Maybe It Was Idealism

When I was student teaching at a mostly-suburban school, one particular teachers-workroom lunch conversation focused on the movie The Freedom Writers and how unrealistic it was.  The most vocal of the teachers were, naturally, the most outspoken.  How idealistic it was.  How glamorized.  How Hollywood.

Maybe they were right about the glamor.   There is nothing glamorous about teaching.

But they had no idea.  They spoke out of ignorance.  They criticized something they knew nothing of.

The first day of teaching in an inner-city school, my first class soon proved to be the most challenging.  There was a knot of 5 or 6 boys who came in and immediately moved my desks, if they sat in desks at all.  (In case you're not aware, teachers are pretty particular about their desk arrangement.)  Even now, remembering that class makes me shiver.

There were some dark days, that first semester.  Luckily, I had 3rd hour plan, and for that I was thankful.  But... I always consoled myself that my day wasn't possibly as bad as Erin Gruwell's.   Was that idealistic?  On my part, possibly.  But the experience as a whole was very, very real, and it was not so different from hers.  There were other teachers at the school who had a worse time, for a longer period.

But the parallels didn't stop with student behavior.  Midway through the movie, Gruwell wants to get her students books to read.  She looks in the children's section.  The most popular book in my class was The Magic School Bus in Space (Half-Price Books, $1.50).

On another occasion, Gruwell asks her class who knows what the Holocaust was.  One student raises his hand... the white kid.

Last spring, after the stress of the EOI, and after team planning disintegrated and we pretty much did our own thing (much to our own relief, I think), I decided to teach Number the Stars, a short book about a Danish family who smuggles their Jewish friends to Sweden during Nazi occupation.  Before I started the book with my classes, I asked how many of them knew what the Holocaust was.

One student raised her hand.

I never really got over the voids I saw.  I just taught.  I stopped giving my students journal assignments about their heroes.  They explained that they don't have any; they learned long ago that heroes let you down.

Gruwell's students visited a Holocaust museum, read Anne Frank, and found in Anne and Miep Gies, heroes.

My students read and watched different accounts of the Holocaust and wrote about who they found to be bravest, and why it mattered to them.  I wish I'd kept those essays.

But the real similarity I see - the one that really matters, and the one that those other teachers see, too, but might not appreciate to the same degree - is not behavior, or curriculum, or achievement gaps.  It's transformation.

I squeezed paragraphs and essays out of kids who didn't think they had five words to share.

I've seen my kids in other classes... they can be monsters.  I've had teachers (albeit only a few teachers) come up to me with the cliched, "I see you have HIM in your class... hah."  At which point, I smile sweetly and say, "Yes, he's my best leader - really charismatic."  And it's true.  That "gang-banger" the teacher was referring to WAS my best leader (once channeled properly) and was the one who periodically felt the need to shout, "Shut up, fools, Ms. B is trying to teach!"

Another girl celebrated her first anniversary in the US in April.  Her English is severely limited, but she had enough words to write, "This is my favorite class.  I feel like home here."

Is this idealistic?  Perhaps. But the experience is real - very, very real.