Field Stories
I've been teaching for over 20 years. I've got a few stories to tell.
Remember Me
Every couple of weeks, throughout my first year teaching, I would ask my students to write me a letter. One day they would write me about their holiday plans, for instance, or they’d write about what they wanted to be when they grew up, or what they liked best about school. These letters always take me straight back into those gritty days in the fall of 1993 at Jackson Middle in the heart of Houston, Texas.
What are your hopes for Christmas break?
Jose S. in my 3rd period class was tiny, with an open and trusting face that was quick to break into smile. I imagined that even as his hair thinned and grayed, his face would remain young and cherubic. His broad smile could carry me through a trying morning. Jose had just arrived from El Salvador and wore the very conservative loafers with white socks that his countrymen favored. He wrote:
To all my teacher and all my friend and my family. (Jose had just arrived from el otro lado – the other side. Most of his family and friends were probably not very near.)
I hope you have a meery Christmas and a happy New Year.
I want to Christmas one pistol and one car of control remote.
I imagined a gun taped to the back of a car racing down the long hallways of Jackson firing wildly at the gangster kids who must have scared little Jose half to death.
This kid, Jose, was one of my very best students, not because he could write or read, but because he tried to read and write. Also, he never cursed at me. Thanks to his innate goodness, and the old-fashioned respect that he brought across the river with him, Jose was one of the few kids at Jackson Middle who behaved. When my hooligans would start running around the room, throwing paper airplanes, or raising hell, Jose would just put his head down and get to work. The angriest I got all year was not actually at the thugs and gangsters who cursed and bellowed and ran the school, but at sweet Jose, who later in the year, when he saw how much the other kids were getting away with, started ever so slightly to edge towards the exciting world of anarchy and chaos. I gave him hell. Sorry, Jose. I was trying to protect you. “Okay, Mister.” I’m sure you said, and smiled, and got back to work.
Orbelinda, a Honduran girl with an exquisitely styled quaff, sculpted atop her head into a splendid and sculptural fountain of hair that we called, in awe; “el fuente de pelo” answered my question about her Christmas hopes.
To a very special teacher I met on Jackson Middle School “93, 94”
For Christmas I want what ever
Your student
Orbelinda
It might sound like Orbelinda didn’t care, but she was really just hedging her bets, knowing that she probably wouldn’t get any Christmas presents from her very poor and constantly working parents, grateful for whatever she might get.
After winter break I asked the kids to write me another letter.
What did you miss about school over the break?
Many of the kids met my question with bafflement or amusement, and even a few whispered oaths under their breath. But Orbelinda, the girl who wanted whatever for Christmas (and got it), wrote back in her painstakingly crafted cursive. Well the best thing about this year was that I got to see all my friends that I hang around with. I get to see them every day having fun together. And I had thought that these kids were in school to learn! Less than ten years out of high school, I had already forgotten what school is about for most kids. Orbelinda reminded me of the distance between their worlds: orbiting around each other, and the one I hoped for them: joyful exploration of this endlessly interesting world with its constant stream of puzzlement, and wonder. It would take a lot of work to share my love of learning when most of my kids could barely speak English, scared out of their wits, and were swimming hard just to tread water.
Then sweet Orbelinda reminded me to remember her too, signing off with this little ditty:
Remember M Remember E put them together and remember ME
These kids would tell me a lot more than I would have told my teachers, and I’m grateful to them for their openness and generosity. And these weren’t even kids I was particularly close to, or had even spoken with very far beyond hello, how was your weekend, where are you from, how many siblings do you have, what are you doing with those white socks and loafers on, and what magic do you use to get your hair to stay up like an ever-cresting wave? These were just kids who happened to find their way into my classroom and who shared a few hours of time in my proximity every week. No matter what question I asked them, like Orbelinda, they very often displayed an aching desire to be remembered.
Throughout the year, as they’d get kicked out of schools that had rules and discipline, more and more rough students kept getting added into my class. These feral kids were taking up more of the class bandwidth to the point that I felt like I wasn’t able to teach my well-behaved kids at all. As my classroom became louder and more boisterous, the letters became my last channel to my sweet students.
What will you remember about Jackson Middle?
Mireya wrote: All the teachers really made my year very fun and interesting and I really learned a lot and I’m really gong to miss them but I hope their still here so I can come visit there. I hope one day they all remember me once their old and they can’t walk any more.
I can still walk and I still remember you Mireya: you had beautiful skin, the color of mahogany, and sharp eyes with the longest lashes, and even your handwriting was elegant, measured and controlled.
Flor was from El Salvador. I called Flor, Piso, which is Spanish for floor. In her choppy and newly learned English, Flor wrote:
My name is Flor. I’m from El Salvador.
She’s a poet, but she doesn’t know it. Like the other kids from Central America, Flor wrote with the grand looping old-fashioned cursive handwriting. We Americans could afford to be sloppy, but these Central Americans could handwrite like nobody’s business.
Remember me, Piso writes; because I always did that my teacher speak Spanish cause I’m an ESL student.
Now Im going to tell you that things I like and maybe the thing that I don’t like of Jackson. Jackson is a good school.
That’s totally not true Flor, but thanks.
Right hear I learn a lot of things that I need to know for the future.
Did you need to know how to be a thug, or how to roll a joint, or maybe how to tag gang signs up and down the bathroom wall? Because that, you could learn at Jackson.
Then Flor (which actually means flower in Spanish) goes on to hit me with that inevitable hope all these sweet young kids have:
I like all my teachers. I’ll remember them and I hope that they’ll remember me too.
I don’t know why these beautiful little kids were so caught up with being remembered. I don’t know if I felt that way when I was in eight-grade – I can’t remember. Maybe being desperate to be remembered is an eight-grade thing. Maybe it’s an immigrant thing – far from home, forgetting all the people they came from, trying to delay the erasure of migration. Maybe it’s a stab at permanency. Maybe it’s just a way of saying thank you. I don’t know. But it worked. I do remember Flor. She was teeny-tiny (even for a kid from Salvador) with lively hands and quick eyes.
Maybe after the whole year unraveled and I felt like I wasn’t giving anything of value to these kids who needed the most, maybe the best thing I gave them was just remembering them.
As illuminating as these kids’ letters are, they aren’t a truly representative sample of all my students. Most of these letters weren’t authored by my illiterate students (who instead of writing, happily colored pictures), or the super-gangster kids who took these assignments and threw them onto the floor (walking over to the trashcan would have been just too much work), or the kids who couldn’t write me letters because they were in jail or home pregnant or living on the streets. Most of the really tough students knew they’d get promoted to the next grade anyway, so they generally never turned in any work at all, but occasionally, my wild students would accidentally write me letters, too.
Please write me a letter about your plans for life after Jackson Middle:
Elizabeth, a hot-tempered girl with a wild black mane of hair assessed the year:
So wuz up. Nothing much on this side just bored. My name is Elizabeth M. and this year sucked. I hated it Im glad I’m going to Austin next year.
Mr. Milner you could be cool sometimes but you could get on my nerves But you be cool. I had a pleasure meeting your brother who came during the eclipse. Was cool but tall.
Wait; is it uncool to be tall? Does that make hobbits really cool?
Elizabeth’s letter reminds me of the long-ago day of the 1993 solar eclipse. The day I got yelled at. A solar eclipse doesn’t happen very often. It’s definitely something worth learning about, even in a social studies class. Before the big event, we made special eclipse-viewing boxes that could throw the image of the eclipsed sun onto a piece of paper on the back of the box, enabling us to view the eclipse without blinding ourselves. My two little brothers (both over six foot six), their wives, and my mother and father (also a strapping six foot six), and my best friend from college and my wife (five foot seven and a half and feisty) all joined my students for eclipse day. I remember taking the students who hadn’t skipped class out into the schoolyard, just inside the perimeter fence, near the moat. (Okay, their really wasn’t a moat, but there were metal detectors and razor wire fences at our school and I’m not sure if they were more to keep people out or in.) We each had our little view-the-eclipse without getting blinded box and there was one adult for every four or five kids. A skipper or two, who had gotten bored roaming the halls, even slinked out into the yard to rejoin class. We were setting up to view the eclipse when the assistant principal, Mr. M., a small man with piggy little fingers, a tragic comb-over, and one rumpled tan suit that he wore every day, threw open his office window on the third floor. I had never ever seen him out of his office and looking up, his head floated extended out from the school, silhouetted by the beginning of the solar eclipse.
“Hi,” I said, waving up into the darkness.
“Get inside right now, Mr. Miller.”
“Hello,” I said, not quite hearing (or wanting to hear). Waving again. “We’re doing an experiment.”
“Get inside immediately, Mr. Miller.”
“It’s okay,” I said, “they know not to look at the sun.”
“The sun? I don’t care about the son. Get back inside right this instant.”
This broken lesson contains multitudes: no learning, lots of yelling, a shadow hanging over the day, and a yard-full of dashed hopes.
Here’s my student, Karina’s thoughts on the last day of school: May 31, 1994:
“Jackson”
Well what I think of Jackson is that is kind of fun sometimes but sometimes it can be boring.
Now I’ll just translate a little bit here. Boring doesn’t mean to a poor 13 year-old what it means to me or to you. First of all, growing up I was taught that only boring people find things boring. And the boring people I grew up with, basically used the word boring as an antonym for exciting. But Jackson students lived in a perpetual state of boredom and in the Jacksonian vernacular, boring meant something closer to bad or loathsome. And it wasn’t just an event or a thing that could be boring, it could be our whole school, or a time of day, the past progressive tense, the field of sociology, grapefruit, the Khyber-Pass, Freudian analysis, fingernails, or even an entire time-zone.
Then Karina lets up on the boring and lowers the boom on the school administration.
I hate the principal Mrs. C. that big fatass bitch She really gets on my nerves and bosses too too much.
I couldn’t have said it better, Karina! I totally agree. And Mr. M, the man with the fat fingers, he was awful too. Please don’t forget him!
The teachers are cool. But, the only one that is too old and boring is Mr. H. but he can be nice and cool sometimes too.
Well, which is it, young lady?
But, I wouldn’t want my little brother to come to Jackson because theres too much violence and the securitys cover up. The food in the cafeteria really sucks it tastes nasty.
The thing I’m left with after reading Karina’s letter isn’t the bad grammar or punctuation, or the image of my horrible principal’s titanic posterior, it’s that this thirteen or fourteen year old girl is very aware that she goes to a dangerous school, and the thing she’s most worried about is her little brother. Despite the fact that she helped make my first year teaching a living hell, my heart really does go out to Karina, and twenty years after she wrote her letter, I wonder if Karina’s made it. And by made it, I don’t mean whether she is a college graduate, or has a good job, or has mellowed into not thinking everything is boring, but whether she’s still alive. It was a tough neighborhood. People died all the time. A number of my kids killed or were killed during my years in Houston. And she was totally right about Mrs. C’s fat ass.
All these kids had hard lives. They sat in my class everyday with their little notebooks, and pencils, and worn-out shoes. They could hide their poverty behind their starched white shirts (the same one every day) and creased slacks, but you could see how poor they were when you looked at their shoes and coats, and always in their worried faces. I looked out across that circuslike classroom and saw them slouched in their seats, deserving so much, expecting so little.
I didn’t always know what my students were thinking or where they were coming from. These letters helped unlock just a bit of their stories. Like Jilnell, student # 33 in 6th period, she just showed up one day in the middle of February. It was only much later that I found out why she was there, when she wrote, in May:
Well I have been from school to school. The first school I was at was called Attucks, the second school was Reynolds. But on January 24, 1994 at 6:00 o’clock ever thing in my life changed. My mom passed and I had to change school’s so I had to come here.
Now I’m at Jackson Middle School with cool great caring and loving friends. But best of all is some of the best teachers and staff.
Thank You
I should be thanking you, Jilnell after all you’ve been through: A little girl losing her mom during the part of her life when she needs her the most, and she’s thanking me and all I’ve done is give her a desk to sit at while the clock ticked slowly onward away from January 24.
I am so grateful to my students for sharing these luminous apertures into their lives. No one wants to be invisible. I want to be remembered. Remembering someone is to carry their hopes and dreams across space and time so that their life is not eclipsed.
21 years ago, a young teenager, just arrived from Mexico wrote me this note:
Hi my name is Sandra, I’m 15 years old. I was your favorite student in this class. I always did my work because I always copy from Silvia my friend. Well I just hope you remember me! Bye. Sincerely Sandra.
Year One: Ready For Lift Off
My first year teaching was the worst.
It wasn’t just your run-of-the mill bad; working all the time, making it up as you go, realizing that not all people can be trusted, not having enough time to learn from your mistakes, trial by fire. My first year teaching was god-awful, gut-wrenching, earth-shaking, vertigo-inducing, twenty-two-years-later-I-still-get-a-migraine-when-I-think- about-it horrible. Just a few weeks into my first year teaching, I had already become so anxious and depressed about work that every morning as I drove my rusty old Subaru to school, my neck so tight that I couldn’t even turn my head to see the side-view mirror, I would secretly hope I’d be in a wreck just bad enough that I wouldn’t have to go back to work. Two decades of teaching later, I’ve learned that hoping for a crash is a pretty good sign that it’s time to quit your job. But just starting into my dream career, there was too much at stake for me to quit and throw away all my hopes and dreams.
I’d always known I wanted to be a teacher. My parents were both teachers; so were most of my aunts and uncles. When I was in junior high, I’d come home from school and invent lesson plans or draw designs of how I would set up my classroom. After high school I went to Wake Forest University, graduated, returned to take a year of teacher training courses in the education department, did my student teaching and loved it. And my students loved it. I was a natural and teaching was a great fit. Everything was on track. I slept well at night.
The year of my teacher training, we read Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities in one of my ed classes. Mr. Kozol’s stories of curious kids in horrible schools, eager to learn, desperate for the same education as mine, slapped me in the face and forced me to recognize our nation’s educational apartheid. By the time I finished reading Savage Inequalities, I was on a new trajectory. I dedicated my teaching career to working in the inner city, changing the world one class at a time. Why shouldn’t those kids have a good teacher like me? I thought. Someone who cares, speaks some Spanish, and is not only educated, but also smart. And with a terrible teacher shortage in the nation’s inner city schools, my idealism also seemed like a pretty good career move: It would be easy to get one of the thousands of unwanted and vacant jobs in America’s inner city schools.
I read a story in the paper about the huge teacher shortage in Baltimore and sent in my application thinking I’d be offered my choice of jobs. After all, the Baltimore school district was in the news for offering significant property tax breaks for teachers in a desperate attempt to get enough teachers to fill their classrooms. Five years later, home for Christmas, I got a letter in the mail from the Baltimore Public Schools saying that they had just received my application, which would be kept on file if there were ever any openings.
The other place I really wanted to teach was Texas. My girlfriend had just gotten accepted into Rice University, and it seemed like the perfect fit for us to move to Houston where she could study and I could teach in the neglected inner city schools. Besides, Houston was growing like wildfire and had hundreds and hundreds of teacher openings each fall.
I sent in my application, replete with my beautifully-crafted philosophy of education statement (we are the world) and all my carefully vetted letters of recommendation (this guy is really excited) to the Houston Independent School District. And then I waited and waited and waited. When I finished my student teaching I checked the mailbox for my job offer. When I got back from the beach, checked the mailbox. Returned from a family reunion, I checked the mailbox. Nothing. By the middle of summer I was starting to get desperate enough to consider trying to find a job perpetuating the class system by teaching middle-class white kids (like me), when I got a call from the HISD personnel office. There aren’t any openings teaching high school social studies to Hispanic students, the personnel officer said (lie), but they could put me to work teaching science at middle school. Science? I asked sure he had misspoken. I practically failed science in high school! Science. Did they have any Hispanic students, I asked. No, he replied, and then I remember him actually saying, “there’s no Hispanic students, but we’ll find lots of Hispanic students for you to teach next year, they aren’t going anywhere.” He assured me I’d love the school. The students had lots of energy.
I thought about his offer. Looking back, I know that he was lying. There were vacancies galore. And probably this overworked classroom escapee desperately needed to fill a science job, which is almost impossible, since science teachers can get actual jobs doing science (whereas, history teachers can’t get jobs doing history since there’s no such thing). In fact, the school where I eventually ended teaching Hispanic students who weren’t going anywhere had lots and lots of openings. “Long-term subs” (a euphemism for someone who is a high school graduate without a felony and gets paid minimum wage to be a substitute teacher every day for an entire year) filled the ranks in every grade, and the school had an overall attrition rate of 1/3 of the teachers every single year. In other words, they were desperate for teachers like me. But I didn’t know that. And he needed a science teacher so that’s what he offered.
I wasn’t one to say no yet, but the idea of me teaching science was so laughable that I said I couldn’t do it. After I stopped laughing about being a science teacher, the personnel guy finally relented and gave me an interview for a social studies job at a high school. I drove to Houston, took the interview, got offered a job, and drove straight to Mexico for a month-long celebration.
As soon as we returned to Houston from Mexico, I called the school district to find out when I started at the high school where I had been offered the job. Oh, the man on the phone said, there’s been a slight change in plans. We’ve got a great job for you, but it’s not at the high school. It’s at Stonewall Jackson Middle School. You start in two days. Are there Hispanic kids? I asked. Lots of them, he assured me. And they have lots of energy. I was so excited. It wasn’t high school, but 8th grade was practically 9th grade, so what could go wrong?
Poor students: check. Hispanic students: check. Lots of energy: check. Fighting the Man: check. I was ready for take off. I was so happy to have my first job. And I was going to get paid a whopping 24,000 a year!
But by the end of the first day I knew that this wasn’t what I had bargained for. By the end of the first week I wished that they had never found a spot for me at Jackson Middle. By the end of the first month I wished I had never wished to be a teacher.
Investigations
I was rummaging through an old filing cabinet last week when I came upon a folder that had slipped down below the other files. I pulled it out from the bottom of the cabinet, opened the file folder, and looked down on a stack of yellowing papers that looked as if they had been stashed away during the Nixon administration. The papers reveled themselves to be original research my students had done back in the 90s on the impact of media on teenagers’ self-perception. My students had put together a questionnaire, for their schoolmates on media usage and self-perception.
One of the questions was especially poignant:
If there were one thing about your appearance that you could change, what would it be?
I held their dusty answers in my hands and wondered if reading these surveys was an invasion of privacy. Was it really any of my business what these students thought about themselves? I wavered, and returned the file to the cabinet. But sitting at my desk, looking longingly at my file cabinet, I thought: these students graduated ten years ago; their responses were anonymous. And besides, I was really curious. I got the files back out and read the students' answers one at a time:
If there were one thing about your appearance that you could change, what would it be?
· I like the way I look; it makes me who I am. If I had to change something I guess I would give myself less fragile nails so I wouldn’t have to keep them super short.
· Legs and face
· Flexibility
· I would probably like to be 10 pounds lighter and have lighter eye color.
· I wish I were thinner
· Less hair: I hate shaving
· I would change my chest proportion. I would change my feet size. I would change my veiny eyes
· This is an interesting/hard question. Coming from someone who has a low self-esteem, there are several things I’d like to change about me but I’ve come to accept most of my flaws and appreciate them. One thing I’d like to change the most would be my upper legs, haha. Ah well. We can’t be perfect right?
· I would have a different nose
· Probably height…would want to have long legs
· Hmm wouldn’t want to age
· I don’t know. I wish that I could change my face. Not too Attractive.
I put the file down and wiped my eyes. It was heartbreaking to think of all these lovely young people thinking about their flaws instead of their beauty. And all this was before the internet tsunami that's swamped our lives have become since these questions were asked. I read on, hoping for more people whose worst flaws were their nails.
If there were one thing about your appearance that you could change, what would it be?
· Hmm…prob the bone structure on my face because I don’t really have defined cheekbones.
· Smaller lower body
· 18 inch waist FOR SURE
· um, how about my entire bone structure!?!? I’m SO bulky; But if it had to be something humanly possible (as opposed to complete bone structure implants), my weight.
· Nose
· I would lose the butt
I held their fears in my hand, and shook my head, thinking: it’s only going to get worse. And I wondered how, a decade out of high school, those students’ answers might have changed. I’m not a physics teacher, but I’m over 27, so I can tell you that as we get older gravity begins to exert a stronger force, and physical beauty tends to slope downward.
I don’t think I want to ask my current students that same question that my students asked back in the 90s, but I probably should. I know that as a teacher one of my many jobs is to help my students learn to ask questions and find answers. So, over the next few weeks, I’m going to give my students more research assignments to take the pulse of their own generation with questions on ideology, civil liberties, race, perceptions of beauty, gun control, death penalty, media use, immigration, foreign policy, and all sorts of political and social questions. Students love to be asked questions (who doesn’t???), and when you listen to their answers, there’s lots to learn. Check back in over the next few weeks for new student research and surveys and please share your own.
Here's two wondrous videos my students made about beauty.
Answering questions that you can’t answer
Students will ask you the most amazing questions. Sometimes you won't be able to answer them.
When I first started teaching I remember being filled with dread that a student would ask a question I couldn’t answer. Of all my worries and fears about teaching, the unanswerable question was that thing that kept me up late at night.
The scenario went something like this.
Student (smartly dressed): What’s the importance of the Tenth Amendment?
Me (stammering): Uh, um, ah, uh. The Tenth? We still have Ten? Um. The importance of the Tenth Amendment? Uh, I don’t know.
Students: Loser, loser, ha, ha, ha. See he doesn’t know anything. Enchain him!
After twenty years of teaching, this nightmare hasn’t happened yet. I don’t mean that I’ve answered every question. I just mean that I’ve managed to navigate tons of wondrous student questions without serious incident. And as I look back on 20 years of teaching I realize that the thousands upon thousands of student questions is the yeast that has leavened our learning. And the important thing I've done isn't answering their questions, but encouraging my students to ask question after beautiful question.
A classroom without questions is like a concert hall without music
I still remember the fear I had when I thought about all those questions my students would lob at me like flaming hot oil, so here’s a handy dandy guide to answering questions you can’t answer.
What do I do if I can’t answer a question?
- Tell the class that you don’t know (try not to do this with every question)
- Lie and make up an answer (this will come back to haunt you)
- Ask the students if they know the answer
- Have students write down the question to answer for homework (for a grade, extra credit, props, or bragging rights)
- Use resources in class: textbooks, readings, the internet (we are not all so lucky) to find the answer
- Write it down on the board. Tell the students you’ll have their answer tomorrow. Explain how you will attempt find the answer (this can be a good lesson on the nature of learning, the value of being able to find answers, and the value of education)
- Pretend to be ill and run screaming from the room
All knowledge is a result of someone asking a question
Whatever approach you take, remember, the question is much more important than the answer. If your students are asking hard questions you’ve already taught them the most important lesson.
And you think your students are tough! Drug Dealing Preschoolers
Today in Arizona, a four year-old girl opened her backpack and passed out candy to her delighted preschool classmates. Only problem was, it wasn’t candy she passed out. It was heroin.
The girl’s teacher, horrified when she realized what was happening, quickly confiscated the drugs from her distraught students before they could get out their little pediatric needles and started shooting up.
The mother of the preschool drug-mule stated that the backpacks must have gotten switched at home, but had “no idea how the heroin got into her child’s backpack in the first place.”
As surprised as the teacher who discovered the heroin must have been, we can only imagine the shock of the drug dealer who’s backpack was full of nothing but Go-gurt and Lunchables.
I’ve had some tough students in my day, but none as tough out as that heroin dealing four year old.