Constructing Kasun, Educator

I have a student working on a found poem right now, so I’ll also do some quick writing next to him.   As I’ve commented before, one of the best ways to write is right alongside the student…  it’s like a spiral where both of us are generative, knowing the other is hard at work.

As I was making my hour-long commute to this site this morning, I was thinking through some ideas.  I’ve been thinking about how our jobs as teachers is in many ways to just sit inside the pain of our students’ lives.  While sitting there, hopefully we provide both some comfort and guidance through the pain.

Which brings me to my own students.  All of them are at sites for the pained (remember, these are “alternative schools”).  That’s a different way of looking at how we otherwise label them…  kids who are “at-risk,” “behavior problems,” “substance abusers,” “difficult.”  How about just pained?  Isn’t that the deeper root of why they’re here?  Pained by the harsh realities of a world which lets so many of them be disposable, kids on the fringe whose lives are too difficult for most of us to want to look at, to want to understand the larger factors which contribute to their lives?

So I sit next to my student, feeling strange inside this pain.  We spend so much time trying to run away from pain… television, music, food, and, in the case of my students, less socially acceptable forms of numbing (fights, drugs, acting out and under-achieving at school).  The one right next to me works, pouring over a text as he tries to lift meaningful pieces of text to craft a new piece of literature.  And as he works, he’s creating, and hopefully I can help him see that he can be a creator of new things, pieces of meaning which elevate him and anyone who reads his work from his point of pain.

And at the same time, I try to communicate that I’m willing to be next to him as he works through all this, inside the pain. 

In my best efforts to connect with students, I am learning a lot more about cars than I ever planned to. 

 Why?

Because, as I try to get under the cognitive hoods of my students, I find that a couple of them are really driven by their interest in cars (puns intended).  So, in my efforts to make curriculum meaningful, with those students, we’ve been reading and writing about cars.

We don’t just read about the big-engine, tripped-out vehicles that they’re drawn to.  I try to intersect science, social justice, and the environment with their interest in cars.  One of my students is currently answering a letter about a dilemma… should the writer of the letter buy a car that will harm the environment, or are there other options? 

My students are learning about alternative fuel options and also weighing the impact of the Nano’s release at just $2500 in India will have on the environment, wrestling with questions about whether people in other countries should be able to use have the same access to cars that we do in the US.

One of the articles a Pakistani student and I read mentioned how the Nano is a nice alternative to motor scooters where whole families ride atop them at once.  “I’ve seen that, too,” he said calmly.  Huh.  Seems completely possible since his country is a neighbor to India, after all.

And my students are teaching me about the catalytic converter, horsepower, and we sometimes look at images of their favorite cars where I get full descriptions as to why those cars are so cool.  And I have to admit that those cars are fascinating to look at…  and I marvel at how much these students know about these machines.

If only there were more good car-oriented books for students.  Any ideas? 

Sometimes we miss each other completely.  Sometimes what I value has nothing to do with what the other values.  And we end up speaking at each other, unpenetrated by the meaning.

That’s what’s happening in a book about a very young Hmong girl born to immigrants in California, http://www.spiritcatchesyou.com/.  She has epilepsy and seizes a lot.  The Hmong usually value this in their culture; she is both cursed with the suffering and but also blessed to become one who sees in spiritual realms which most people never will.  For her western medical doctors in California, she has a disease which must be cured.  For Western eyes, the Hmong perspective may seem “primitive,” but as I read the story, I am drawn into seeing the perspective behind Hmong eyes, where doctors make a baby cry, where the baby’s condition seems to get worse with medicine.  Meantime, the doctors are frustrated that the parents do not follow the treatment regimen as they prescribe, and both sides are frustrated–missing each other in their meanings and intentions.

There’s a connection here with an immigrant student who I won’t be seeing much longer.  His time at one of his sites is almost up, and, based on his progress, he will move to a location with less observation.  I’ve enjoyed every session I’ve worked with him.  I learn from him.  He’s brutally honest about a past he wants to leave in the past; he writes about it freely.  His writing isn’t exactly linear, it’s more like stream of consciousness, the details about abuse, people who have abused him, concrete metaphors spill out in a way that is usually hard to understand yet rich with meaning.

So he’s not a natural writer.  But his thoughts and feelings are intense, heavy.  Heavier than those of many adults I know.  I learn from him and the way he battles his demons every day.  I try to support him in that. 

Part of that support was pushing his case forward to receive special education services.  I find him so bright on many levels, but not the ones our education system has deemed are important–logic, math, reading and writing.  In fact, during one of our lessons, I administered a multiple intelligences survey to see where his strengths lay (see this link for a description of Howard Gardner’s development of multiple intelligences theory http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm). 

Of eight intelligences Gardner has defined, my student scored highly on all but two–the only two that often count in US schools–verbal linguistic and logical/mathematical.  As such, I explained to him why I was submitting the paperwork for his testing.  What I couldn’t effectively explain was that he really is intelligent, just not the way schools value intelligence.

And what a shame.  My student is so introspective and good at expressing himself.  He’s creative, funny, good on the basketball court (we played once together for about fifteen minutes at his request and with the permission of his site).  He’s existential and loves music.  But these qualities don’t seem to count, and I wonder how he’ll do in this country.  Will his strenghts be missed over and over again, as they’ve been in the past, and might a sensitive soul go unnoticed, or, worse, get beat down by a culture that just doesn’t value his ways of being intelligent? 

“Ok, stop, I can’t do this,” is how a student responded to me last week.

Was I ordering him to read War and Peace?  Demanding that he write a lengthy essay?  Getting him to recite a monologue?

I was asking him to spell the word, “pet.”  This is a student who has been in the US for two and half years, who has almost entirely lost the accent on his spoken English, who has what is the approximation of third grade reading skills according to the test I applied earlier this year.  And he can’t spell three letter words from a word-study spelling battery.

It’s no wonder, then, he would act out in school.  I understand the ESOL team doesn’t want him back in their classes at that middle school (this is hearsay, in their defense).  But I probably wouldn’t either.  His oral and listening skills would be much more advanced than his peers, but his reading and writing scores have continued to keep him down.  And, frankly, he hardly knows how to read, despite his reading score.

 But he likes poetry.  He likes getting a friend’s sister to write poetry with his friend.  And I showed him a short, simple poem in Spanish I had put on a small website I’m creating (slowly) with my students, and he was thrilled to read the poem and understand it in Spanish.

So I sort through this mystery of, “Stop it–I can’t take any more!” and try to read up on how to teach letter sound awareness so this student can begin to succeed in academics and maybe, hopefully, stop acting out in class and in society once he tastes a little bit of the sweetness of academic success.

I’ve officially begun working in the longterm with students. 

 I like it.  It’s fun.  And scary.  And requires a lot of individualized planning and weighs you down because you know that you want each lesson to be a hit for each student since you work alone with them.

 And I don’t know how much to share with you, dear reader.

The work is so personal with each student.  On one of my questionnaires for students to fill out, they get to write down what they want to learn.  One student wrote that he wanted to learn about why he is here–what his purpose is in life.  Another student began writing about God and feeling that he doesn’t feel his presence but wants to believe.  Of course there are others who are quite interested in hairstyles and makeup, but things are so personal (like what I shared in my previous post about “Daniel”) that I don’t know what to share and what not to.

If you were being instructed one-on-one, would you want to be the subject of someone’s blog post?  My inclination, when I try to answer that question honestly, is no.

And at this point in my job, I’m not sure how much I can share otherwise.  Most of my mental energy goes toward finding the right book, the right album, the right thought, to share with each unique student. 

I am, however, having thoughts about the larger implications these students have about humanity–like, for instance, that these kids are so good when I teach them (yet, supposedly, so bad according to the way our system has judged them).  And they are so good, and I’m convinced that we’re all somehow good the more I work with them.  Maybe that will change.

Or maybe it will just be the next subject of my next blog post.  To share or not to share?  I’ll have to decide.

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.

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.

The first step to a second chance.  That’s the name of the conference I attended in my district today.  Hundreds of staff participated in this conference—an event specifically for those of us who work in alternative educational settings.  What is alternative education?  It’s all the education offered for the students who don’t learn the “normal” way, usually for students who behave so badly that they get expelled or sent out of their home base schools.  The keynote speaker, an expert on relationships who has appeared on several nationally syndicated talk shows, described alternative education as “where it’s at” in education today.  After listening to him in the first session, I wondered if he was right.

Let’s go back a day.  Yesterday I met with an incredibly thoughtful colleague in my district who asked me about the Fulbright experience.  Her opening question, after not having seen each other all summer was, “In light of the Fulbright, how have you changed?”  I couldn’t thank her enough for the insight of the question, the invitation.  But, back to alternative education and “where it’s at,” to borrow our speaker’s phrase.  My colleague and I are co-chairs of the metropolitan ESOL teachers’ chapter, and we’re figuring out who will be presenting at the next conference we’re organizing.  We were tossing around ideas and names of people we knew:

“How about Sally Smith [not her real name]; she’s so energetic?” she asked.

“Nah—she’s only doing sessions on how to make shadow boxes [not exactly, but something similar],” I replied, feeling guilty.  “Why are so many people giving sessions on all this busy work stuff?”

“Gosh, do you think teachers get compassion fatigue?”

Ah ha.  She had nailed one of the issues.  In the land of standards, test-based learning, mandated curricula, bells, hall passes, inane discreet pieces of data that kids have to memorize, we’re just too damn tired to feel compassion.  Who wants to hear a session on how to care for kids?  Who wants to think critically about the metamessages behind what we’re teaching?  Can’t we just drill them with the American Revolution, ionic bonds, and cumulus clouds?

Back to our conference today.  The majority of the folks in alternative education know they can’t afford to have compassion fatigue if they genuinely want to help the students we’re working with—the ones who are getting a second chance, and, oftentimes, their last.  So our keynote explained that we really need to be educating kids how to have healthy relationships, that we seldom discuss it, and when we do, it’s under the rubric of sexual education, which he claims (and I agree) is more about plumbing than learning how to love.  He argued that most kids today don’t see healthy relationships, and there are rich questions we should be asking and discussing to help guide them along.

My next session was one on a concept called Restorative Justice.  American Indians had long ago established traditions of restorative justice, and we’re now, in a few places, beginning to use it.  The idea is that when a person wrongs someone else, instead of focusing on punitive action, we need to look at how the victim, the aggressor, and the community are harmed (primarily the psychic damage) and how all parties can heal.  The focus is then on the engagement in resolving the problems.  Some schools are beginning to use this model in working with students, instead of a discipline and punish approach.  It seems to make a lot of sense.  I wondered if restorative justice could be used for Israel and Palestine and other world conflicts.  I also wondered if we had listened more to the American Indians how our country would be radically different.  But I digress.

A first step at a second chance.  In some ways that’s what I’m starting with my new job.  I wrote about this in a lost in cyberspace post last night.  My new position is as an itinerant ESOL teacher, working with immigrant students one-on-one, once a week for an hour, pulling them from their alternative education sites as well as working in my enormous district’s central office.  I also get a peak at new initiatives before everyone else, help out with other initiatives, and get some advanced training.  So far I’m delighted to work with a talented team of strong women who know their jobs well.  I sat in on a presentation that two of them gave today about gang awareness, and I was impressed at their extensive knowledge and the big hearts they have for working with kids who so badly need it.  We all deserve these second chances, if we could only get them.