We're just human!

A post from a community college instructor:

Last week I held one-on-one conferences with my students in our school library. The rest of the class did library research while I went through my class rosters, meeting with each student to go over a writing assignment. It’s a great way to get to know students at the beginning of the semester and provide a quick assessment with each student of grammatical writing skills--before they have to turn in a full-fledged essay. The personal conversation gives us a moment to connect and helps impress upon them the importance of eliminating all those comma splices and run-ons, and that writing only one hundred words isn’t going to cut it.

After class, I went back to my office to work on some upcoming lessons. My door was slightly ajar. A soft knock interrupted my how-to-write-a-compare-and-contrast-paper presentation prep.

            “Come in,” I said, looking up from my desk.

            The door opened slowly and there stood a young man--who was not one of my students. He looked a little flushed. “Could I talk to you a minute? Privately?”

            I got up from my desk and walked to the door, definitely leaving it open. I smiled. “What can I do for you?”

            “Could we shut the door?”

            “No, of course we can’t.” Not to be mean or anything, but it’s very bad idea being alone with a student in an office behind closed doors.

            He took a deep breath.

            I smiled again. “It’s for both our protection. Now, how can I help you?”

            He drew in another deep breath, and released it slowly. “I saw you in the library, well, with your students, and I wondered if maybe, well, we could meet for coffee sometime.”

            I smiled again. “Well thank you, very much. Thank you for the compliment. I so appreciate it. I’m married, though.” I didn’t say and I am old enough to be your mother.

            “I’m only going here for one class, one semester. I’m already at the (he named the big university on the other side of town). So it wouldn’t really be a conflict of interest.”

            The sweet boy. He must be sticking to his plan because he apparently didn’t hear the comment about my hubby.

            “I’m already thirty,” he continued. “And it really isn’t a conflict of interest,” he said again.

            I didn’t tell him I was twenty years older than he is.  “Thank you. I’m honored. But really, it might be a conflict with my husband. So tell me what you’re majoring in.”

            We chatted just enough so that he could save face.      

After he left, I went to the restroom feeling quite pleased. I’m a harried teacher with so much running around and so many papers to grade that my dolling myself up doesn’t last long.

I looked in the mirror. I couldn’t help but feel a bit proud. The young man must have heard me working with my students. He must have thought I did a good job balancing encouragement with threats of failure.

And he must think I’m still at least pretty enough to be seen in public with him at a coffee shop.

“You go, girl!” I smiled at myself in the mirror.

And there smiling back at me was my lunch. During that whole conversation, I had my bean soup sitting in my teeth. I had gone through two classes, an earlier meeting with two of my colleagues and a quick visit from an adoring fan….all with food in my teeth.

And not one person had told me.

After I got over the total embarrassment--not feeling too proud then--I realized that one thing about being teachers is that we’re just plain human with our students. We are with each other day in and day out, through thick and thin. They get us looking snazzy some days, and other days, not so much.

            I thought back to my conversation with the young man. He must have been too nervous to notice the bean skins. At least I hoped so.  

            And all those other students who had sat by me in the library? No one would tell me I looked like a ridiculous cartoon with black in my teeth? I’m thinking about them, thinking that there's got to be some way to give college students detention.

Borderlearning Conference--Come to Las Cruces, NM Feb. 9th & 10th

Seventy presenters will be covering quite a variety of topics....something for all of us who must teach in a world that seems to grow bigger and smaller everyday--all at the same time.

These are the Guests speakers:

Author Denise Chávez is our 2012 Border Learning Conference “Crossing Borders” award recipient. Denise Chávez is a novelist, playwright, teacher and performance writer based in Las Cruces and Mesilla, New Mexico. She has roots in Far West Texas with her mother's family and in Las Cruces, New Mexico with her father's family. A true child of La Frontera, Chávez is the author of the memoir, A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture, Loving Pedro Infante Face of An Angel, and The Last of the Menu Girls. She has published a children's book, La Mujer Que Sabía El Idioma de Los Animales/The Woman Who Knew the Language of the Animals. Chávez performs her one-woman shows, Women in the State of Grace and El Muro/The Wall: A Chorus of Immigrant Women's Voices, throughout the U.S. Chávez has recently finished work on a novel, The King and Queen of Comezón, a border mystery/love story. She is working on a collection of stories, El Inglés Tan Bonito/Beautiful English and a book, Río Grande Family, about her Sephardic Jewish roots in Chihuahua and Delicias,México. She is also working on a children's book, La Hermana Ying and LaHermana Yang. Chávez is the Director of The Border Book Festival, a major national and regional book festival based at the Cultural Center de Mesilla, a multicultural bookstore that has recently opened an art gallery, Galería Tepín. www.borderbookfestival.com

Hector Galán is a critically acclaimed independent filmmaker who has won numerous national and international awards and recognition for documenting border issues. Early on in his career, he realized that his goal in life was to bring diversity to national television and bring real stories about real people. His work has explored border issues, such as, migrant farm workers, life in the colonias, development of Tejano music and its reflection of Mexican American history/culture, the life of the first Mexican-American bishop in the history of the Catholic Church, as well as, the hunt for Pancho Villa. Mr. Galán has cast his lens on the Latino experience in America, bringing the culture and history of the U.S. Latino experience to the screen. His work he says, “only scratches the surface of what Latinos are creating in our country. I am extremely proud to be a microphone for their work, to document their art, to publicize their culture.” Mr. Galán received a degree in Mass Communications from Texas Tech University.

Federico Reade received his Ph.D. in Educational Thought and Sociocultural Studies from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in December 2005. His work has focused on critical theory with special emphasis on New Mexico and the experience of the American Southwest. Federico Antonio Reade Jr. is a descendent of one of the soldiers of the First California Column; his great grandmother was a Navajo captive who was traded to a family from San Geronimo, New Mexico, outside Las Vegas, New Mexico, y mama’s mexicanas. He grew up and received his education in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has applied his education on doing ethnographic documentaries on the sociocultural history of populist movements and stories of peoples of the American Southwest border region and has recently completed a screenplay of the landgrant movement. Today he is working on the story of the Black Beret’s of Albuquerque, New Mexico following a group of youth and their activities from 1968 to 1973.

For more information about the event:

http://dacc.nmsu.edu/bis/borderlearningconference/docs/final%20BLC%202012%20brochure%2009%2015%202011.pdf

SO VERY DIFFICULT....

In academia for more than thirty years, this contributor has seen the world of education from many vantage points, including from across a  teacher's desk and now in a school library. She has also been a grant writer and has served as an independent consultant. 

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I work in the heart of the most urban of areas in a large metropolitan city, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) population just under two million. 

Eighty-nine percent of children in the school where I work have no father in the home and live in single-mother households. The transience rate for the students is 105 percent, and historically is about 30 percent on average per year for teachers.  Only five out of 336 students pay for their lunches. About 20 percent are in Special Education classes. And only 38 percent pass the annual state exams. Over 40 percent receive in-house mental health counseling and another 15 percent of the school is on a waiting list for services. 

Stark figures, to say the least.

The day-to-day lives of the children ages three to fifteen (grades pre-K-6^th) fair not much better. 

This week, kindergartner Demilo was exposing himself to classmates. CPS said all boys do that. His single mom sent him away to live with his dad.

Yesterday, Treasure entered the school library with her class and began quietly, factually recounting her experience with watching her mom forcibly raped three times the night before. Treasure is a first grader.

In fifth-grade for the second year, fourteen-year-old Corrience left the school bus this morning and entered the building visibly angry, fists clenching and unclenching, shallow breaths punctuated by grunts as he glowered straight ahead and shouldered his way ahead of the line.  As he steps over children he has knocked down, he flails and twists away from a teacher’s gentle but firm hands trying to redirect him and minimize the collateral damage. Never mind she had just slammed her own head into the wall as she tried to spare a toppling child.

Corrience’s problem today? His foster mom told him he couldn’t have money to spend at the school store for a pencil and eraser.

Gre’marquis is new to the school just last week. This morning he quietly approaches me in the hall and says he needs to speak to the social worker. As I respectfully try to learn why, he tells me he cannot let his brothers or himself go back to his mother’s home again. He says she was drunk and high again this morning and beat him and his brother as she does most mornings. Most days he comes home and finds her incoherent on the couch. He says he knows it means they will go to the Guardian’s Home, but it is better that way. He magically recites his mother’s name, her complicit boarder’s name, their phone numbers, ages, and the drugs they were using. He provides his grandmother’s telephone number in a distant city and asks that she be notified.  In a very subdued tone, Gre’marquis pleads to not go back to his mother’s again. These are his own words. Gre’marquis is 7.  His brothers are 6 and 5.

 

I mull over all of this as I sit at my desk in the library. Making a difference in these children’s lives--a measurable difference--is difficult.  At least it is difficult to know if anything I do makes an appreciable difference beyond the moment.

I recall my own tumultuous, traumatic elementary years, and I realize words and actions can make a difference far beyond today, far beyond the moment. I recall the summer school teacher between my seventh and eighth grade years who believed in me like no one else did. He said I could pass the classes. He said he knew I could do it, and he’d help me all I wanted. 

And I passed the classes. I passed them for him and because of him.

I see Corrience trudging past the library windows, scowling as he makes his way down the hall. Wondering if he had been suspended or helped, I wave at him and he waves back. I beckon for him to come in to the library--which he does, with a torrent of invectives directed at no one in particular. I let him spout, and then I ask him to come sit with me for a bit and help check-in books. We talk about what had set him off this morning. Eventually, we discuss what he likes to read (not much), but when I tell him I’ll buy for him whatever books on whatever subject he might be interested in, he lights up and begins sharing an amazing amount of knowledge about outer space and space travel. Explaining the source of his mental compendium, he says he likes watching Nova when he can but he usually gets laughed at by his foster family. He says his biological father had encouraged his interest as a child before he disappeared one day when he was eight years old. I say I’ll buy a bunch of books for him tonight at Half Price Books (knowing I’ll have to be sure they were at the 3^rd grade reading level he is working at). He can keep them at school or take them home--whatever he wants. 

Glancing at the clock, he scoots back his chair hastily, unfolds his gangly fourteen-year-old man/boy body from the chair and heads for the door to catch breakfast before too late. Taking the pencil I proffer him, he lopes to the door. Looking back over his shoulder, he says, “Thanks, man” and heads off for his day.

Do I think that a span of five minutes cures the ills in his life? Hardly. But I do hope as I follow through on my promise, he can begin to learn to trust again, to trust in talking, talking about his needs and wants, about his hurts and hopes. I hope he can begin to see a place for his dreams when maybe no one else does. I know it can happen. I wanted to be Maria Mitchell, girl astronomer, and only that summer school teacher ever said this troubled, waif-of-a-girl and abysmal math student could be whatever she dreamed she could be.