Time is such a relative human experience. It is perpetually difficult for me to understand how quickly it can disappear when you keep yourself occupied. The last time I posted about school was after my very first day. I have now completed three weeks of the marathon school year. If I learned a lot my first day, the same is true of the thirteen that have followed . In order for readers to understand what I mean, I think I need to set the stage for where I teach.
ROOTS Academy is no ordinary school. Our students are no ordinary students. Our city is no ordinary city. On Thursday afternoon, as I drove home from work, I followed two police cars and one police motorcycle up the hill to my house in the Plan 12 community in Aliquippa. I knew something was up. I knew it wasn’t good. I read about it in the paper the next morning. An 18 year old was shot in the head. Miraculously, he is expected to survive. He was a student at our school two years ago. Four of our students were around the incident when, or immediately after, it happened. One of our students was with Shawn when he was fired at. He had the premonition to run, but saw his friend shot in the head, lying on the ground. At least two of our students saw Shawn lying on the ground. “I saw him trying to stand up,” a male student said Friday in our group therapy session. “He kept trying to stand up but he couldn’t. And I saw him lying there.”
Thursday afternoon was not an uncommon experience for the students who attend ROOTS Academy. In fact, if you heard them speak about the situations they go through, you’d hear them speak about them as if they were normal experiences that everyone goes through: cousins, uncles, friends shot down in homicides, drug and alcohol addiction, violence as a means of conflict management, being arrested, locked up, gun shots, early sexual experience/abuse, teenage pregnancy, never meeting their fathers. I am their teacher, but I have no idea what they have gone through. I cannot empathize, it is difficult even to sympathize.
Having to deal with all of this on a regular basis, you can imagine the behavior and psychological issues that our students bring into school with them. As one students put it, “When you have all of this shit going on outside of school, you can’t just turn it off and be ‘good’ when you walk in the door.” She is admittedly scared to walk outside of her house for fear of being hit by a stray bullet.
This year I am teaching art, english, and graphic design. Our students are broken up into three groups of three-to-five students each. Having a small class size definitely has its advantages (hard to imagine having all 12-15 students at once!), but even with a small class size, our teaching situation is incredibly difficult. In each group I have at least one student with a learning disability. I am constantly juggling behavior management, academics, and tutoring students with learning disabilities.
In many ways, I thought art and graphic design would be easy to teach. Who doesn’t like to draw? Isn’t creative activity innate to human nature? For the most part, I don’t have much trouble with students in art class, but there are the few who hate to do their art work. I emphasize over and over that they are not graded on their ability, but on their participation and their effort. Sometimes it is pulling teeth to convince students to even try. It seems that they have such low self-esteem that they are convinced that they cannot draw. For someone, like myself, who believes that anyone can learn to draw, I find this incredibly frustrating. I’m trying to work on creating an atmosphere where it is OK to experiment and to fail.
I was hit in the head by a marker on my second day of art class. It came flying at me from an angry student who didn’t like that I corrected his use of obscene language. Of course I wasn’t injured, but it was enough to land him in in-school-suspension for the next day. You aren’t really allowed to ‘cus out’ teachers or assault them with classroom materials at our school. I’m just glad it wasn’t scissors. I was trying not to laugh though, as the student was escorted out of the classroom by our behavior support staff. This kid was acting like a little child throwing a temper tantrum. I wish he could have seen how absurd he looks when he allows such a little situation to escalate. When you think, however, that this is the same type of behavior that leads someone to fire five bullets into a crowd of people, it loses its humor a bit. Endemic to human nature is an inability to deal effectively with conflict. Something is wrong here. We’ve got to do something. Something has to change.
I try to keep small victories in the forefront of my mind when I think about school. In English class this week, for instance, I think some good work got started. Our only senior this year, a male, seventeen, had a baby boy born to him this summer. He has mentioned more than once that having a child has begun changing the way he looks at the world. He is, as I said, a senior, and about ready to graduate, but he has a learning disability and can write about as well as a third grader. He was frustrated at the material I had been giving him to work on because he felt like it was not at his level. In spite of that, after expressing his frustration to me in a few choice words, we began working on a college application essay together. I am walking him through, step by step, and though it is slow going, he is working hard and wants to succeed. The topic he chose to write about was the birth of his child, and how it has changed him as a person. It takes him a whole class period to write a paragraph but it is a joy to see him working hard, and really thinking about how is life has changed and needs to change. “I didn’t used to care about whether or not I got shot before. Now I do, for my son,” he says.
Friday in English class I gave my students an opportunity to write in their journals about the shooting the day before. I wanted to give them the opportunity to get out some frustration, fear, anger, etc., and I also had to give them some work, despite the fact that they were all pretty shook up. One of our most difficult students, a girl, fourteen, wrote two whole pages in her journal. Students NEVER voluntarily write that much. She has about as bad a situation as any of our students. She’s been neglected by her mother. She saw three family members die this year in homicides. So far this year, art class is the only class that she has not been kicked out of yet (knock on wood!). In art class I see this girl transform into a completely different young lady. She is quiet, concentrating on her work. She asks for help and encourages other students. She volunteered to take work HOME with her over the weekend (How often, at ANY school, does a student volunteer to do homework, and on a WEEKEND?!). I’m excited about working with her on her artwork. I think it could be a good escape for her. I think, too, that she has a ton of potential (something I have definitely been sure to tell her). She could, if she chose to, use art to get herself out of her situation. I’m talking about art school. She has so much working against her though…
Three weeks into school, I needed to get some thoughts out. There is a lot more where this came from. I think I NEED to write to get some of this stuff out, to process it, to deal with it. I welcome advice on teaching, if anyone has any experiences they want to share, things I can do better. I want to post more frequently about some of this.
The road to athens was made for conversation.
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