Laughing to Keep From Crying

On difficult days at the High, one of the highlights can be watching students sneak back into the school after leaving school grounds. Two other teachers and I share a prep period in an open room overlooking a grass lawn fenced off for safety. Here students sneak out, go to the park across the street, (get high), and abysmally attempt to sneak back in. They trip over the fence and get stuck between loose poles. They fall flat on their faces, rip clothing, and lose hats. Eventually they try every locked door along the side of the school hoping to get in. This fails every time unless a student in the halls sees them and lets them in through a door unlocked for emergencies.

Looking on from above we sit in our classroom narrating the students’ advances, providing dialogue, asides, and soliloquies for this comedy of errors.

“Oh, there goes his hat!”
“Well, those jeans just got a little baggier…”
“Oh man, what if we don’t get back inside in time for lunch?”

Sometimes the chaos, absurdity, and utter disorganization of the High become a constancy we take comfort in. The consistency of inconsistency.

A veteran teacher told me to keep track of the things in the beginning that seemed abnormal because they would become routine before I knew it.

I think about the leak in my roof. The teacher that had the room before me said it had been leaking for two years. I hardly even notice it anymore.

What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?

"I don't know boy but it is my business to find out...."

“Learning begins with the Fear of the Lord” reads a mural on the wall of our high school’s auditorium. I didn’t know the religious fervor I would encounter, but the ‘fear of the lord’ has permeated our classroom, our staff assemblies, our morning announcements, and our beginning of the year orientation where we, as a staff, sang:
(3x)
I need you,
You need me
We’re all apart of God’s body
Stand with me agree with me
We’re all apart of God’s body
It is his will that every need be supplied
You are important to me I need you to survive

(7times)
I pray for you
You pray for me
I love you I need you to survive
I won’t harm you with words from my mouth
I love you I need you to survive

It is his will that every need be supplied
You are important to me I need you to survive!

I guess I underestimated the power of God in our public schools. As I stifled my child-in-church giggles of bewilderment, my co-worker said, “At least they didn’t march us downtown to go to church this year.” Perhaps this happens at all jobs. Maybe this is Bush’s payment plan for “No Child Left Behind.” Regardless, it was reassuring to leave that revival only to witness a red-faced teacher threaten to kill another teacher if he ever touched his stuff.

....

I now live within a brief walk to Reverend Charles Tindley’s Methodist Church on Broad Street in Philadelphia. The father of American Gospel, he penned “I Shall Overcome” (later “we”), “By and By (I’m going to see the Lord)”, “Stand by Me,” and “Nothing in Between.” He also wrote the song for which this post is titled, which I became familiar with after the Mississippi Records release of Washington Phillips, the dulceola (or fretless zither?) master. Phillips is also available on CD from JSP record’s compilation Spreading the Word: Early Gospel Recordings (B).

Before You Accuse Me

Courage. Being a high school student requires courage. Given all of the distractions facing students at my school on any given day, it takes courage for many of them just to show up. One appropriate example is a student showing up to school after two days of absence without explanation. He never missed class before then, and I began to worry about him. Nevertheless, on the Friday of our first pep rally, he returned to stand in the bleachers and bare his "RIP" banner for a loved one recently deceased. He did not have to be at school, and he was obviously having a hard time. Still, he came to school. He came back and continues to return.

Students return after getting jobs, attending funerals, sleepless nights watching siblings, disputes with their parents, and any number of other events that characterize adolescent development. It just seems that they don’t necessarily know how to turn this determination and courage into success according to the rules and expectations in my classroom.

I know that if a student walks into my room, they want to learn. They may not know how to express that or act that out, but they want to learn. So I know that when I fail to get their attention, or I lose their interest, I have not capitalized on their determination and courage. Their attendance alone is the biggest difference between success and failure.

Some of my “smartest” students cut class the most. Some of my “smartest” students are my biggest behavioral challenges.

I want to know how to channel this energy, determination, and courage into academic success.

Double Trouble

Overall, my students are very intelligent people. They prove their intelligence and courage every day they show up to class. First of all, no person makes it to fifteen-years-old without being intelligent. Second of all, if experience is our best teacher, then these students should be teaching me. My struggle as their teacher is to meet them with the intellectual stimulation an intelligent fifteen-year old deserves while providing the skills they need to improve their third grade reading and writing levels. I am frequently balancing this disparity while attempting to provide the students alternative means for expressing their various literacies.

Conveniently, English skills are spiraling, and therefore the skills they practiced in third grade are the same skills we must practice in ninth grade. Inconveniently, we often struggle with the deeper comprehension that ninth grade skills demand. In a sense, it is like teaching an adult English Language Learner. Such students have complex and intelligent questions and opinions, but they lack the vocabulary to express them.