And now you’ll want to hear about my students, and how they behave, and how well they speak English, and what they do that is endearing, and what they do that is insufferable, and how they have grown in the month since school began.
And I hold out my hands, browning daily in the sunny schoolyard, and wiggle my fingers—a magic trick. I conjure up a vision of them: sitting, standing, slouching over their desks. But the vision is not whole. It is a holograph to be looked at from one angle and then another, a computer screen that flickers when filmed.
“I forgot my homework,” F. tells me.
“You forgot it? That’s too bad. You’ll have to stay in for recess.”
F. grabs a page in her notebook and rips, then motions with it in my direction.
“No, miss.... She smiles.
A few minutes later she does the same act with presentation she is scheduled to give. Amazingly enough, I fall for it again.
The school director walks into my classroom to get a student to discuss a discipline issue. “Están tomando un examen?” It is a beautiful moment. They are in fact working on their second drafts of their memoirs. They were resistant to the idea of continuing to work on them, but working they are. A few have even added details based on an exercise—which they only partially processed—on different ways to begin a story. Alas the two students who have the most trouble settling down to work will be pulled out of class. (They were calling a classmate names, and that classmate is a bit of a tattletale.) I instantly blame myself for not better handling behavior management and discipline. I wonder what those two students might have written if they had stayed in class. The beautiful moment is broken.
But the students have written some heartfelt pieces, intimate, full of lines that are telling and lines that are inadvertently poignant:
When I went to school, I did not want to go play at lunch. My teacher called my parents to ask them what was wrong. I was traumatized. ..... Three years later my father left the alcohol.
I didn’t want to eat. I only wanted to spend time with the horse.
My grandfather’s nickname was Papiman. He would always give me five lempiras to buy candy.
I ask a student in class one day whether she is sick—her eyes are red, her face looks a little puffy. She says she is fine with a flat, strained voice that sounds like the indifferent tone she always uses. But the next day I see her crying during lunch. How could I not have realized she was upset? It has something to do with a boy, I think. I don’t know what to say. Her other teacher gives her permission to skip the next class. I awkwardly give her a pat on the back and say, “Hope you feel better.” I doubt she is comforted.
Another day. The boys in my class ask me, “What did you do to your hair?” They want to know why I cut it, where I cut it, and why does one side look shorter than the other? When I lean over their desks to ask them questions about their work they reach up to touch it. I remind them of our class “no touching” rule. I tell one student that I don’t touch his hair, either. Of course, he offers that I could if I wanted to. Walked into that one.
A girl observes that another girl is very flexible. “She is a snake.” I ask why. “She drew a picture of a pig with my name on it. She is a snake." She doesn’t seem shaken by the interaction, and I am so proud of her chain of thought. I consider that perhaps I should not ask students to describe each other when we continue our work on metaphors.
The students whine a lot. They complain a lot. They say “Ayyy Misssss!” They try to convince me that I said the vocabulary quiz would be on Tuesday, that they didn’t know, that they had too much work and it’s very unfair and they did not have time to study, and didn’t you say it was Tuesday—you did, you did! I find it very hard not to get visibly angry. These kids are very lucky to be going to school, but like kids everywhere they don’t appreciate it much. It’s comforting, somehow, to know that kids everywhere are so similar. They call school a jail (“But jail is better because you have TV and you can relax,” one student told me), want only to talk to their friends, spend too little time on their homework, and need to borrow pencils. It can be hard to keep that in focus after a trip to City Mall, where the clothes are American style with American prices and all the classic fast food chains are there. (Watching an undubbed Lindsey Lohan movie in the air-conditioned City Mall movie theater made me ridiculously homesick.) But always I am reminded of how their experience of normal is different in the details. One student’s father works in the States, illegally. He has been gone three years, and he’s supposed to return, but...
There are so many stories that I want to discover, and I hope my students will let me into their lives in the same way that I’m trying to let them into mine. They are fascinated to hear about my life in New York, my family, my friends and their extraordinary world adventures. They love to ask questions about topics I know about off the top of my head that are new to them, like Judaism. If you want to expand their interest, mail me some matzoh—they would love to try it.
My students--seventh, eighth and ninth graders--at times seem a bit anomalous in the context of the whole school. To have stuck it out this long, past the government-mandated sixth grade education, they generally have parents who are very involved in the school. There are fewer scholarship students, and on the whole their families are really committed to helping secure a strong future for them. For that reason, I sometimes feel that I am not getting the chance to grasp first-hand the wide variety of our school attendees’ experiences. I also feel detached from the school community on occasion because the junior high is in its own building and my classes are smaller, so I know fewer kids. But then I walk to school and get passed by a busito, the students scream “Miss!” and stick their arms out the windows to wave. Then a first-grader being taken to school on a bicycle yells “Good morning!” at me from quite a distance and repeats the phrase until I snap out of my daze and yell back. Then a group of students sings The Wheels on the Bus to me at recess. I realize I am a part of it all. I just have to keep pulling myself into the mix.
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I decided after racing through the book Banker to the Poor that in the future I want to manage something big and ambitious and innovative. I like to manage, even if it’s just the creation of a house stir-fry meal. I remind myself that I’m scaling up, to adopt business-speak. Putting out the paper five days a week was a warm-up for placing knowledge in twenty adolescent minds five days a week. I foresee even greater and similarly serendipitously wonderful challenges ahead. Maybe in that vague “ahead” place, I’ll even be able to escape the painfully earnest tenor of this paragraph.
