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 6th
grade for 6 years at a middle school in a large district in the South. I will begin teaching 6th, 7th,
and 8th 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 3rd
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, & 1st
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
