Never Enough Time

If I had a little extra time, I liked to wander around the school and drop in and visit with my friends. School was my small town. I’d wander around. I’d chase a few kids to class; kick the smokers out of the boys’ washroom and double-check that nobody was sneaking in an unattended side door.

One of my buddies, a history teacher, is on hall guard. Like many of my friends, he doesn’t read. He’d say, “I do too. I read National Geographic and the Smithsonian. For a while, I even read American Heritage until it got too expensive.” I’d mess with him, “Too expensive, ten bucks, that’s chump change—you’re just too cheap. But, you’re right not to read that junk. Really, I don’t want you reading that crap. All about how wonderful the good old US of A is and look how many heroes we have and really what a great country we are and all of that.” And then I’d take off, before he had a chance to reply,” Oh, you English teachers, you don’t know shit.”

To be fair, he went to the first Earth Day Celebration in Chicago, in 1970, and tried to go every year and take his kids. And when we argued, I say, " OK, I have to give you points for Earth Day."

Back at the English office, I’d ask one of my friends, “James, what are you reading these days? He mumbles, “Student papers. I keep telling you; I don’t have time to read. I haven’t read anything since college. I read enough then and I don’t intend to read anything else now. Maybe, I’ll read something when I retire, but not now. Right now, tell me, how’s the next contract coming?”

But some of the teachers did read.  For some reason they never talked about it much. You could tell when occasionally a new book would slip into someone's classroom. A friend loved to teach 2001 A Space Odyssey, talk about sci-fi and how Arthur C. Clark was really a great philosopher. Another teacher, just as serious, taught This Little Light of Mine by Kay Mills. White or black, she was one of the few teachers who took black lit seriously. Because of her some of us taught not only A Raisin In the Sun, but Purlie Victorious and Day of Absence. But it seemed we never had time, either informally or at meetings, to talk about books. We talked about keeping track of books, buying books, storing books, getting the books back from the students, ordering replacement books, reviewing books, distributing the books, collecting the books and hoarding the books. Some loved anthologies and had their favorites. They wanted more and more of them. They just wanted to teach a particular book to a particular class the rest of their lives and they didn’t think that that was too much to ask.

I ran the bookroom. It was where the broken dreams went to die. There was a half set of an abridged version of the Count of Monte Christo, a tattered well-worn incomplete set of the Autobiography of Malcolm X and a half set of Houghton Mifflin’s Afro-American Literature: Drama, Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction. Some wanted to build a curriculum based on these fine paperbacks, but the majority wanted their anthologies. The anthologies won. The familiar won over the new. In a way they were right. Who had the time or the inclination to give up their favorites for new preps and the unknown? There was never enough time amidst the confusion and chaos.

There were other reasons why there was no time. Many of the women, and even some men, had to rush home to take care of their own kids, fix supper, and help supervise homework, deliver one kid to violin and drop off another at soccer. Some teachers taught night school or took night classes themselves, taught summer school or took summer school classes. Some had part time businesses—they were house painters or pizza store owners. One worked a second job because he didn’t believe that women should work. If asked, he didn’t hesitate to say he believed for him and his family it was better that he worked two jobs so his wife could be home with the four kids. Others coached or were referees or chaperones. Others stopped at the tavern and not just on Fridays.

Some came early. All they wanted was peace and quiet—no distractions, no interruptions, just time to grade papers, prep, have a cigarette and think and finally to listen to the quiet. Sometimes, they’d hide out in an empty room.

And still others said, “Look, they pay me to come here and teach. They don’t pay me to work nights grading papers or doing mindless lesson plans. I have designed my day so I get it all done between eight and two forty five. If there’s more to do, it just does not get done. Unreasonable??  Not entirely. Another friend said, “You know, when I retired, I got my Sundays back. For thirty-five years, I worked at home every Sunday.” She went on, “I never realized the sacrifice I made. I used to save all my magazines and read them in the summer. It was the only time that I read. Now I can read the New Yorker when it comes and when my friends talk about a story I can say, oh yes I read that story and join the conversation.”

Some did find time to read. For a time Stephen King, John Grisham and Barbara Kingsolver were popular. Some liked Terry McMillan and the Anglophiles were reading John Mortimer for their English fix. Another, the same one who introduced us to Purlie Victorious, wanted us to read, and maybe teach April Sinclair’s Coffee Will Make You Black. Another teacher read and started teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Her students loved it. She’d say, “You have to remember, if the author is black the students will stretch, even if it’s hard they’ll work at it. They want to understand black authors.”

We’re the generation that can do everything and we did it—job, kids, health club, jogging, gardening, gourmet cooking, a night life. We raised our kids, got divorced, cared for aging parents, buried our spouses and some snuck around. We bragged about our own kids without meaning to and sympathized with the parent that couldn’t brag about his teen. But the daily grind got to most of us over time. You could see it in the sag their bodies had by the end of the year. And we were jealous of the ones who looked cool, calm and collected in June. We envied them, but our envy was mixed with bafflement; we asked each other, “How do they do it?” We never learned their secret.  Didn’t they care, didn’t they have a little guilt gnawing away, wasn’t even some of everything just a bit overwhelming?

One friend said, “You know you have to pace yourself, not take everything too seriously. Remember, they’ll be gone and we’ll still be here. We have to take care of ourselves, the school and then the kids. It won’t work without us. We’re important too.” I never did figure out if he was right or not. I guess that was what you call the long view, when you’re in it for the long haul, the duration. The institutional view.

 I still don’t know.

        

It’s really a little city: The coffee shop

A big urban high school is like a little city.

In the good old days, in the morning, the teachers’ lunchroom was the corner coffee shop. Many of us drove 20 to 40 miles, one way, came from two states, dozens of suburban communities, the exurbs and from fiercely segregated Chicago neighborhoods, to get to school. So much for the neighborhood school concept.  So once we got there, we had to catch our breath and unwind. We loved to listen to the folks who drove in from the western suburbs complain about the Eisenhower Effect. Some of us would teasingly say, “Oh, you mean the Congress Expressway?”

At just the right time of day and the right time of year, the sun rising in the eastern sky could be blinding. One particular bright and sunny morning, a woman came in a little late (for coffee not for school) all out of breath; she had just driven through the Eisenhower Effect. She started to complain and was immediately cut off by one of our Miss-Know-It-All, “That’s what the visor is for my dear!” Just as she was about to launch into a long lecture about the sun and the planets, another teacher came in equally out of breath, interrupted everybody and started in about the sun, the back up and the near fender benders, the mess and the parking lot that the highway had just become. That completely shut up our one friend and redeemed our other friend who was about to wilt and everybody lived happily … until the next crisis.

 Plus, we needed to talk to a few adults before we started our day because once the bell sounded, we would be surrounded with students for the rest of the day. And most importantly, we genuinely liked each other. And we wanted to start our day on a high note: Forget about the traffic, forget about the little jerk in yesterday’s third period and for fifteen minutes or so just bask in the warmth and soft light of our camaraderie.

We liked each other in the same intense way a police officer likes and relies on his partner. It was a strange friendship. Often we only saw each for a few minutes in the morning. We seldom saw each other in the summer and once we retired, with a few exceptions, we never saw each other again. (Some of the retirees in our coffee group do meet once a year in September. They call themselves the Alumni Group).

The teachers would begin arriving about an hour before class. Some grabbed a quick cup and went upstairs to work, but a group of about thirty or so with a core group of about 25 regulars would have coffee and even breakfast every morning. Sometimes, ladies in the serving line would have something special for me. It doesn’t take much to be polite and sometimes the rewards for just being polite are wonderful.

If it was cold, wet, grey, ugly and raw outside, the students who were just like us and who had come to school early for a little food and human comfort, would be crammed together outside by the front door. At first,  they couldn’t get in and then they’d be let in and crowded together in the vestibule. Finally they’d be allowed to go and get breakfast and visit with their friends. Our day, in contrast to that of the students, got off to a much better start. And those of us who thought about the contrast and the unintended consequences quickly pushed those thoughts away.

We had all kinds of rules. Some tables: “Don’t bad mouth the students”, at others it was all sports, “the game” and of course at the adjoining table no sports. At our table, the culture lovers got to report on the Lyric, the CSO, the Goodman and eventually Steppenwolf. We talked politics, but not too much. No gossip—too many ears at the adjoining tables—too undignified, so out in the open so to speak. So the gossip was saved for later, the washrooms and the department offices when just the select were around. And then there was lots of gossip.

Those of us who bought the paper every day (and why wouldn’t you, it was only fifty cents) had to watch for the paper thieves. “Let me just check the scores.” And if you weren’t careful you’d never see your paper again. Some “Just want to borrow the crossword.” Say what? We bragged about our own kids (for a while the trip to visit college campuses was an important topic), talked a bit about our part-time jobs. And of course we were all experts on everything. 

There were no gays. There were, of course, but no one would ever mention them.  At one school, where I had worked there was a lesbian couple but they were so cool and everybody liked them so much that nobody ever said anything, period. It was the most strictly enforced taboo of all. Looking back, it was strange; all the teachers would be drinking coffee, looking at the paper, talking about last night’s performance of the Ring Cycle or “the game”. If it was Monday morning, we might be talking about our kids, our wives, our dates and what we did over the weekend. The gays would always join in and talk about their weekend, but they could never mention their dates, their lovers or their trip to Boystown.  If someone had said Boystown, most teachers would deny its existence (their eyes would tell you, you were breaking the taboo. We won’t be able to keep them in the closet if we admit that there is a closet) and some truthfully could claim that they never even heard of Boystown.

 One time, a male teacher was seen outside of school with a female student; he was transferred and his name disappeared from our collective memory. He was never mentioned again. But we could be nasty, petty and vicious. Two men who worked night school ate dinner together, between night school and day school, and the rumormongers spread dirt all over the school about them.

The white teachers sat at the white tables and the black teachers sat at the black tables. There were two black teachers who would have coffee and later in the day lunch with us. And there were two white teachers who would do the same. There was a wonderful teacher that we all loved, but a little spacey, and he would eat at any table with an empty seat and then he gave his full attention to his food. The table might as well have been empty.

And like a small town, not everyone was as friendly as the next guy. There were little groups throughout the building who hid out in little offices with a Mr. Coffee and a mini-fridge. The English department was so big thahalf the department could be downstairs, another third still on their way and still a small loyal band upstairs complaining that nobody understood the English teachers and their difficult task. Once they got to the English floor (their side of town), they stayed there all day.

In the lunchroom, the clock would be ticking away. It was almost time to go. Some folks would leave before the first bell. Maybe they had one last set of papers to record. Some liked to get to their room early, to set the tone, be a good example and all that.  When they outlawed smoking, some had to run out for one last drag before class. Someone had to go check: “Whose raft was it anyway? Did Huck find the raft or Jim? Where did it come from?” It was a minor point, but it was fun to get the students to double check or to reward a close reader.

The warning bell rang and in four minutes it would be another day.

Going out the door: “See you at lunch?”

If it was Friday, “Are you going to Jimmy’s for a pitcher?”

They come and go

A.

Her name was Karen. She was seven or eight and I was six or seven. It was 1949 or 50. Our mothers still picked out our clothes, told the barber how to cut our hair, put our breakfast on the table without asking what we wanted and put us out early in the morning to play unsupervised. It was before stranger danger, before rebellious kids who would even dream of leaving the block and yes, there were neighbors who kept an eye out the window, but most of them were too busy with the house work and whatnot to pay us any mind.  We hadn’t heard of puberty and no one had heard of playing doctor. We were just a bunch of kids, the little kids, boys and girls, brothers and sisters who played together outside, weather permitting.

We all played Hide-and-Seek and Mother-May-I. The girls jumped rope, but in general we just ran around. Karen wasn’t necessarily a leader, but she was adventurous. She lived in a three-story Chicago-style brick courtyard building, and we lived in the one right next door. She liked to run up and down the back stairs, playing a kind of catch me if you can. She was the one who discovered that if you were careful you could kind of half stretch and half jump from one set of porches to the other and get away scot free. After she did it two or three times, she made us do it. A little encouragement and a little teasing and we did it.

When you’re little, too little to be self conscious, one’s not aware that one’s growing up. People say, “My, look how big you are. You’re so tall.” But day-to-day you don’t notice. It’s the same body, after all, and you don’t pay much attention to your own body. But after we learned to jump from building to building, we realized that we had just passed a milestone. We were almost ready to hang out with the big kids.

And then it happened. Her family moved. She was gone, just like that. I must have known that she was leaving, but I didn’t realize that she was gone until well after she had left. I didn’t really realize until years later that when she left, she left a hole in my life.

Over twenty years later, I gave Karen’s name to my youngest daughter Melissa for her middle name. I did it in Karen’s memory and in memory of that long ago time when little kids were just kids and played happily together in comradeship and good cheer.

B.

            When I was just a kid, I didn’t know about social dynamics, war babies and boomers, class and race, demographics and median family income, or religion and gender. My world was my parents’ friends in the building, later the kids in school and the big kids who played baseball with a tennis ball. It was a small world, and I had no idea about all the convulsions a society goes through to create such places. Our building had never been designed for kids, and for twenty years it had always been older, childless couples, widows or newlyweds saving for a bigger place. Things had been put on hold during the Great Depression, but our street had escaped the changes created by the Depression. Nothing on our block was cut up and divided into smaller and smaller units. The southern white immigrants had gone someplace else. But the war froze everything in place.

No one could move, and the folks who would have moved before starting a family started having kids and not moving. Upstairs, Dale would go off to war and come home and have three kids in four years. My father always joked that he was too young for WWI and too old for WW II, but he got serious about having kids and had me in ’43 and my sister in ’44, just in case they started drafting older men. Soon the building had eleven kids under ten. One couple who lived across the courtyard from my parents just said, “Hi and goodbye” until the woman had a baby. Then they became best friends ( until my parents were killed in an auto accident) and the newborn daughter Kathy and my sister Joanne would become lifelong friends (that is, until my sister died of cancer). Joanne even followed Kathy to Clark College in Dubuque twenty years later.

But soon the building started losing the families with kids. Dale, his wife and his three sons moved to a small suburb along the old Chicago and Northwestern RR line. Arlington Heights had a population of about 5,000 people. They moved to a house that dead-ended five blocks from Highway 12. We were impressed by the size of their house, the fields that they could play in (The site of a future development, but we knew nothing about developments), and even a big backyard. I imagine that now the house is considered a tear-down waiting for the market to improve.

My mother kept in touch, and Eunice would come to my parents’ funeral, but I never saw the boys again. My brother reports that they grew up to be typical white suburbanites of their day, so it’s just as well. We also moved; we made it within four short blocks of the suburbs, but we didn’t quite make it to the burbs.

The white movement to the suburbs has been characterized as a flight. I don’t believe it. The folks in my building moved because they needed a second bedroom, an expandable attic, a garage, and a place for the kids to play. At first, at least, people didn’t move for “better schools;” they moved to schools that weren’t overcrowded and new. Our parents wanted new and they were happy to leave behind the old cities. They used to brag (and it was half true) that Edison Park was really just like a suburb, but in the city.)  But they also left behind their old friends, the old neighborhood and some of its old ways. Sometimes, now when we look back, we wish that somehow we could recreate those old ways.  Some of the grandchildren of those folks who moved to the burbs have moved back; they might not stay, but they are trying to recreate urban life.  I have a young friend who grew up in Niles and now lives in an apartment building six blocks from my old apartment building.

Climate Change has smashed its fist into our face.

Halloween Weekend, 2011

In northwest Illinois, this year’s late summer and early fall is going to go down in the history books as one of our most memorable.  It’s times like this, that I wish I was a poet. It would be so cool to be able to describe the wonders of nature including our miraculous weather. It has been drop dead gorgeous. Day after day, the sky has been pure and clean, and as bright blue as the skies over a Greek isle. The temperatures remind one of heaven. So far, we’ve had just a touch of frost. Every few nights, there has been just a tease; just enough to kill the tomatoes and peppers and coat the car windows, but not quite enough to blacken the still stunning geraniums and mums. The frost whispers that winter is coming, but not yet. The trees have never been more spectacular.

It was a godforsaken July, with days of record heat and torrential rains. The ferocious rains tore up roads, ripped out culverts and destroyed bridges. Saddest of all, a friend was swept to his death in a flash flood which carried him and his car downstream. Cool winds finally brought relief and moderate temperatures.  What at first we welcomed as a short respite before the dog days of August arrived turned out to be over three months of bliss. The dog days never came.

Here at home, every day, the air is clean. The wind is soft and delicate, like a lover’s touch. In July it had been too hot for the tomatoes and peppers to set fruit, in August, the plants finally developed fruit and the late harvest with its bounty almost made amends for the delayed start. And now, in late October, just after the hummingbirds left, the juncos arrived right on schedule. Now the deer are leaving the timber during the day and are more visible. The young turkey poults have matured.  Most of the corn has been combined and we’ve regained the sense of openness and spaciousness associated with hill prairies.

Today, Sunday, October 30, even as the grey clouds move in low and slowly swallow the sky and as the clouds move from west to east and bring rain and a damp nasty feel, I’m reassured. It is a familiar pattern. I like the cliché a, blustery, November day. It reminds us not of winter but of Thanksgiving; reminds us of all the reasons one chooses to live in the country, the things we have to be thankful for.

To me at least, the weather has become more real lately. Today, as I write, I listen to the wind and watch the grey clouds fill the sky. Right now, I’m watching the wind tear the leaves from the trees. Many of the leaves aren’t quite ready to fall, but the wind grabs them, throws them to the ground and then picks them up and hurls them across the yard.  An hour ago, it was quieter, a lovely dance. A few leaves were lightly falling from the trees and pirouetting across the yard before gently landing on the ground only to get up again, waltz, and twirl across the grass.

 I like to think that since we moved to the country, I’ve become more observant.  I’m proud that I’ve learned to watch for the changes in the light, to the feel air on my face, to see the sumac just a second before it burst into flame, and to note the arrival of the first bluebird and the departure of the last swallow. On the other hand, I worry that it is old age.

I worry that watching the changing of the seasons is a sign not of a new vitality, but a step, however small, toward old age. I wonder how many more falls will I have a chance to be a part of, not just to observe, but to actually experience.  I know that I have seen more than I will see in the future. I’m ashamed to say that many of them passed me by and I wasted away those precious days, my thoughts and eyes someplace else. I was oblivious to their comings and goings. I’m convinced, however, that it is not my heightened awareness of the beauty and mystery of nature or looming old age which has made me more cognizant of my natural environment.

 I think that my heightened awareness comes from a growing realization that climate change is already disrupting our world and that over time our world will become unrecognizable.  We may never have such a long and glorious fall—ever again. Right now, I live in the loving embrace of the four seasons honored in song and poem since the very beginning. From teachers, troubadours and friends, I’ve finally learned to see, to listen for and even smell the world just outside my door and now we may lose it all.

 The tiny changes that have already happened are frightening. As I write this, thinking only about today, putting aside for a moment all that has happened this year, I’m frightened. This weekend, while we in the Midwest are enjoying heaven on earth, the south west is still being destroyed by heat and drought. As the tumbleweeds begin to roll across new deserts, desperate cattlemen are shipping the best of their herds north in a last ditch effort to save them, they’ve sold others prematurely and they have had to stand by and watch still others slowly starve to death. There is no hay not even a blade of grass left in Texas. At the same time, the northeast from Pennsylvania to Maine is covered in record drifts of snow while high tides smash again the New Jersey shore. (Later in the week, a hurricane would come ashore in New Jersey tearing, ripping and destroying everything in its path.) Arizona is still suffering from record heat. In Europe, Dublin is still trying to recover from flooding and Tuscany, one of the world’s most idyllic spots is trying to recover from major flooding.  Around the world, more than half of Thailand is still under water and Bangkok, the capitol and a world famous tourist destination, is threatened with inundation. Cambodia, more poor and backward than Thailand is suffering even worse from the same floods.

Our world is being turned upside down. Climate Change is smashing its fist into our face.

 Global warming is annihilating Nature’s clock, the four seasons; destroying cycles of birth and rebirth; and disrupting age old migration patterns. Everything stands on the brink of destruction. This year it was a friend or two here at home, a few more in New England, four hundred in Thailand; next year it will be more. More fires, more dust storms, more floods and tidal waves, more mud slides, more record snowfalls and cold spells, more dead cattle, more land gobbled up by the growing dessert, more crops withering in the summer heat, and more climate refugees. The world, that has nurtured every generation of humans and provided shelter and a home for the animal kingdom since the first cell divided, faces a worldwide calamity.

We have to put every other issue aside and act. We can’t turn the clock back. We can’t stop the future from bringing more chaotic climate disruptions, but we can stop the worse from occurring, but only if we all act right now.

Contrary to urban legends, fights really are rare

Usually, I don’t like to talk about the fights at school. It seems that it is impossible to talk about a fight or two, even a few fights, without leaving the impression that fights were a daily occasion, which they weren’t.  Police officers will tell you the same thing. Most law enforcement is writing tickets, writing a report on a petty shoplifter or writing accident reports—not very exciting, not like TV. There is a lot of potential for violence, but not much ever happens.  One officer told me, “It’s mainly driving around in the car waiting for the shift to end.”

And that was the way it was in school. With two or three thousand kids jammed into one building, sooner or later there was bound to be a fight or two. And that’s all it was: a fight or two.  One day, I was cutting through the lunchroom. It was late, the lunchroom was empty and all cleaned up. There were two kids, freshmen, playing Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker with plastic lunch trays. They were just fooling around, having a great time. I yelled at them to stop. I hurried over to where they were play fighting. Just as I got there, the kid closest to me swung his tray up and around and hit me in the mouth. They were both terrified. All that happened was that I had walked into the top of the tray’s arc; the tray tapped my partial and one of my two front teeth, whole and intact, hit the ground. I quickly grabbed it, told them I never wanted to see them again and “You better get the hell out of here.” They were scared to death. Just as they were leaving, I said, “Stop. Wait, don’t worry, nothing happened. If you don’t say anything, I won’t take you to the office.” They nodded and I said, “OK, now get the hell out of here.”  Of course, when I went to the dentist, he didn’t believe me. He wanted all the juicy details. I had to disappoint him.

Most fights were over in a flash. I sometimes think that the males depended on the teachers to be there to break up the fight before it got too serious. If two males were fighting in the halls, a crowd immediately formed a ring around the combatants. The last thing the spectators wanted was teachers to break up the fight.  A good fight made a good story, gossip for the whole day. It was hard to get to the fight; the other teachers and I had to dash down the hall, break through the wall that the audience had created to keep us out and then without hurting the combatants,  break up the fight. Most of the time, after a little bravado, the males were happy to have us break up the fight. They had made their point (God only knows what it was) and they had maintained their honor.

Fights among young women were rare, very unusual, but if two young women were fighting it was entirely different from the way many males fought. They completely lost their heads. They freaked out. They would grab each other’s hair or try to and hang on. Then it was nearly impossible to separate them. My friend and I once broke up a fight. Our superior size and weight, the fact that we were teachers, didn’t matter. We had a hell of a time. Finally, we got them separated with much loss of hair. We had to figure out a way to hold them, you couldn’t just grab them anywhere the way you could grab a male and drag them down to the office. Even in the office, we had to stay until they calmed down. The disciplinarian could more easily handle two seventeen year old young men twice as big as the girls as he could handle two still half-crazy young women.  On the way back upstairs, I asked my friend what he did to break up the fight. I hurt her and that’s why she stopped. He replied. “As soon as I was able to get one finger free of all that hair, I just kept pulling on it. I would have broken it off, if she hadn’t stopped.”  In thirty years, I don’t think I ever hurt a student, but he was right.

 He was upset because he had missed out on his daily rendezvous with his latest teacher flame. I had to hear about it all the way back upstairs. I had wanted to talk about what could be done to reduce the number of incidents like the last fight. Anger management wasn’t part of our vocabulary yet, but it made me mad that I’d go back upstairs and do vocabulary or we’d talk about a short story or whatever and never talk with our students about the reality all around, this sense that there was always at least a potential for violence.  

A few days later, I was in a good mood—everything was humming along. I was looking forward to my first period, a wonderful freshman class. They were always ready, always prepared, bright, cheerful and most importantly, on time.  There were two young men in the class still waiting for puberty to kick in who were both madly, blindly in love with the same young woman. She didn’t even know they existed. She was more interested in the older males she saw in the halls. Robert started fussing with Michael or maybe it was the other way around. It didn’t matter. “She’s mine, leave her alone.” “Don’t tell me what to do!” and of course the good old F-word started going back and forth. As I moved down the aisles, they started swinging at each other. These were good kids; they didn’t even know how to fight. When I got there, I pulled them apart and then shoved Robert—much too hard. He went flying over a bunch of desks and landed in a heap on the floor—unhurt except for his dignity.

The class turned on me. “That wasn’t right—you could have hurt him—Mr. Wemstrom, you’re bigger than he is—you could’ve hurt him—not fair—you be wrong—not right. So I had to settle the class down; keep Robert and Michael separated even though they weren’t going to do anything; (later in the hall they would apologize to each other) get the desks straightened out, find out where we left off, find out that we hadn’t started and then I decided, to myself,  “Oh the hell with it.” To the class, “The bell is going to ring in a minute or two (thirty to be exact), just sit quietly and finish the story. We’ll talk about it (the story, not the little fight) tomorrow.”

Robert and Michael wanted to know, “Are you going to take us to the office?”

“No, just sit down and be quiet.” They were relieved. Because they were good kids, if they got in trouble at school they’d also get in trouble at home, and they didn’t want that to happen. And I knew that they had learned their lesson and it was all taken care of.  Except for my black mood and the gossip in the hall, it was already history.

Of course, the class was right. I had overreacted. All I had to do was step between them, snarl a couple of threatening words and it would have ended right there. I didn’t have to take out my frustrations on the two of them, who were in some way still kids—cute kids actually. The students were quiet; they didn’t want to risk my wrath. In the meantime, I was still mad at them, but even madder at myself.  They had ruined my day—I had ruined my day.

The good news was that it was a good class and it continued to be a good class, and over the course of the year Robert and Michael each shot up six inches, discovered basketball and other girls who were as interested in them as they were in the girls. And better yet, they remained friends. And best of all, it remained my best class. 

Shattered Dreams

Duncan was a junior, inquisitive and intelligent. He had fairly good grades. And he hoped his grades were good enough (he thought they were) that he might just be able to get into a good college, play basketball and then on to the pros. And of course, the system exploited his dreams, just as it exploits the dreams of millions of young people.

 He was a promising athlete, a star on our varsity basketball team. Unfortunately, early in the season he injured his knee. It wasn’t too serious and the doctor, not a sports doctor, said that he should be able to play the last half of the season. 

The season was almost over, Duncan was dying to play. Finally the coach said ok. The first half everything was fine. He played well. His teammates looked after him and he had a good first half. The second half the score tightened up, Duncan got the ball. He swiveled to pass, changed his mind, jumped to shoot and he sank the ball. However, coming down, he didn’t land just right and his knee blew up. He never played again.

When he had first injured his knee in the fall everybody treated him like a hero. He hobbled around on his crutches and would wave one in the air like a trophy. After the second and much worse injury, he was quiet, subdued, mentally licked, beaten. The other students picked up on that, were embarrassed and avoided him. After awhile he started to miss class and then he stopped coming.

It’s not just poor black inner city kids who get sucked up into the hype of sports.  About the same time that Duncan was hurt a handsome, personable, bright and intelligent kid was on a work crew that reroofed my house. When he found out that I was a teacher, we got to talking. He had been a star football player at his affluent, middleclass, all white suburban high school. He was courted by lots of Division II schools. Finally he picked a school in Colorado. He was so excited. The coach came to the house, met his parents, his mom served coffee, and he signed the contract. He couldn’t wait for August and training camp. On the third day of camp he broke his leg. 

The coach visited him every day in the hospital. He reassured him that everything was going to be OK. He shouldn’t worry just because his leg was in a cast, in traction and he was missing practice. The coach reassured him he’d be ready to play by October. Then one day, the doctor said, “Well yes, the leg is healing just fine and Brian will be able to walk perfectly normally.  However, I don’t recommend that he play football. To be perfectly honest, he simply can’t play ever again.” The coach never came back. The school rescinded the athletic scholarship and he went back home and when his leg was healed he went back to his old summer job as a roofer. And after a long day, his leg bothers him, but as he said “What you gonna do?”

Most students came every September, but never stayed

The students came and went. Sometimes, the students were there in the morning and gone forever by the afternoon. Sometimes, a parent dropped them off at the front door and they skedaddled out the back door. Sometimes, they had planned to just skip out early to catch Oprah and then come back the next day. But for some reason they never did. Sometimes their mother went back to work and they had to stay home and babysit. Sometimes they lost their own babysitter. Sometimes they got pregnant and decided to use that as an excuse to quit school. Sometimes they moved. Sometimes the gang alliances changed and it was harder to get to school, to have to go through hostile territory. Some did get shot, some were even killed. They would be there on Friday, and on Monday the other students would be passing around the obit from church. Sometimes, if they were cut from a team, they slowly stopped coming.

Sometimes it wasn’t the Gangster Disciples; it was the gangs of dogs. It was 1973, cold snowy, the L was running, but not the bus. It was only three or four blocks from the L to school. I could easily walk that, even in the snow. I started out and there were dogs everywhere—packs of dogs, blocking the sidewalk, snarling and hissing. Let’s face it; dogs scare the shit out of me. The only think I could do was walk down the middle of the street. I was less afraid of a driver who couldn’t see me in the blinding snow, who had no brakes on the ice and no warning that I was wandering down the middle of the street than I was of the dogs.

One time I told that story in class and that got the whole class going. They all had stories about trying to come to school or to go home at night, especially in the dark. Terrance, tall, skinny and with no coordination, had the class in stitches. He described the time he was attacked. He said, “I got away by just jumping up on a car and then I just jumped from car to car to get away. Lucky for me, the dogs got tired before I ran out of cars. I did leave some dents in the cars, but just on the hoods, maybe on the roof or trunk but nothing too bad, honest.” He smiled, they all laughed and I had to play the teacher and point out that the destruction to personal property was not funny. They all laughed again.  They had all heard Terrance’s story before. They loved the embellishments, the pack of dogs got bigger with every telling; the number of cars grew. They all loved a good story and they all love the storyteller’s ability to make the story better with every telling. The first time Terrance told the story he climbed up on a car and simply waited for the dogs to go away. His audience asked, “Is that it?” And they all love being able to tease their teacher about being afraid of a few dogs. (And yes, they did enjoy those same qualities in the stories they read).

 Sometimes there was no bus money, no money for clothes, or no money for all the extra fees that the school and even the individual teachers wanted. School should be free, no locker fees, no towel or gym fees,  no musical instrument rental fees and no student purchases of so-called extra books. No fees, period. No free or reduced lunch forms. Simply free breakfast and lunch—maybe even a snack or two for everybody.

For a long time sweat suits were in style. Students would get a couple of imitation knock-offs of famous brands in late August at the ‘back to school sales’. And they did look cool in their new clothes. They didn’t look so cool after a couple of washing, however, when everybody realized that there had been more starch than fabric in those outfits and then because that was about all they had, they got pretty old pretty fast.

The system tried to enforce a rule: “no coats in the class room.” And of course, there were all the reasonable reasons. If the student keeps his or her coat on, it’s like they’re getting ready to leave at any moment; they’re not really settling down, not really getting ready to get to work. And besides, who knows what they may have inside those coats? Truth be told, some of the students wore their coats everyday because they did not have much under the coat except their same old worn-out tops. It was less embarrassing to wear the same coat every day than to wear the same old shirt or blouse every day.

In the seventies and eighties, the only institutes left in many city neighborhoods were public institutes, the post office and the fire station. Some days all you’d see was the bulldozer tearing down another abandoned, burned-out wreck of a house and a squad car cruising the neighborhood “keeping the lid on”.  I often thought that “if the school is it,” that means that the school has to do everything and it should. America lost a whole generation of young people across the country because it would not accept that challenge. The attitude was, “They’re not my kids, screw em.”

The system is nuts. A student is cold and hungry. So he does the sensible thing, he comes to school early. But if he comes too early, the system won’t let him in. He has to stand outside in the cold, sometimes in the rain. Sometimes we’ll let them in, but not past the foyer. “We can’t have them wandering around the building before school. God knows what kind of trouble they’d get into. Do you want them breaking into your classroom?” the disciplinarian calmly warns us.

So we’d suggest, “How about the library?”

“O, yeah, we’re going to let kids who don’t read and who hate books into the library for an hour, just to tear up the place.” He quietly and professionally replies.

On the other hand, lots of teachers came to school early. We came for some of the same reasons. To see our colleagues, have a second cup of coffee, read the paper and catch up on the gossip. All very normal, very human but we couldn’t extend the same privilege to our students. 

At the end of the day, it’s the same thing;” Clear the building. Make sure that only people with a good reason are in the building and in their designated areas and supervised. We just can’t have people…”

So I said to myself. What a happy coincidence. We have students who need academic help and want to come to school early or stay late—to get warm, to eat and socialize. Let’s do it. Let’s create a program for early birds or those who don’t kick into high gear until three o’clock. Let’s feed them, allow them to organize their own group, let them pick something they want to learn more about, something brand new perhaps, anything they want to learn. Let’s hire the teachers, pay the kitchen staff overtime and provide the resources. It may be the “good kids” who want to do more of what they’re already doing. It may be fifteen-year-olds who want to really learn how to read or it may be kids who want to shoot baskets, not good enough for the team but still they love b-ball. If the neighborhood is in chaos, let’s provide the stability.

 I add, smirking to myself, “Isn’t stability one of the prerequisites of learning? Isn’t it a necessary part of the learning environment?”  And the system answers me, “We tried something just like that and it worked just fine, but it was too expensive and it was like running a whole other program. It’s a nice idea, but just not feasible, it’s not practical.

So we do and we don’t want the students in school. We only want them on our terms. Here’s another bright idea, not very original, day care for the students’ children and other neighbor kids. The student parent spends half a day upstairs in school and the other half in the nursery helping and learning how to take care of the kids, including their own kids. And maybe there’s time for a bit of talk about women’s health. Maybe there’s bit of time to have a soda with other moms. Maybe there’s a bit of time for the dads to drop in and help.  It worked somewhere, it was hailed as a model for the future, but it was dropped, because it was too expensive

But of course, when it comes to helping single moms, especially teenagers of color, there is always an underlying nastiness that goes along with the refusal to help. You can almost hear, “Let’s not reward them for their immoral behavior; and let’s punish them by making their life more miserable, more difficult.”  Or, “You know that will only encourage them to have more and more kids.” But we know it works. We know it will reap enormous benefits and we know that even though it will be expensive up front, we know it will save money down the road. And we even know that it is the right thing to do. And still we won’t do it. We wouldn’t do it in the 1970s or 80s, or 90s and we still won’t do it in 2011. It used to make me mad, but now just thinking about it, it just saps my energy—sucks the life out of me.

It always amazes me. Every September, the students show up. Every September, we disappoint them, not the first day, or the first week, but sooner or later we’re going to let them down. We’re always preaching, “Go the extra mile, work harder, apply a little elbow grease, ‘no pain, no gain’.” We preach all that good stuff, but the system consistently, without fail, lets them down. And teachers in turn blame themselves; internalize the pain, swallow the guilt and show up next September, believing that we can make a difference, that things will be different. The kids can’t buck the system and ironically the teachers can’t either. We’re all trapped in a system that was not designed for either kids or adults. We’re both victims.