visits to each student who has been absent thus far with dismal results.  “They gone to another school”, no answer at the door, etc.  We learned after this that the apparent star students from years’ past have moved on to different schools. You can’t blame their parents as the idea of another charter coming in to take over could mean one more year of inadequate education. But to see the looks on the few remaining teachers from the old organization, I knew we’d lost some good ones…the best.  Similar to how we felt at my old school when we lost our highest performing students to an elite magnant school. 

I am tired.  No, I’m exhausted.  I’ve never worked this hard in my life.  I don’t know how to begin to sum it up.  I want to though, and I said I would…exhaustion cannot hold back my documentation of this process or there will surely not be a word recorded come May 25^th. 

Perhaps I am back at the beginning…and ol Jerri Blank.  Go with what you know…

I wake up at…wait.  My alarm goes off at 5:07am.  I have a thing about odd numbers, and won’t set my alarms for the minutes at anything but…although my favorite time of the day or the one I’m connected to most often is made up completely of even numbers, but I attribute that to my M’Maw Grace’s spirit.  I hit snooze a number of times.  The number of times determined by the previous night’s activities, my quality of sleep due to head-butting kitty, etc. I immediatedly turn off my AC, and revel about the fact that I am able to be cold in August in my New Orleans residence in August. Work preperations proceed as normal, coffee making (if I remember to set it up for auto the night before, I’m sure I’ve made it to adulthood status), shower, respectable people clothes picking out, making lunch (the same lunch I’ve eaten for over 6 years much to Courtney’s demise), and then I’m out the door by 6:37.  I see my landlord walking her dog on the same block each morning as she passes by the most elite charter school in New Orleans and I make my way to one of the worst. 

I smoke a cigarette.  I know I shouldn’t, but I do. Vices are necessary when you’re living the life of a teacher…there’s no good reason, and I even lied to my voluntary benefits folks today as I signed up for every available benefit and felt like a complete grown up…well, besides the fact about lying about smoking and considering short-term disability insurance as my co-worker so daintly put it, “in case you get knocked-up” insurance.  The man approached it in a more gentle way: “well, I see you’re single, but do you want to have children?”…oh.  wonderful!  A lovely topic in the auditorium with an insurance man.  I reply yes.  My new best friend/coworker pipes up with the knocked up comment. I think of Ron talking about “seeds”.  I love that thought.  Not just of mine, but of everyone’s children being their seeds.  So accurate. 

The mornings are rough.  The kids arrive beginning at 7:15 & must assemble on the “Yard” or go into breakfast.  This is my second battle of the day.  The first being with my snooze button.  It’s a slow staggering of children and then an influx of groups surging with every bus arrival.  The order of lining up and waiting is near impossible.  They hate it as I would…its like the fucking DMV.  I’ve stated my disagreement with the process, but, it is what it is. 

I’ve never encountered so many parents at this time of the day who take the initiative to walk their child/niece/nephew/neighbor/etc. to school.  Each parent I’ve encountered is so friendly and supportive…kind.  Yes, I’m talking “ghetto” parents in lounge clothes with gold teeth, etc.  Well.  I’ve never been met with such smiles and kindness and genuine appreciation. 

We have Pre-Kindergarten children at our school as well.  Thursday morning, I saw a little boy, dressed perfectly in his navy blue insigned polo with his khaki shorts…hair cut close to his head, bottom lip out…quivering.  Waving in the sweetest hand up fingers closing downward child-like wave.  I looked around to see if he was perhaps waving at one of my buck-wild students.  Then I looked beyond the barbed wire fence to the man, the father, waving back who could not seem to walk away…who couldn’t bear to leave his son with tears intertwining with sweat of the morning.  This man.  Father.  The connection was palpable.  There were no judgements being made. 

It was the visual of everyone who just wants to be loved and feel accepted.  This was a man who many people would get nervous if they saw walking down the street because of his skin color, his age, his dress, his hair, whatever.  It’s real.  And I am not ignorant to that….I know the statistics.  I don’t blame people for feeling fearful.  I just want people to become more aware of other people’s reality. 

I know that this is America. I’ve made and convinced more people than you would imagine I would,  to pledge allegiance to it on the daily.  I go further and make sure they know what they’re pledging allegiance to though…which is where I may run into trouble.  Ask your kids.  What does ‘pledge’ mean? What about ‘allegiance’?  Break the entire thing down.  From that point on, my students are required to stand, and place their hand on their heart, but they have the option of reinforcing the idea of the pledge, saying a prayer, or whatever they need to do. 

I see resistance from children scared of being revealed for their inadequacies.  Flexing their power can’t be denied, so must find new ways.  The most amazing thing to see though, the students who have been waiting for too fucking long to be challenged.  That’s most of them.  Waiting with their pencils sharpened and paper in their backpack and notebooks and folders.  I’ve had kids pull me aside and ask me what they’re gonna be learning this year now that it’s a real school. 

The response is…everything. 

This is for the kid who I watch picking up paper in the classroom when he thinks I’m not looking.

For the kid who is struggling so hard with basic logistical compliances like, the single file line in the morning, pulling up your pants…but! Has the handwriting of an architect, and doesn’t miss a beat of my lectures.

For the child who’s brother was murdered last year, and I have been asking you every day for 9 days if you would water the plants in the room to keep them alive…and you kept saying no, but then told me on the 10^th day in a panicked voice that the plants were dying.  That’s when I decided to water them. I know he will do it now. 

His poor heart. 

I long for the day when he can shed his hurt and anger and we will talk about it.  He stands over a foot taller than me.  You can’t miss him. Only when I’m writing about this do I realize that each morning, he arrives at whatever time, but walks to the front of the line and stands on the block for Room 311 when he’s supposed to stand behind it.  I repeatedly tell him he needs to go to the back, etc.

But,

I stand there. 

.timeline blips.

When thinking of where to begin, I am reminded of Jerri Blank repeating advice given to her by Mr. Jellineck…to “go with what you know.”  I will start there:  I am 33 years old.  I have been teaching 6^th grade for 6 years at a middle school in a large district in the South.  I will begin teaching 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th grade science at a charter school in New Orleans in a couple weeks. 

There is something so dangerously frightening & exhilarating about choice & free will.  Making decisions has always been something that has caused me extreme anxiety, which thank goodness has not pigeonholed me into a stagnant life.  I see different aspects of life as graphics and cartoons in my head.  Life is a timeline going along with varying degrees of ascents and dips, and it is usually at some point along an extended flat line that I see a dot.  An enlarged blip caused by the birth of an idea or daydream of change…different than change that has happened in my life due to tragedy or major loss that has no blip of intention, but a sharp angle of change made without planning or cognizance.  

I became fascinated with decisions when I started driving.  It provided immediate physical evidence to choice and change of intent.  Some people may think of this as personal freedom, but I don’t think I have any idea of what that feels like.  Choosing is the farthest thing from freedom that I feel. 

I will find myself on a boat emerging out of the fog to see Catalina Island for the first time, or driving into Prescott, Arizona knowing no one & alone with all my belongings, in Buzz (my beloved piece of a first car) on a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, on a plane to France to backpack with Sean, signing a mortgage, and all the sudden I wonder ‘how in the hell did I get here?’  Sometimes the answer is easy as with travel…but I think of all the moments of decisions that had to happen to lead up to the moment of action & commitment…making the call, clicking ‘submit.’

When analyzing how in the hell I got here, the first blip I see in my brain cartoon immediately zooms into the W.A. Bass Middle school cafeteria where I was a practicum student at my first placement while earning my Masters at Belmont University. 

Out of 20 teacher candidates I was the only fool in the group who was seeking to teach middle school.  The reactions you get when you admit that you teach middle school are always along the lines of: ‘Wow, it takes a special person’; ‘I could never deal with ‘them’, ‘You MUST be insane’, ‘Is something wrong with you?!’; ‘Ugh’, etc.

It’s easy to love the little ones, the cute ones…society perceives even ugly, chubby kids as cute when they are in elementary school.  But, oh the middle schoolers…what a terrible time.  I always make my students laugh when I walk in the room and declare that it smells like “feet, farts & funk” and remind them once more about hormones and the beauty of bathing & deodorant.  The awkwardness…the kid that’s 4 and a half feet tall and weighs 50lbs who is best friends with the kid who’s coming up on 6 feet, 175lbs.  You can always tell a line of middle school kids cause it looks like an ever-changing inconsistent bar graph of height & weight.

Middle.  Who ever wants to be in the middle?  We wanna be here or there, but the middle is such a difficult place to be.  I fell into mentoring the “middle” at camp when I was placed in middle quad my first summer as a camp counselor.  I didn’t know exactly what it would be like, but I knew I didn’t think I wanted it…but I was good at it, and so determined my fate with the awkward, weird, and desperately self-conscious ones. 

They are difficult to love…anyone who thinks back to themselves at this age knows this.  I even hang a construction paper heart that a terribly annoying child made me over the threshold of the doorway into my classroom to remind me that we all just want to be loved and are worthy & unknowingly seeking it at every moment. 

During the practicum portion of my teaching program, I had 2 options for placements for 5 weeks…a school in an affluent suburb of Nashville or an “urban” school that physically showed you how much the city planners thought & expected of these kids when they literally expanded a flyaway interstate ramp so close to the school building that it placed these kids in society’s shadow.   It seemed to heckle ‘get used to living under a bridge’…’get used to the constant drone of traffic that’s enough to drive anyone crazy.’ 

I chose that school.  And on August 30, 2005, sitting in a drab cafeteria that smelled of years of foul food, someone handed me a copy of the Tennessean newspaper with the most insanely devastating photos showing New Orleans…all it’s beauty & filth mixed up in a swell of madness. 

My southern Louisiana roots, the large number of family members & friends in and around New Orleans, combined with my career move to become a teacher drove my thoughts immediately to what was happening with all of those kids…I started looking into teaching down here. 

As the devastation became clear, I realized that wasn’t an option.  110 out of 126 public schools were destroyed.  400,000 kids had to move in order to go to school.   I accepted a job in Nashville & settled into my teaching career where I stayed put for six years at the same school on the same hallway. 

In April of 2011, I became so frustrated with the public school system.  It was a combination of the disrespectful group of students I was teaching, the fact that I was wearing myself out trying to convince an apathetic faculty to participate in environmental initiatives I had put in place at a school that boasts a mission of ‘Global Environmental Awareness’, and the fact that the maintenance crew had mowed over (for the 3^rd time) the wetland restoration project I had spearheaded. 

Ha!  I would be teaching and become aware of the distant drone of lawnmowers, run across the hall to get a view… “Fran!  Cover my class!”…run down 3 flights of stairs, frantically waving my arms, run across the parking lot & down the driveway in my god-awful Dansko clogs, yelling, “STOP!” and whispering explicatives under my breath as they mowed over the thousands of dollars of plants that tried to keep coming back after several attempts at decapitation.  Defeat.  So much defeat.  Teachers are overwhelmed and well versed in this feeling.  Everywhere I went, I heard negativity & complaining.  I decided I wanted out. 

Egad. Time to make a decision.  A big one.  Was I going to make a career change or explore other districts to see if it was this way everywhere?  It became clear to me that although our district’s problems were magnified by its sheer size; similar problems plagued the majority of the state. 

I am a good teacher.  I don’t know how…I am certainly not a cutesy teacher.  Ask Renada, who cringes when she walks in my classroom in August and sees my fabric-covered bulletin boards with borders that don’t quite make it all the way around because my math skills are quite terrible and I miscalculated how much ribbon to buy.  You should see her face when she comes in my room in May and they still look like that & not one thing has been displayed on them all year. 

I’m unorganized.  I hate to grade papers, and am known to toss a stack of ungraded papers into the recycle bin after they’ve sat there for weeks collecting dust, and wanna wring a neck when one of the kids says, “whatever happened to those _______ that we did?” or, “I just found this in my book, did we ever turn this in?” I deal with this by doling out way too many 100%s for participation. 

I always fear the day that I get “busted” for this lack of regard for traditional grading, but in six years of teaching, I have never had one parent complain.  I know the reason why…because my students are learning.  They talk about our class & what we are learning at home, and they blow those end-of-the-year-test scores out of the water. 

It’s not time for me to hang up my teaching hat.  I never imagined wearing an indoor classroom one in the first place & daydream of the day I can afford to teach kids ecology outside all the time again.  But for now, here I am. 

Let’s make one thing clear: my intent never was and never has been to ‘save the world’, I’m not going to ‘save the poor, black kids of New Orleans’ and nothing irritates me more than when people ask if that’s what I’m doing down here.  New Orleans is turning public education on its head…experimenting with change.  Opponents of charter schools may express their opinion that charters are the “death of public education.”…well…public education has been dead for a long time.  I don’t claim to have the slightest clue as to what will fix or rebuild our society, but I do know that whatever is going on in most public schools isn’t working, and I cannot sit by in the muck of it for another school year. 

On Monday, I will become part of a faculty that is not only part of this experimental change in education, but a school that was failed by another charter group and is being ‘taken over’ by another organization. 

I am nervous for multiple reasons…change, the level of poverty & violence in the neighborhood, the obvious race relations that come along with a predominately black organization being taken over by a predominately white organization in a black neighborhood  (I’m not afraid to address race issues because it is foolish not to when it is so obvious, but people flinch when I openly mention or discuss it).  I am nervous about earning the trust & respect of my new students.  I am nervous about teaching kids older than I’m used to.  I am nervous about teaching kids who will be taller and physically stronger than me.  I am nervous about getting to know a new way of doing things.  I am nervous that I will have 3 times the curriculum I’m used to and worried I won’t have support. 

I am full of hope as well…and know that the cyclical nature of life is evidenced by the fact that the kids I will be teaching were preschoolers, kindergarteners, & 1^st graders when Katrina devastated the already broken education system here.  It may be 7 years later, but I was able to become a better teacher, gain experience, so I would be able to teach at least 120 of those kids who were more than likely out of school during the formative educational years of learning how to read & socialize appropriately.  To not connect the correlation between the years of interrupted schooling with the violence that is erupting among the young black youth in New Orleans is a tragic oversight. 

And so…

I can only hope to be a consistent person in their daily life that my students can count on for a stable, safe, and respectful space.

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.

- Holden Caulfield