Let Us Go To School!

Please support these Morton West High School students, who are threatened with expulsion for their peaceful sit-in against military recruitment inside their school. These are the brave, thoughtful, independent students I am trying to help build!

read about them here and here

sign the petition here

call the school administration here

You Might Be Here. (Field Notes #1)

I'm excited - and a little apprehensive - for the next four weeks. We'll be doing field visits at other schools, spending two weeks each in the classrooms of two previous residents. The schools are different from our own, and more like those - indeed may be the very ones - where we will teach next year. We are given official school "report cards," which I study with a few grains of salt - knowing they are only rough gestures toward a picture of students I can't yet know.



Children are more dynamic than numbers, but these numbers should startle you. They are as telling of their audience as they are of their subject. At CAHS, where we're doing our residency, the students are mostly low-income, but their ethnic make-up is unusually well-balanced for CPS - roughly 40% Hispanic, 25% African American, and 25% White (mostly Polish, Russian, and Eastern European). At the Excel school at Orr High, where I will be on Monday, the students are 97.3% low-income and 86.2% African American. At Little Village, where I will spend the weeks surrounding Thanksgiving, the students are 99% low-income and 98.9% Hispanic. These curious statistical pies - composed almost entirely of one solid slice - are the norm for Chicago's schools, if not always its neighborhoods. A city whose public school students are 8.2% White and 85.9% low-income. A deeply flawed city, one I love very much.



Unlike some of my fellow residents, I don't really know what schools like these are like. (The suburban high school I spent my most formative years escaping had its own, very different, racial and institutional dynamics.) Though we've read and talked about them for months, I don't know who these students are I'll be teaching. What I do know is that I can't wait to meet them, and I've decided that's a pretty good start.

Among my instructions for meeting my new students, to be added to the "texts that need a close reading" list: "Don't worry about the metal detector - they don't stop adults."

For the purpose of finding my way, my mother's words yesterday were much more meaningful to me. She told me, "you are a survivor." Reading that, I found myself crying, and realized I was crying with how good it felt for someone to see that in me. That is the feeling I want for my map.


____________

The photos are by Stephen Shames, from his series on child poverty in Chicago, circa 1985. There are fewer photographs from the American ghettos of the 21st century. Perhaps our media is too saturated with images of the terror we are cultivating abroad to make room for the terror of our children at home. And yet the poverty, hopelessness, and violence persist, unrecorded.

on defiance.

Even the school bells, they tell us, have their history. Early public school children, their education aimed at creating successful factory workers out of farmboys accustomed to the rhythms of the sun, had to be conditioned to city time, to factory time. To it mattering that way, the way children and workers bellyache for the stroke of the bell, the way time feels when authority tells your body not you. Can you picture the blinking, barefoot, wild-eyed boy being herded, quieted, etched slowly away into the form of his caste?

But that is not my duty. I am building citizens - humans - not laborers. What I want is thoughtfulness, not obedience. Respect owed not because I am me but because we are we.

Now piece together incongruous fragments from our education: someone writes that "urban" (read: ghetto) children (who look to me much like other children on the inside), unaccustomed to the gentle and forgiving manner of the young white liberal teacher, are confused, their achievement threatened, by this approach and require the kind of toughness associated with love at home. (I won't unpack that sentence now but buy me a drink and I'll tell you all about it.) Our optimistic (read: naive) ears abound in progressive euphemisms for "don't smile 'til Christmas," they fall from the mouths of authority and collect at our ankles.

We have hammered into us this idea that you gotta be tough right from the start, to not slip, not accept anything once, not early on, or else there's no hope and you can never reel 'em back in. Sometimes it seems very sensible. I do believe kids need a consistent, solid structure. (I know I do.) But how can we teach them to think critically, if we don't allow them to criticize us? I have seen an entire class cower in silence as they are yelled at for not meeting miscommunicated, and sometimes actually incorrect or spontaneously altered, expectations. It is at these moments that I realize again that the majority of my struggles these days have to do with being made to feel as these kids are feeling. Where's the sense in teaching "open-ended questions," in believing in education as dialogue, but not accepting students' questioning of your self?

If I am making a mistake or being unjust, I want my kids to feel free to point it out to me. Otherwise, what are we teaching them to do when they encounter injustice in the world?

The night I found "A Teacher Ain't Nothin' But a Hero,"* by Bill Ayers, I had grown sick of cowering in silence with my students and exhausted at having to teach outside my skin. There was magic in there, words that showed my bruised instincts I wasn't crazy. In it, he tracks the Hollywood image of the teacher-hero, reading films such as "Stand and Deliver" and "Blackboard Jungle" for what they tell us a city teacher should be like, and for that idealized teacher the first principle is always assumed to be "classroom management" (read: discipline). The problem with that picture, as Ayers so eloquently points out, is that "real learning requires assertion, not obedience; action, not passivity." As he talks of "teaching defiance" I curl over the page, circling words and underlining passages, and feel myself begin to breathe again. I think again of how reading is so often about feeling yourself not to be alone.

"Teaching is intellectual work - puzzling and difficult - and at its heart it is ethical work. It is idiosyncratic, improvisational, and most of all, relational. All attempts to reduce teaching to a formula, to something easily predicted, degrade it immeasurably...

...it involves learning how to...embrace students as dynamic beings and fellow creatures. It requires building bridges from the known to the not-yet-known. And it demands liberating schooling from its single-minded obsession with control, obedience, hierarchy and everyone's place in it...

Real teachers need to question the common sense, break the rules, become political and activist in concert with kids. This is true heroism, an authentic act of courage. We need to take seriously the experiences of youngsters, their sense-making, their knowledge, and their dreams - and particularly we must interrogate the structures that kids are rejecting. In other words, we must assume an intelligence in youngsters, assume that they are acting sensibly and making meaning in situations that are difficult and often dreadful, and certainly not of their own making. In finding common cause with youngsters, we may also find there our own salvation as teachers."

Serendipitously, Mr. Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were speaking the next day, in another context, a screening of the documentary of the Weather Underground, of which they once were a part. I hold my mother's hand as we watch, then wait shyly after the talk, wanting to tell him, thank you for helping me to breathe. Instead I manage to introduce myself. Nonetheless the day is beautiful and invigorating and I sit in the park, sunny autumn afternoon, blissfully reading the page where he's written "To Margeaux, With admiration for your journey so far and hope for a future fit for children - a place of peace and justice."

There are still only more questions. What does a classroom look like where rigor and freedom both thrive? How do I get us there? And always more words, falling. In a marginal vignette one of our textbooks warns us about the first-year elementary school teacher fired for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance along with her students, who were required to do so. What do I do about the tiny freshman girl in my homeroom who's already planning on joining the marines after high school, like her big brothers? What kind of space will I build with my students, once I am free to choose this for myself? What I found the night I read Ayers's essay wasn't an answer but something more dynamic, an affirmation of my own senses.

Even as I type these words, return to the moments of this reading, I feel myself healing again. Exhausted by the dissonance at my ankles, I had again lost track of my purpose for a moment. Telling you this story brings me back home to my journey.


____________

"A Teacher Ain't Nothin' But a Hero" is from the wonderful collection City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, edited by William Ayers and Patricia Ford.

disembodied

Here in Chicago it's what I guess they call an indian summer. There's a July thickness to the air, a sleepy, saturating heat that makes your bones lazy and wants your feet bare. The summer weather is misleading, suggesting as it does that time has not been passing, October already, candy corn in my kitchen. The disconnect's in the fall crunch of dead leaves beneath flip-flopped toes, beach-headed.

This weekend, though, I don't care how false it is, summer ex machina, it tastes like freedom and I dive in, the water's cold and delicious and wakes me back up into myself. All weekend I zoom and pounce around the nighttime city, a hoodlum on my rusty blue bike, tasting it.

During the week I don't own my body. It's not just time, those cruel limits, it's words too, politics, constrictions. Nerve-wracking to be under observation, critiqued/criticized, throughout the day. It stings a little even when it's right, and when it isn't it stings worse. Often what is criticized is so deeply tied to my own instincts that I find myself floundering, a metaphorical amputee with the best intentions. I'm tired of being told I'm kind as if it were a disease that might be catching.

I'm sure it doesn't help that I've got the sort of skin easily penetrated by others' thereness. Well, grown-ups at least. Children don't frighten me. Children don't scratch at those flimsy, fragile edges of self. Maybe it's because they are equally porous, becoming. I think it's because they listen, pay attention, in ways many of us learn to stop doing, don't have time for, as we get older. Last week my fellow resident and I had our first day alone in the classroom without our mentor teacher there. I imagine it should have been stressful, left alone with the monsters while mom's away, but instead it was the most relaxed and natural I'd felt teaching all month.

Like so much of this experience, survival--maybe even happiness--means holding onto what you can from what you're given, always learning, even on the really bad days. For me, the most important thing to remember will just be this: to listen, always, to never stop listening.

Artifacts of My Selves: Reflections on Learning (Still Here #3/Spying on My Homework #4)

Comrades! It's now two weeks since school began and I know I owe you an update on this new chapter. But the weeks have been unbelievably overwhelming, mostly from matters of pure Time. Did I say summer was intense? Foolish, foolish girl! The structure of My Life Now: Monday-Thursday, in the classroom 7:30 am-4:30 pm or later teaching/planning/beingcoached; Fridays uni classes all day; Tuesdays uni classes 6-9 pm. Find the unclaimed hours and fill them with textbook reading, essay writing, class novel reading, reflection writing, homework grading, observation writing, and loads of other things I'm sure I'm forgetting (Has anybody seen my to-do list?)...so my capacity for self-expression is stretched rather thin these days.

I don't sleep more than four hours a night, and my quota for crafting complete sentences usually maxes out by Wednesday. I have brief, tearful panic attacks every few days, usually when I'm writing and revising my perpetual to-do lists (including the daily "MUST-DO TONIGHT") or trying to figure out if I have time to eat dinner or call my mama. Luckily I have Chrysa sending me text messages that say "Sagapo Lulumu. Don't forget to eat." and wise, beautiful Jodi reminding me: "Always call your mother."

The good news is, the wonderful news is, none of these stresses has anything to do with actual teaching! All signs so far suggest that this strange career I've chosen will be home. Sometime very soon when I have a little more time in my hands I'll sit down again and begin to tell you why.

For now, I thought I'd share a piece adapted from one of my assignments this week (a confidential "personal learning reflection" for my Ed. Psych. class). I think it will help sketch a glimpse of the histories of the person stepping into these high school classrooms now. Gulping now too because this essay touches on some gritty wounds and secret things, hoping that the trust I feel within this community of readers can pull me through to publish, remembering the trust I'm building Right Now with my students in each classroom community, wanting to share our voices. Here's mine for today.

____________

Many years ago, while home from college and sorting through the countless boxes of forgotten objects and priceless remnants that fill my closets there, I became absorbed in a faded slip of paper I found towards the bottom of a box of childhood art my mother had saved. I had discovered an official report from one of my earliest teachers on my progress in preschool. The “Margeaux” in the report is a little thing, not more than three or four years old. What’s fascinating is how very much she reminded me of myself then, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, and how alike she would seem to me again now, at twenty-eight, for though I no longer have the report in front of me I remember very well its mood, which so deeply struck me by its familiarity.

Three-year-old Margeaux is curious and creative; an independent, self-directed learner; cooperative and intrinsically motivated but shy, sensitive, and withdrawn from other children (my teacher’s only concern); happiest making art or listening to stories; already reading. Transpose “always reading” for “already reading” and you have a remarkably accurate picture of myself today, twenty-five years later.

This parallel challenges the notion of intellectual and emotional development shaped primarily from environmental influences (“nurture”), a notion to which I have typically, intuitively been inclined. Yet the assessment also describes a personality and learning style very clearly aligned with my life experiences. Reflection on the larger narrative of my subjective development seems to confirm the strong influence of our experiences on whatever is present in our “nature” (whether chemical, genetic, or neurological), suggesting a hybrid truth resulting from a complicated interplay of influences.

The report was from a Montessori preschool I had attended in San Francisco. My parents were young when I came unexpectedly into their lives, my mother completing her bachelor’s degree, and my father his master’s, while both held down odd jobs and cared for one, and later two, children. Because they were both quite busy, I attended an assortment of daycares and preschools before beginning kindergarten. Nonetheless, my parents were nurturing, creative, and intellectually committed, and read to me constantly. It seems likely that all of these factors, along with some kind of innate cognitive ability, combined to the result that I had begun to read by the age of three. As a voracious reader and an English-teacher-in-training, the threads between these aspects of my child development and my present self are quite clear.

Along with my innate fascination with reading and a robust imagination (including a dangerous tendency towards “magical thinking” that persists despite my intellectual growth) came a deep interest and natural strength in writing. Not long after I learned to read and had begun to write, I composed and illustrated my first story. I include the text and image of this story here, because I believe it paints a fascinating portrait of my early development.


Figure 1: My first story, written around 4 years old on a piece of cardboard.



Figure 2: The story continues on the other side of the board.



Figure 3: Complete text of the story, transcribed exactly as written.

"There once was a cat who met a dog and first she was afraid because it was big. and then she met a pig. and the pig siad eech eech and then she met a horse and the horse went eeha eeha and then she met a goose and a sheep and the she siad what are you doing heere and the goose siad what are you doing heere to so they ran of in the…"
[text continues but gets tinier and tinier and can’t be deciphered]

The subject matter betrays that innate interest in animals common to so many children, but the story suggests an inquisitive and linguistically advanced creativity as well as a natural command of narrative structure (including the use of a classic “once there was” opening, temporal markers such as then, and relative mastery of the simple past). A surprising number of non-phonetic spellings are correct (e.g. because, horse, goose, and what). Even the misspellings demonstrate a significant knowledge of irregular spelling norms that point to language acquired more likely through reading than through speaking (e.g. I consistently spelled said like “siad,” but would guess that most developing writers would have misspelled it as “sed” or a variant thereof). Overall, this artifact serves as a deeply layered expression of my early development, and a remarkable blueprint for the selves I have become. My love of writing extended throughout my childhood, and served later as a crucial means of self-expression during the deeply turbulent years of my adolescence. Now, as a poet, I thrive in spaces of ambivalent and creative language.

Throughout my childhood I excelled consistently in all academic areas but was particularly skilled in writing, an activity which has always seemed to come naturally to me. I remained a shy, withdrawn, and highly sensitive child but always did very well in school. I sometimes wonder whether my academic success may have somehow been a cause of the bullying and other intense social challenges I faced during grade school, where children’s sometimes deep cruelties remain a relative mystery to me. The social alienation became so intense at one point that I ran away from school one day after my mother dropped me off, wandering the streets of the Upper Haight district of San Francisco alone at the age of eight, until after a few hours a policeman dispatched by my anxious mother found me and brought me home. I still recall that when the other children back at school asked me what had happened that day, I shrugged and told them simply that “I just wanted to go for a walk.”

In spite of, or perhaps because of, this fierce independence, academic achievement seems to have come quite easily to me. I began kindergarten but was moved ahead to the first grade because—as a reader among kids learning their alphabet for the first time—I was deeply bored. Later we moved to Istanbul where I was enrolled in a normal Turkish-speaking elementary school for the third grade, language being another, contingent, strength. Returning to the States the local grade school initially forced me to repeat third grade again, concerned that I had not met the national standards in my foreign school. After a few weeks, however, I was moved ahead again into fourth grade. As the years progressed I grew used to adapting to constantly changing contexts and to mostly being left alone to take care of myself. My little sister’s undiagnosed, degenerative, neurological disorder demanded constant parental care, and as long as I continued to do well in school no one seemed to worry about me.

The year I began high school, at the age of 13, was steeped in tragedy. My mother developed a brain tumor that temporarily paralyzed one side of her body; by the time she had begun to rehabilitate, we lost my sister, whose immune system was already weak, to pneumonia. Following her loss came the loss of my father, who moved back to his native Turkey something like six weeks after my sister died, suggesting that he didn’t think there was anyone left here to take care of. I was barely 14. Despite this emotional turmoil, I maintained my nearly perfect A-average for two more years, learning to smile as a means of deferring attention, a communicative subterfuge. I never spoke of my sadness, but wrote poems fraught with hurt and loneliness, quietly publishing them in my schools’ literary magazines but hiding them from my parents. By the time I was 15, however, the grief and anger I had so carefully hidden from sight surged within the already fertile instability of adolescence.

My emotional fragility, combined with a budding intellectual independence, permanently destroyed my perfect record. I was placed in Honors Physics but couldn’t seem to pay attention or even show up, half the time, to the 7 a.m. class (my worried teacher called my mother, who joined the perpetual chorus that I was not “meeting my potential”). I stayed out all night drinking the night before my SATs but managed a remarkably high score anyway. I wrote a research paper I was extremely proud of, debating the ethics of mandatory HIV-testing for doctors, but my teacher refused to read it and I received an F for Junior English that quarter anyway because I had refused to turn in any of the mandatory steps prior to the final paper (those notecards, outlines, and drafts that are the bane of teenagers and artists). I was restless, wild, and self-destructive. Somehow I managed distractedly to apply to and start college, where I spent my freshman year ignoring Gen. Ed. in favor of graduate-level coursework in philosophy, but finally dropped out in the middle of my third quarter after a half-hearted suicide attempt and psychiatric hospitalization on my sister’s birthday.

I mention these behavioral and emotional aspects in part to suggest the difficulty of locating distinct teleological maps of our subjective development. Though a linear narrative could easily be written connecting the loss and trauma I suffered with my eventual psychological crises, it is just as possible that even as a baby the threat of these breaks lay dormant somewhere in my chemistry. Perhaps there is simply something different about my brain and always has been, as evidenced by the fact that a simple medicine seems to dramatically improve my ability to function, to survive, and to succeed. On the other hand, I often suspect that many of my struggles were connected to the fact that my intellectual and physical development led people to treat me at a level at which I was not yet emotionally capable of dealing. Forced to attend therapy for the first time at the age of eight, following my parents’ divorce, and continuing unwillingly off and on throughout high school and college, I despised psychologists and psychiatrists because they seemed to want to draw too tidy a picture of me, either entirely from my life story (in the former) or from my brain chemistry (in the latter), both in the end unimaginative and unreal pictures, pictures that seemed to have nothing to do with me.

A parallel can easily be drawn between these complicated questions of emotional and behavioral development and the intellectual patterns I have also begun to trace. Would I love making art so much if I had not been given tons of materials and encouragement from my parents, if my father had not regularly taken me to the Museum of Modern Art in one of those infant backpacks or drawn collaborative cubist drawings with me in his notebooks, if my mother had not insisted on my having the Anti-Coloring Book, or handmade breathtakingly elaborate and imaginative cakes for me each year on my early birthdays? If I had grown up in a banal, happily married household in Middle America, with 1.5 siblings and a dog, would I have still been sad? If my parents had never read to me, would I still like to write?

My emotional dis/order has proved not to be ineffable; there are happy endings to my story so far. Having spent a year recovering and growing at home, I returned to college to graduate three years later with highest honors, finally completing a master’s at the University of Chicago before deciding that if I was going to devote myself to writing I wanted to be writing creatively, with freedom and without footnotes; and that I wanted to teach not in the rarefied air of academia but in the living realm of urban high schools, teaching students whose innocence (like mine) is belied by their lives, whose hopes (like mine) are fragile but fierce. Where transformation is possible, because we are always learning, growing, and becoming.

Yet when I return to the artifact with which I began this essay, and to the stories I have only begun to untangle, I seem to have only grown more and more into my self.
____________

hi! school (still here #2)

i've got to put myself to bed soon and i'm certainly too tired for poetry, but i also know that there are at least a handful of very generous people out there who read this and want to know what is happening, and i want also to share the excitement: i'll meet my first students tomorrow!

tuesday's the official first day of school, when we'll have a full day of regular classes, but tomorrow we'll have orientation, an assembly and then an hour in our classroom with our freshman "slc" ("smaller learning communities," sort of like progressive, character- and community-building homerooms).

otherwise i will be working in two ninth grade english classes (which meet for an hour and a half every day) and one senior ap english class (which i think meets three times a week: twice for an hour and a half and once for 45 minutes--as you can see the school schedule is quite confusing, i'm surprised no one's managed to sell me an elevator pass yet!). there will be two of us residents working with one mentor teacher. our mentor is wonderful, she is witty and wise and she seems to know instinctively which stuff to sweat and which not to, a very important piece of the teacher's survival tool kit. i actually requested to work with her because last year she taught a junior creative writing class, and of course i want very much to incorporate creative writing into my own future teaching practice.

unfortunately she's not teaching that course this year, but i know enough by now to appreciate working with someone who values this aspect of an english curriculum and can give me ideas about how to do it well. but ultimately i feel like i wound up in the best possible environment, with the best possible mentor, for me. she laughs a lot, which is so important. the desks i helped arrange in her classroom don't face forward in neat rows but are clustered together in angled pods of fours, a finely composed, intentional dis/order. i can tell that she works her students hard but and because and through loving them well. and she really loves her job!

we've spent the week at our new high school in training, curriculum planning, and classroom preparation, which has been quite exhausting; last week's reprieve already feels so distant. it seems we'll be expected to take on quite significant teaching responsibilities nearly immediately, which is unexpected and nervewracking but also exciting, and i sense that my mentor will provide me with the right balance of handholding and freedom. (just like a good teacher.)

the dark checkered hallways are waxed to a squeaky shine, lined with those tall human-sized lockers in a glossy deep blue, and the air smells of that peculiar, thick, expectant smell of high school (except when the physics/philosophy teacher is burning incense in his classroom). the other resident and i have our own wooden desks in one corner of the classroom, maybe tomorrow i'll bring a little plant or one of my prints to decorate with.

probably best to go now: i've still got to iron my shirt for the first day of school. wish me luck.

love. (still here #1)

is it possible it's been three weeks since my last post? of course it is. i've written & presented and read & written & presented and written & read and then written & presented, and then written some more. oh, and reflected, i've done an awful lot of that. i've cried many times, both in & out of class. i've stood clammy-handed before a simulated classroom of my peers gulping deep breaths in preparation for giving my very first "lesson"...and i've found myself, 15 minutes later, perched on the edge of my table with my legs dangling beneath my "teacher" skirt, laughing and enjoying the hell out my "class", enjoying the hell out of my fellow residents, who surprise me every day with their HEART and sheer ingenuity.

picture them, my 14 comrades, divided into three groups to defend and recite an interpretation of the plath, and there are the "soldiers" with their hushed-pulse-angry line of attention, the "mushrooms" (unbelievingly, unwillingly victorious! our kind and handsome math teacher) with their internal dissent and unassisted female voice, and finally, the one that had me perched giggling with pleasure, the "snowflakes" with their beat-snapping measured calm.

yes, they are kicking the hell out of us in this program, and no mistake. but i have NEVER ONCE not even for A MOMENT doubted that i am in The Exact Right Place. i've never known this peculiar, heart-stopping feeling before, it's huge.

the photo (HOME RUN!) is the second-best (anonymous) peer review i received after giving my mini-lesson. the first is:

"I HATE poetry and I absolutely loved this exercise. If I had this in high school, maybe I would actually have liked it."

it may seem like i am bragging, but let's both believe that i am going to have my fair share of stumbles, even of failures, in the coming years, and i'd like to hold onto these rare diamonds when they grace me.

IT WILL BE HARD BUT AND BECAUSE IT WILL MATTER. & it will matter because what we are working with is love, and what we are working from is ourselves: "Love is an action, never simply a feeling." bell hooks