Inner City

I don’­­t like to write about my students. As soon as I start, I am disappointed in the word bank I have to choose from—urban youths, achievement gap, inner city. The term inner city must not have originated in Chicago— the phrase describes a place that is in the heart of something, the center, the most integral part. My students are pushed to the edge of the city, if not geographically, then in every other way. Perhaps the term better refers to something hidden, the innards, the entrails, the most true. When I consider starting this type of piece, my mind recalls the encouragements I’ve received to “write this stuff down.” But the looks on peoples’ faces tells me that they think of me as some sort of patient heroine, a mother Theresa of public education, and I know my actual teacher persona would fall short of this image. Enough white lady teacher books already crowd the shelves of other white teachers; I know because people give them to me as gifts along with figurines and plaques. There is one shoved on my desk that says, “Children are born with wings, teachers help them to fly.” 

Beginning to write down my experiences threatens the coping mechanisms and survival tactics I’ve used over the last 2 years. Once I open up the space to think about my time in the classroom, I will have to process through the link cards, dirty shirt collars, bruises, students asking for the macaroni boxes we used in math class, the popsicle stick with Corvell’s name on it that I still keep in my desk drawer, the kindergartner who wants a tear drop tattooed on his face. Already, I feel as if I am name dropping, building some sort of shocking account that will wake people up, or worse, a kind of Freedom Writer’s narrative. And yet, some Freedom Writer shit does happen; there are moments when students who have not been expected to achieve get what they need to excel past anything anyone had thought possible. In those moments, I sort of feel like Hilary Swank in the movie I actually haven’t seen yet, but imagine is filled with scenes of a white woman risking her life in the ghetto and making dangerous black kids into poets.

Very often, the changes I see in my students are small, fleeting, but they happen. Oftentimes, the change comes on a day I have come ill prepared, resenting my students, resenting my job. I am not a savior, if I was, I would have stayed at the impossible school with the impossible principal to help the impossible kids. I find that the impossible kids are everywhere, but among us inner city teachers, if your school has less than 80% kids receiving free and reduced lunch, your job is pretty cushy.  Sometimes I have to sit with my head on my desk instead of working hard for my students. Sometimes I cut corners I know should not be cut. Sometimes I leave right at 2:45 and can’t stay a minute longer in the school; I feel the day creeping on my skin like a rash, I become over aware of every sense, of my greasy hair, of the hairs outside the line of my eyebrow. I recall my responses to issues of race earlier in my life,” I can’t help it that I’m white.”

I worry that writing my experiences down will piss someone off, or worse make them feel guilty or sentimental. I imagine that anything I write down about my kids would come with a longer forward than anything I could write down, perhaps that is what this entry is shaping up to be.  Its not meant to be freedom writers. It’s not supposed to be vignettes of cute little black kids, although some of these kids are exceptionally cute. Others aren’t. I am not patient, and I once told a student to laugh their way to jail. This barely skims the surface of what I have said to my students. The one thing I have going for me is that I fiercely love my students, all of them, painfully. Up in the middle of the night thinking about them love. This is the hardest and most draining, but also the easiest and most effortless part of my job.

 I don’t know where exactly to start confronting the memories of students and the classroom. I do not think I am strong enough yet to start in Room 115, my first classroom. I can only dip my toes at the edge of the pool. I focus in on an image from this summer. I was acting as a writing coach at the organization that got me started in my work with urban youth. It’s a non-profit that empowers kids to write their stories--much more like Freedom Writers than me. Its funny to trace the path of how I ended up a special ed teacher in one of the worst school districts in America, but sometimes when I look back I see that it makes more sense than I’d let on. I think the passion first started hearing about programs like Open Books at a writer’s conference. I thought I’d just play the Hilary Swank role, but fate landed me in a much less glamorous position that involved a lot more asking Andrew to take his hands out of his pants, to stop licking his calculator, and that he couldn’t come up from behind me and hug me around my boobs.

I came back to volunteer at a slam poetry workshop probably to see if I felt more qualified then I had before. I entered the room feeling a sense of knowledge, wanting someone to congratulate me, a soldier coming back to the reserves after a time in the trenches. This is honestly how I felt, so I have to use that tired metaphor. Here in lies the difficulty of not painting myself as a savior or a saint, because sometimes, I do see myself in this way. I cringed at the pronouns utilized by the college-aged interns leading the workshop and the former stay at home moms who in one of their words “needed something to keep me busy.” There were also the out of work writers that seem a little better, but mostly just believe that they will help a kid from the slums become the next Maya Angelou.

I squirmed in my seat and played distractingly on my I-Phone sweeping my finger to scroll through emails I had already read. “These kids need a lot of help” “They often don’t know much about poetry.” “Its important that we get them emotional.” Then sitting through the presentation of the actual workshop where the two interns capture zero of the kids’ attention and didn’t divert from their script at all to make poetry come alive for the students in the room. Instead, the one keeps ineffectively and nervously shushing the kids as the other goes on about the history of slam poetry using words I learned at least in high school.

And yet, all of this is only dredged up to the surface because I am trying to figure out why this one image drifts towards me, why it’s the only corner I can grab without falling in. I was paired with one of the youngest kids in the group, Mecca. He had a wide grin and one of the worst cases of attention deficit I had seen. His head and body were always moving wanting to show me how he folded the paper or how he could stick his tongue through one of the gaps in his teeth. He told me he couldn’t read with some shame in his voice, and I told him I could help, and I knew I could. We wrote a poem together called, “I hang out with them.” It ended inviting others to have their friends hang out with he and his friends too as they devour strawberry popsicles and pepperoni pizzas, and build castles they fit in on the beach. He noticed the bleached hairs above my lip; I find my favorite little students always do. “It’s growing,” he said, pointing to his upper lip. “It’s a moustache,” he shrugs, “just saying!” I try to laugh it off pretending I’m comfortable with it, but privately consider other ways of masking the problem. There is nothing glamorous about being an Italian.

 What I remember, what I keep thinking about are his shoes, his feet dangling above the ground. He wore slip on dressy shoes, like the ones old men wear as bankers or doctors that save time because you can just slip them on; you don’t even have to lace them up. Little bankers feet dangling high above the ground, athletic socks with red trimmings and bare brown legs leading up to baggy shorts and a neon t-shirt for the summer camp program he was a part of. The shirt fit like a dress and he kept grabbing the collar up with his teeth. Little bankers feet attached to knobby knees, and further up that gappy grin that made him lisp and form words in unusual ways. Little black synthetic leather banker’s feet swinging and then still, toes pointed in towards each other. This is a start. This is as far as I can go today. I can tolerate the cold water lapping over my toes and can still walk away clear enough to teach tomorrow in Chicago's inner city, ignoring my own.