Thursday, March 14, 2013

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. 


Sunday, February 3, 2013

The Holy Water Comes from the Bathroom, God's body is hard to rip


"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice..."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez-

Times I was most sure I believed in God over the past month...

1. While eating a raspberry at breakfast
2. The time the communion grape juice ran over my fingers as the piece of bread I  dipped absorbed too much juice
3. When I thought I overheard a student saying his middle name was "Emmanuel"
4. When I spoke with confidence to a friend

Reading the above line from One Hundred Years of Solitude, I am drawn in by Marquez's signature magical realism--the present reality of the verb "discover," the familiarity and weight this word carries for Western civilization, the image of ships and men in puffy shirts that it brings to mind, and the cutouts of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria I once glued to a paper plate on Columbus day. Then, that word, discover, put together with something that seems so obvious, ever-present, un-discoverable, elemental--I underlined this line three times in my copy of the book, starred it, and wrote "wow" next to it in the margin. There are dents in the grainy paper above my comment where I tried to write "wow" before ink was coming out of the ball point pen. So I tried to write "wow" twice. I never finished the book, but I have returned to that line several times. I imagine if you took that book off my shelf it would flip open to that page with my scrawled "wow"s.


 I believe most and least in God when something about my faith or my experience of God seems to meet reality in a magical way.  Sometimes, the magic and the reality seem to unify, creating the prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the experience wakes me up to mystery, and I remember the day I embarked to discover ice. I am left like the bucktoothed Pevensey children in the Chronicles of Narnia repeating the name of Aslan with whispery, breathy annunciation. Prayer lingers at the edge of my thoughts and sometimes just becomes a part of my daydreaming. Things will change because I have uttered "in the name of Jesus," and today, I think it means something; I will try and to remember to write this down on a sticky note, and write about it someday. I am one with the universe, attuned to the spiritual, enchanted and in wonder of all the magic the world holds. Pure rationality falls short. 

The experience does not always pan out this way.Other times, I am aware that something about what I am doing seems like magic, but the 3rd grade birthday party, quarter out of the ear, trick hat kind of magic. We stand around the communion bread, and this must be a particularly stale batch. Grasping the nub of bread, my fingers slip; God's body is hard to tear. All of us gathered around the table laugh, and when the server begins to mouth his words about the body and blood, I am distracted by his smile all the while focused on the way the stale bread has made me aware that I am dipping a crumb of bread in grape juice. The strands of magic and reality run parallel never to intersect, and I sit on the taught rope below as I try to imagine that the strand above me is more real, more close, and that everyone around me is also grasping  at it too. Trying to use my weight against the taught rope, I try to propel myself up to the line above, but I am only made to feel stupid that I believe its there--the magic. Do the people passing me by see me grabbing at air? I long for the shivers, the dumbfounding awe when the lines intersect. Yet, something about what I believe strikes me as a voodoo magic, too ureal, too out there, too arbitrary, too foolish.

The other day someone in my small group referred to a group of Christians as “believers.” I never realized how terrifying that term sounds. Believers: a group of people marching or zombie walking, a huge doomsday cult, also see noun, singular, someone who holds a crystal to their forehead and talks about energy. But then again, I do believe that God impregnated a virgin who gave birth to his Son who lived a totally perfect life and that he died on a cross as an atonement for all of our sins, as in all of us in all of history. I also believe that 3 days later he rose again, and that when I was 3 years old I asked him to climb inside my heart, and that he can hear all the prayers of the world at the same time. I wish I hadn’t written that all out. I think I’ve been avoiding writing that part out. It is easy enough for me to abstractly connect with what seems like Jesus in prayer, but when I write that all out, I feel like a “believer.”

After all, the holy water comes from the bathroom. Or at least I've seen a collared minister come out of the bathroom with a sort of crystal flask, and he was wiping the excess water droplets off with a paper towel. In that sort of moment, I do not know whether I will feel like the incarnation of God makes sense or whether I will feel like I've been lied to, and everyone else knew it. That depends on the day or the wind or my hormones. But I know that this month, when the grape juice spilled over my thumbnail, I understood that God had covered me with his blood, when Jose's middle name was Emmanuel, I was reminded that the divine is with me, even in the little Hispanic boy with warts bubbling out of his nail beds, and when I ate the raspberry, the little cells of juice burst in my mouth, and I wondered at the improbability of a raspberry and its vibrant red-pink color. Something must be outside of this world looking in, ordaining raspberries. 

Lord, help me to discover ice.


Saturday, February 2, 2013

Things currently in my hand me down green suede purse

Things currently in my hand me down green suede purse with blue jean dye stains on the bottom from the day I wore it in a downpour and I had to walk from the train...

1. A red wallet with satisfying zippers
2. A small pink journal with the following white, loopy cursive on the front: "She just had this way of brightening the day." I use this journal to chart my panic attacks and anxiety episodes
3. A rubber stamp, still in its packaging. It says, "Awesome!" surrounded by stars
4. My Checkbook in a forest green vinyl case, also a Chicago Symphony Orchestra ticket,  one of those things you are supposed to use to balance your account, and a "Perks of Being a Wallflower" movie ticket inside
5. My Planner, complete with small black binder clip pinning back the weeks that have already passed
6. A Squirrel shaped carabiniere key holder with the crappy copy of my CRV key and the keys to go in the front entrance of my apartment. I prefer to go in the front entrance
7. A Christmas card from my 1st grade co-teacher with an old mint wrapper clinging to the front only. Static.
8. A purple pen, the clicky kind
9. An un-opened sample of lubricating eye drops from the eye doctor
10. My Chicago Public Schools ID...that's where I put it
11. An un-opened hand held mirror
12. 2 packets of Emergen-C both "tropical" flavored but from different eras of packaging styles
13. One piece of Orbit peppermint gum
14. Unidentified crumbs
15. One small tub of C.O. Bigelow "Mango Butter Lip Butter"
16. 3 "Fresh Nap" moist towelettes
17. A pair of forest green mittens that are the perfect size for my hands, that were inconveniently hand knit by my ex boyfriend
18. One acorn that I plan to use for wax sealing
19. One Burt's Bees Beeswax Lip Balm
20. One bachelorette party light up ring favor (thought it could be used as a flashlight at some point???)
21. Worn out cards from when US bank took over my local bank chain and issued me new account numbers
22. Free sample of "Energy Sheets" A mix between those mouthwash things that dissolve on your tongue and an energy supplement
23. A mini manilla envelope with my most recent college ID from 2010-2011


Nothing in this bag catches me off gaurd. I dug my hand in each time without looking, but rejected certain objects by feel as I went along. The moist towelettes should precede the items zipped away in the side pockets, the pink journal merited an early spot on the list. Each time my hand brushed the mittens, it moved on to the smooth plastic of the lip balm or the gritty crumbs settled on the bottom. I dug the mittens out from their hiding spot under my bed sometime after Christmas. No other pair fits just like them and the color is the best representation I can find of what I think is my favorite shade of my favorite color. The wool is soft and does not give me a rash like Old Navy sweaters do. I tried several different words before I chose "inconveniently" to describe their origins:  "unfortunately," "revealingly," "embarrassingly," "ironically," "randomly," "unimportantly," "actually," "as a side note," "humorously," "hilariously," "in fact," "as an aside." I mean all of these words and none of them. I remember all of a sudden that I am not supposed to use adverbs when I write, but I am unwilling to note who made my mittens without some sort of protecting disclaimer and to leave out the detail seems dishonest. The mittens were moved to number 17 from 23, revealingly, inconveniently, as a side note, humorously, embarrassingly, ironically, in fact, as an aside, unimportantly, unfortunately, randomly, actually, hilariously.