Constructing Kasun, Educator

After discussing all the things we’re learning about life, my dear friend who lives in the Middle East and I decided this week we would open a worldwide chain of coffee shops. Caffeine-loving contemplative types could sit over coffee and experience moments of insight and wisdom, drop their coffee mugs in that “Eureka!” moment and not have them shatter at their feet. We decided we’d call the chain “Unbreakable Epiphanies.”

Aside from the entrepreneurial fantasy, today I had my real-life connection to epiphanies with a student. I started doing my first lesson with “Daniel” (not his real name), after finishing up his testing last week. We talked about how he felt about the other Spanish-speaking student at the site who just dropped out of school to go to work now that he’s 18. We also talked about what he wants to learn about English (most of our discussion was in Spanish today, as his English is still very limited), where he feels he needs to be.

Just like with my regular classes in the past, I gave him a questionnaire about his hobbies, his social constellations, and his fears and hopes about learning. Before we could get very far, we got stuck on his family. No mom–she died two years ago after he had arrived to the US. He grew up in a tiny pueblo (town) in Mexico. He lives with his dad, who hasn’t spoken to him in over three weeks. Daniel isn’t sure why. He lives with some other male cousins as well. He doesn’t talk with anyone who lives at home. He has one friend whose name he knows, and he spends a lot of time with him after school.

We then talked about Daniel’s journey to the US at the age of 12 (three years ago now), how for the first time he saw snow as he was walking for over a week across the US border. He talked about how he thought he saw a man die as he fell down a ravine because of the slick trails, but the man survived because the snow broke his fall. Daniel remembered these details with exquisite memory. Then we discussed how some events we live right on the edge of life, how we can remember them so strongly afterwards, and how most of life is just average, forgettable. He hadn’t thought of life this way before, and he liked knowing that, he said.

Next we began brainstorming about things we’ve lost to later turn into poetry. We listened to a song by a Lebanese singer who laments the loss of her boyfriend to help evoke feelings. The first thing he wrote about losing—his mom. We brainstormed for a while and then talked about things we could both relate to… missing warm tortillas, the sound of chickens in the morning in Mexico, the mariachis playing their desperate ballads of love and loss. Then we got back to his mom, and many memories poured forth. I wasn’t sure what to do. I listened, tried to help him put words to beautiful memories (he had loved her and could not return to Mexico for her funeral, where she had died apart from him).

It occurred to me to ask her name. “Epifania.” Epiphany. A not very common name in Mexico, an uncommon coincidence. “Do you know what an epiphany is?” I asked as gently as I could. He didn’t. I explained that he had had one with me just today, recognizing that there are different kinds of experiences in life—those on the edge and the average, daily, forgettable kind. A look of recognition crossed his face. His mother had been given a beautiful name, and I was glad to give him something about his mom that he could take with him.

We’re planning to work on writing to remember and to understand in efforts for him to improve his English. He says he’s looking forward to it. As for me, my epiphany was one about irony and connectedness, recognizing that the moment of the epiphany, no matter what it is, really is unbreakable.

Today I was initiated into the world of the ESOL Central Office Staff Meeting.  Observing an ordinary meeting of the sixty-plus of these staff members would have been enough of a culture shock (first fifteen minutes are mandated for the regular consumption of snacks and coffee and “nice to see you again,” announcements, reminders, talk about business, etc.). 

But what unsettled me wasn’t the subculture (actually, these people like each other, and the leadership in my district is truly talented and kindhearted—not easily replicated).  Instead, it was what was coming after our first break, something called “eCART.”  The preface was, “This is something we can use on Blackboard [that ubiquitous and not always helpful, some argue badly-designed on-line tool for teacher, student, and parent usage—now mandatory in my district].  It’s a tool where teachers can share information with each other and share out to the district.”   

One of my very good-natured and technology-friendly colleagues thought about the possibilities.  She leaned over and said, “Hey, great.  We can probably put up really helpful information for the teachers at the sites where we work.”

Another colleague, skeptical like myself, rolled her eyes. “I don’t think that’s what they have in mind.  It’s probably going to be all about testing and assessment for No Child Left Behind.” I agreed with her, citing some things I had already seen our district do to “support” NCLB, and waited.

Two women who were very enthusiastic about this new product smiled their ways through the introduction.  This is the latest “tool” teachers can use (the kind that slices,  wounds, carves), they assured us.  All those teachers who are basically being forced to use common assessments (some will argue they like them—especially if it cuts down o the amount of time they have to spend preparing other assessments) in our extremely large schools where most kids are anonymous will have to use this on-line equipment, especially those who teach in the four “core” areas (math, science, history and language arts).  We can then track data on schools, teachers, and students (and presumably punish those who don’t meet the standards, and, to be fair, perhaps help some of the kids who really need it most?).

In this software, all the discrete points of the standards in my state are now on-line with their corresponding benchmarks and indicators.  Along with them, however, are minute questions which test for each of those standards.  So much for essential knowledge—we’re drilling deep here for tiny pieces of evidence of information.  People are being paid all summer long to create these questions.  In fact, we (the district) are even purchasing some questions from big publishers like the Princeton Review.  And most of the funding has gone toward the creation of test questions.  And the supplemental materials they showed us as support for these discrete pieces of knowledge (like the algebraic concept of the line of best fit) come with what appeared to be dull, dry worksheets.

Those worksheets were referred to as the “resources” new teachers really need, the kind of resources that are hard for us to sort through in my district, since the district provides an overabundance of them.  Dissonance.  I remember my principal at my last school telling us my district wanted to “get away” from worksheets.  So?

Finally, to set our minds at ease, we were told the software had been created by Northrupp Grumman.  Yes, the major defense contractor.  The same one that builds missiles and aircraft used in war, like the one we’re not managing so well in
Iraq right now.  Of course it’s logical that there’s technological spillover from our generously-funded military research and development into civilian fields, but, do we have to do business as a school district with makers of weapons?  On the devil’s advocate side, the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development—one of my favorite sources of educational research—has partnered in creating the software.

Our two presenters continued to sell us the benefits of the helpful “Curriculum Repository” button (I don’t know why we have to use big words instead of more clear ones like “bank,” especially when they sound like places where we keep dead bodies in refrigeration… or maybe I’m getting these death images because this whole agenda smacks of the death of education,  forsaking the bringing to life new ideas for students, of opening their eyes to beautiful possibilities in learning, of discovering alongside them).

And then one of my colleagues shot me an email which popped up on my monitor.  “This is really depressing.”  And I bled on the inside for an instant and remembered that despite these initiatives, good teachers weather them and steer their children through these storms because they have to, because despite the pressures, they can.

Yesterday I went to a site for kids who have been sent by their principal to another school so that their behavior becomes more appropriate to the norms of a regular US classroom.  I write this and ask myself, “Why aren’t we equipped in the regular school setting to help these kids better?”  It’s a long process to get students to this particular kind of alternative school in my district; the guidance counselor, teachers, and parents are involved. 

One of my former students was sent a couple years ago.  No matter what I told him about, no matter how hard I tried, I could seldom get his head off the desk.  I think (though never reported because I wasn’t sure it was him) that he took a large bread knife I had brought to school to cut a cake for an after-school activity with the Latino Leadership Coalition.  When he was about to be shipped out of our school, on his last day, he finally wrote in my class (we did a lot of journaling).  He wrote feverishly—about how his biology teacher had refused to let him in her classroom. She had screamed at him to “Get out!” when he tried to take a seat in her class, thinking she was kidding when she refused to let him sit.  I read his entry and apologized to him for her, and, in a way, for me, for not being able to connect with him in meaningful enough ways to keep him coming back to school with a purpose.

And last year as department chair I lobbied to get one of the students in the department to one of these alternative programs.  It wasn’t that we didn’t like him.  He was riddled with problems from home, from what he was doing after school, from anger.  A place where he could get a lot more personalized attention and be among students who were all trying to learn skills to “fit in” to the culture of school would be a better place, I thought. 

This year, he is now my student—still inside the alternative setting.  I had spoken with him so many times in the halls about his choices in life, about how he was doing.  Several other staff members worked more with him, but he was still in the alternative school this year. 

I found him a bit larger than the last time I had seen him—more muscular, older, in so many ways, especially around his tired eyes.  He had been sleeping on his desk, uninterested in the work of school.  His sympathetic teacher and I woke him, told him that he had to be tested for ESOL.  He knows the drill after having been in ESOL in my district for two years now.  His teacher told me privately that he seems to be making worse choices these days, getting himself into more trouble.  He’ll probably be shipped to the juvenile detention center before long, or maybe not.

What did this test mean to this boy?  Why do it?  Why even come to school? (He’s legally obligated to and gets in trouble if he doesn’t.)  How does he get out of bed in the morning?  If you saw his face, you’d know why I ask these questions.

He didn’t finish the first test, the reading one.  He just couldn’t.  I don’t blame him.  I said I’d come back again in a few days.  I fear what I am to him.  A symbol of an institution that hasn’t helped him?  Just another piece of a world that is unfair?  A hollow voice that makes unimportant demands on him?  I just don’t know. 

“Life is cheap in the Third World.”  An old friend and I used to share this sentiment back in the days when we studied the concept of development in what we often refer to as the Third World.  We looked at high infant mortality rates, lack of access to health care and education and came to this grim conclusion.  He was from that part of the world; I had lived in it.   We traveled through some of it together and felt some consolation in this reductionist refrain as we dismissed the smudged-faced beggar children who pulled at our pant legs.

After a few days working in my new position with the least likely to succeed in this society, I have to come to the same conclusion about the First World as well, at least the US as part of the First World.  Life is cheap here, too.  So many of these people around us, even in this country of abundant resources and highly developed infrastructure, are tossed away like rotten meat, forgotten on the garbage heap of wasted human potential, abandoned and dismissed.

Last week I went to a mental health facility for children who have problems with substance abuse; all of the kids there have both a mental disorder and problems with substance abuse.  My colleagues took me there, as it’s one of my many sites on my list.  They didn’t think I’d have any ESOL students to service, but they said it would be good for me to know what those sites were like.  And the place isn’t bad.  It’s an old house on fairly spacious grounds with woods in the back.  The furniture is a little old and dirty, but not worse than some of the furniture I used in my dorm rooms in college.

The kids came up the stairs from their classroom in the basement for a break while we were there.  And, guess what?  They seemed like normal kids, helping themselves to water from the refrigerator, joking, talking with each other.  I didn’t expect anything different.  But somewhere these kids have been given up on, or they wouldn’t be in that home.  It turns out I will work with one of them—a young man from
Mexico, I think. 

At another mental health site that afternoon, we visited a house that is almost primarily for girls who don’t have a place to live.  There was only one resident at the time we visited, an American girl, working on large Matisse-like cutouts.  She was using another piece she had colored as a model which had peace symbols on it and a large gravestone that said, “Daddy, Rest in Peace.”  She was thin, tall, drawn into herself, and fragile.  Those chestnut eyes darted back and forth from the shapes she was cutting to glances at us, the strange visitors.  Her teacher kept telling her to rip the cutouts instead of cutting them, and the girl got angry at this (I would have, too!).  I just wanted to hug her, tell her it was ok, adopt her, even.  We toured the house, where I saw a sun-drenched living area and about seven bedrooms, complete with observation windows with a tiny privacy curtain the staff members could observe with. 

Surveillance.  A lot of the kids I work with are surveilled—somehow they’ve checked their ability to have autonomy at the door, and the “system” can’t afford to trust them anymore.  I guess stealing cars, running away, dealing drugs, recruiting for gangs, and the host of other things they’ve done means they can’t be trusted anymore.  But that’s how we treat them… no longer trustworthy.  Could we not look back instead and learn what has happened to them to make them this way?  There’s always a story.  Could we not find ways to mend the brokenness in their hearts, their homes, their communities?  Their teachers and counselors, many of them (hopefully most) fight against this in these unwieldy schools and centers where they get tossed, trying to recognizing the light emanating from within them, helping to nurture it.  But what happens when they leave these somewhat protective (and surveilling) places and go back to the harsh conditions they started from?  Will they be able to nourish that light on their own?  Or will they just get tossed back on that garbage heap again later in life, that heap partly comprised of the millions of people we have in our prisons?  God only knows, for life is cheap, it seems, wherever you go. 

I recoil as I write this post.  What if someone from my district is watching?  What if they catch on to what I’m going to write?  It’s so contrary to No Child Left Behind, to standardized curricula, to everything education is mandated to be in this country these days.  But I’ll share the little secret with you, anyway.  The questions it presents are so big to me that I think any audience out there needs to hear them as well.

I can teach anything.  I will have each student for one hour a week, and I’m supposed to teach them what they need.  In this job switch, I am the ESOL teacher who will help the ESOL student learn English.  However, because best ESOL practices mean teaching through content (not just skills and drills of the English language), I can teach whatever I think the student needs.  So I don’t have to worry about their standardized tests that they might fail and then might make their school and our district “look bad.”  I don’t have to worry about meeting all the various and wacky criteria of someone’s idea of what the study of X curriculum needs to be.  Sometimes their regular teachers at their site (math, science, social studies, and English) might weigh in and ask for support in some area, “Hey, can you help Ahmed figure out how to construct a scientific question?” might be something I’ll be asked to do.  But, beyond that kind of question from teachers, I’m on my own.

I have a little space in an office I share with three other women.  Picture an old US 1950s schoolhouse, complete with cream colored cinder blocks and bad flourescent lighting that was “renovated” into an office space (that means they tore out a few wallks here and there and installed tampon dispensers in the bathrooms with impossibly low toilet seats and really low wash basins).  So my desk faces the window with the large metal blinds and the parking lot where afternoon sun glares back at me from the cars’ sideview mirrors (hey–I’m not complaining, my district had me in windowless classrooms previously).  And behind my desk is a very large closet (think C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe).  In that closet are the keys to part of the kingdom.  Books and books and books.  Primary sources, novels, teacher guides, books on good instruction, textbooks, basal readers (argh to the last two).  I can almost feeling the dragon’s breath on my neck as I face the opposite direction and prepare my work from my desk.  Inside that closet are many of the tools I’ll use to access these students, to somehow enhance their lives.

But will I enhance their lives?  That’s the big question.  Will I provide anything of value?  Will I make them love education?  Is that my job?  Am I supposed to get them to be compliant, to slough off their “deviant” behaviors?  Or am I just supposed to somehow accompany them on their journeys, affirm them in their existence, let them know it’s ok to just be?  Will I teach them about the U.S.’s “Westward Expansion” (that is part of the curriculum in my state and many others), or will it be types of clouds?  Or will we do identity work through writing, and what might I encounter?  Am I strong enough to be present for that tiny amount of time each week with each child? 

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I’m hoping that somehow, some way, I can really do this.