Wordy Wednesday: A Shot of Hope

For a long time now, I’ve been worried that I was never going to be back in the classroom.  After all that happened to me at CHS, I was feeling pretty burned; for all that the place was pretty laid-back and permissive, I still managed to get into trouble, so it stands to reason that it’s highly unlikely I’m going to find someplace where my enthusiasm, passion, and ethics won’t be a liability.

I met Jay for coffee this afternoon.  He’s a teacher at a different charter school (and a hell of a photographer; hit that link and go on over and click around.  Leave some feedback; he’s looking for some interaction), and the parent of one of my former students.  We’d been tangentially in touch since before I was dismissed from CHS; he and I clicked when we first met, he was very supportive of my efforts to kick his recalcitrant daughter in the ass, and we share a very similar perspective on politics, spirituality, and the underlying purpose (and ethics) of education.  Anyway, I left a comment on his blog about a particularly stunning portrait he’d posted of Sweet Pea, and a few emails later, we’d set up a coffee date.

I left that hour feeling much better about where I am professionally.  He told me a lot of things I really needed to hear (though, let’s be clear, I don’t think for a second that he said them because they were what I needed to hear; he’s not like that at all).  He confirmed for me a couple of things that I deeply suspected but really didn’t want to admit (I’m over that now, by the way; I’m done telling myself stories to try to make it hurt less).  He told me that not only should I go back to teaching, but that I very likely had to; we share a proclivity of spirit that compels us to work with young people, and he recognizes in me the same drive that moves him to do the work that he does.  He essentially told me that I wasn’t going to be happy doing anything else – that I could do other work, certainly, but that I would never be as fulfilled as I will be teaching.  I don’t think he’s wrong.

Jay also offered me a glimmer of hope that there may well be a place for me in a classroom.  I’m going to chase down a couple of contacts tomorrow (and send out a couple of resumes, as well) and see what becomes of it.  While I’m not going to force myself into a situation where I have to change who I am to fit in with the culture so much that I don’t recognize myself anymore, neither am I going to give up entirely on the idea of being a teacher.  The truth is that I miss the kids too much to abandon the work, and I love who I am while I’m doing it.

Onward.

Angry Love Letter

I subscribe to Letters of Note.  You should, too.

This was today’s offering.  It’s a letter from Pat Conroy, the author of, among other things, The Prince of Tides, in response to hearing that a school board in West Virginia had challenged the inclusion of that novel and another of his works, Beach Music.  The letter was published in the local newspaper, and the challenges later failed.

Letters like this make my proud to do what I do.
To the Editor of the Charleston Gazette:

I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. I heard rumors of this controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work. These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do not mess with McCoys.

I’ve enjoyed a lifetime love affair with English teachers, just like the ones who are being abused in Charleston, West Virginia, today. My English teachers pushed me to be smart and inquisitive, and they taught me the great books of the world with passion and cunning and love. Like your English teachers, they didn’t have any money either, but they lived in the bright fires of their imaginations, and they taught because they were born to teach the prettiest language in the world. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid. They take an unutterable joy in opening up the known world to their students, but they are dishonored and unpraised because of the scandalous paychecks they receive. In my travels around this country, I have discovered that America hates its teachers, and I could not tell you why. Charleston, West Virginia, is showing clear signs of really hurting theirs, and I would be cautious about the word getting out.

In 1961, I entered the classroom of the great Eugene Norris, who set about in a thousand ways to change my life. It was the year I read The Catcher in the Rye, under Gene’s careful tutelage, and I adore that book to this very day. Later, a parent complained to the school board, and Gene Norris was called before the board to defend his teaching of this book. He asked me to write an essay describing the book’s galvanic effect on me, which I did. But Gene’s defense of The Catcher in the Rye was so brilliant and convincing in its sheer power that it carried the day. I stayed close to Gene Norris till the day he died. I delivered a eulogy at his memorial service and was one of the executors of his will. Few in the world have ever loved English teachers as I have, and I loathe it when they are bullied by know-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

About the novels your county just censored: The Prince of Tides and Beach Music are two of my darlings which I would place before the altar of God and say, “Lord, this is how I found the world you made.” They contain scenes of violence, but I was the son of a Marine Corps fighter pilot who killed hundreds of men in Korea, beat my mother and his seven kids whenever he felt like it, and fought in three wars. My youngest brother, Tom, committed suicide by jumping off a fourteen-story building; my French teacher ended her life with a pistol; my aunt was brutally raped in Atlanta; eight of my classmates at The Citadel were killed in Vietnam; and my best friend was killed in a car wreck in Mississippi last summer. Violence has always been a part of my world. I write about it in my books and make no apology to anyone. In Beach Music, I wrote about the Holocaust and lack the literary powers to make that historical event anything other than grotesque.

People cuss in my books. People cuss in my real life. I cuss, especially at Citadel basketball games. I’m perfectly sure that Steve Shamblin and other teachers prepared their students well for any encounters with violence or profanity in my books just as Gene Norris prepared me for the profane language in The Catcher in the Rye forty-eight years ago.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

The school board of Charleston, West Virginia, has sullied that gift and shamed themselves and their community. You’ve now entered the ranks of censors, book-banners, and teacher-haters, and the word will spread. Good teachers will avoid you as though you had cholera. But here is my favorite thing: Because you banned my books, every kid in that county will read them, every single one of them. Because book-banners are invariably idiots, they don’t know how the world works—but writers and English teachers do.

I salute the English teachers of Charleston, West Virginia, and send my affection to their students. West Virginians, you’ve just done what history warned you against—you’ve riled a Hatfield.

Sincerely,

Pat Conroy

How Far the Ripples Go

Very long story somewhat short: I’ve got this kid… or, rather, I should say I HAD this kid.  Let’s call him Mitchell.

Mitchell and I never really got along very well.  While I’m sure there are a number of reasons for this, the one I come to first is that he’s a pretty insecure young man, and I think that my forthrightness intimidated him.  Regardless, he ended up leaving my class on ideological grounds; his mother, it seems, is a fundamentalist Christian, and from what I understand, she didn’t appreciate my challenging her kid in the ways that I did.

The truth is that I have nothing personal against the boy, and never have, though I don’t go out of my way to chat with him as his behavior around me makes it pretty clear that I make him uncomfortable.  That’s why I was surprised, and pleasantly so, when Mitch asked me this afternoon if I had a few free minutes I could give him.  I invited him into my room and gave him my full attention.

He started out by asking me some vague questions about how I handle fear.  I spent a little while talking about how different fear – fear for physical safety, fear about personal conflict, fear of intimidation, fear from shock or surprise – have different effects.  I let him know that I, personally, have difficulty managing my physical response to fear; despite going into a conflict armed with confidence and knowledge that I have a strong foundation upon which to stand, I still shake and my palms still sweat and I often find myself in angry tears.  I told him these things as a way of humanizing myself to him because, as I say, I know that his impressions of me have not been entirely favorable.

It turns out that, despite what else he may think of me, Mitch understands that I’m someone safe to go to with difficult personal issues.  He confided that he is having some pretty serious problems with a family member (not his mother), and that the issues are sufficient that he felt it necessary to warn the school about what’s been going on.  He asked me for advice on how to comport himself through these experiences, and I told him that while I could not counsel him – that I’m neither a social worker nor an attorney – I did know that, as an adult (he’s 18) he has absolute freedom of association; he gets to choose whether or not to spend time with someone, and that his fears of being compelled by court order to associate with the person in question are unfounded.  I recommended that he seek the advice of law enforcement about the possibility of a restraining order and that, if he feels it would do him some good, he should talk to a counselor to sort out how he feels about the whole mess.  I offered that I grew up as an abused child, and I understand that there are a terrible lot of mixed emotions that come with that legacy.  I also offered up confidence to the boy that I had faith in his ability to find his way through it, and told him that I would always be a listening ear if he felt I could be useful to him.

It turned out that I had some things to take care of a the end of the day, so I was on my way out the door when Mitch emerged from his meeting with administration.  He was clearly upset, so I hung back to offer up one last shot of support.  I took him aside, so that we wouldn’t be in the middle of the hall, and asked him how he was doing (though it was patently obvious the boy was on the verge of tears).  As I was giving him my “you’re not alone; there are plenty of resources; you’re strong and smart and I believe in you” pep talk, his mother came around the corner and stopped dead in her tracks.  I know, though I’ve never been told outright, that she has very little use – and even less respect – for me, but at that moment, I didn’t care.  Her son recognized me as someone safe to confide in, and I was not about to disrespect that for fear of what his mother might think.  She stood there, a respectful distance away, listening to every encouraging thing I had to say to her son.

Though I’m truly sorry for what’s happening to Mitch, this could not have happened at a better time for me.  After everything that’s happened at school these last several weeks, having THIS kid come to ME to address something difficult and painful and personal is nothing short of divine confirmation that I am doing a good job.  He sees me being a support to other kids; he recognizes me as someone safe and caring and generous, and came to ME despite our previous rocky history.  That tells me that what I do – and the way that I do it – are working.  This boy’s choice to seek me out for this personal issue is a vindication of the very public, open, and honest way I love my students.  ALL of my students.

Thank you, Mitchell.

Ten Things Tuesday

Ten things I say in class…

1.  I love you.  Now shut up and write.

2.  Really?  No; REALLY?!

3.  How’s that workin’ out for you?

4.  La-la-la-la-la!  Don’t TELL ME these things!!

5.  Read that out loud… do you talk the way you write?

6.  You?  YOU!  Are my favorite kid right now.

7.  Did you read the instructions?  No?  I didn’t think so; go back and read the instructions.  REALLY READ them…

8.  … and what would you like ME to do about that…?

9.  Close your computers.

10.  I love you, too.

I NEVER Thought I’d Say This…

… but I’m kind of hating the weekends.

I’ve got a couple of (my favorite) kids whom I’m keeping a wary eye on lately.  Things aren’t good for either of them; Margot’s just been released from a hospitalization and is dealing with debilitating panic attacks, and Jeff is neck-deep in a really unpleasant home environment.  They’ve both come to me for support, and I’ve been more than happy to give it to them.

I’m finding, on this lovely Friday afternoon, that I’m worrying about them more than I did last night, or on Wednesday.  I’m sure this is because, on every other night, I know I’ll see them first thing in the morning (and, if I don’t, I know how to find out where they are and whether they’re safe and upright).  The idea of going two days without laying eyes on either one of them is proving to be disconcerting.

I’m less worried about Margot.  She’s got a strong family support system and is being well cared-for at home; I am confident that she’s safe and loved.

Jeff is another story altogether, though; he sent me a text message on Wednesday asking me to sign onto facebook so we could chat, and he told me that his home life is fast becoming untenable.  So much of his situation reminded me of MY life at that age – parents (or, in this case, a mother and a new boyfriend) who give every impression of loathing the mere presence of him and make no effort to disguise that fact but who, inexplicably, won’t let him leave the house.  Jeff is angry and frustrated and, I think, scared; he’s recognizing that all of this is wearing away at his already tenuous self-esteem.  I spent a good bit of our chat time explaining to him why *I* think he’s an amazing kid who’s growing into a good and decent man, and how I’m deeply proud of him.  I know, from my own experience, that while hearing these things from me is probably helpful, it’s not enough to salve the damage being done by the people who are supposed to love him, and that’s the part that’s killing me.

I had a conference with Mitch (the new guidance counselor, whom I really, really like) and our assistant dean (whom I’ve not yet given a pseudonym; let’s call him Brad, okay?) about exactly where my line has to be with Jeff.  They both agreed that everything that’s happened thus far has been not only okay, but good; they both recognize that Jeff needs someone he feels he can count on, and he clearly feels safe with me.  When I brought up the idea of having a sit-down with Jeff’s dad, my men searched all of Jeff’s files and discovered that we’ve got nothing in the way of custody orders or other official paperwork that would forbid such a meeting, so Dad and I are having coffee tomorrow afternoon.

In the meantime, I’m keeping my cell phone on – and on me – at all times.  I need to be available if either of these babies needs me.

Monday can’t come fast enough.

Ten Things Tuesday

I love all of my students, but some of them are much closer to my heart than others.  Here are ten of my favorite kids (in no particular order), and just some of the reasons I love them.  I have changed the names, but the kids are all very real.

1.  Bart.  He’s my “school son;” I love him like my own.  He is kind and gentle, he is generous and thoughtful, and he is wicked smaht and funny as hell.  He and I have settled into a kind of familial intimacy that makes me grateful every day that I took this job.

2.  Margot.  She and I are just now starting to connect.  I had her in class last year.  Some days I thought we clicked, other days I was sure she hated me; I could never tell where we stood.  I found out the other day when she had a panic attack, left the school, and called me in near-hysterical tears asking me to come and get her.  I cannot tell you how important it is to me to be a safe person to my kids; knowing that she is comfortable enough to call me when she felt most vulnerable is huge.

3.  Kermit.  Kermit and I clashed HARD last year; to the point where he actually transferred out of my class.  I will admit to being nervous to have him this year, but something is profoundly different between us.  He’s energetic and engaged, and he’s dug into the work that I ask my kids to do – to the point that he’s kinda rocking my socks.  His parents told me that something clicked for him at home, too, and he’s totally making it all work.  He and I are laughing and really talking, and I am delighted to be sharing this year with him.

4.  Caroline.  She’s a new kid this year, but something in her resonated with me from the moment we met.  She is open and sweet, she has a sublime sense of humor, and she’s eager to learn and to find her place in our community.  She’s got some self-esteem problems that I’m working on (she was convinced at some point that she’s a bad writer), but every time we talk, I get the feeling that she’s going to be one of my kids.

5.  Jeff.  Jeff is one of my guitar boys and, like Kermit, we did not connect our first year together.  In fact, Jeff was one of the kids I was sure we were going to lose; he just wasn’t working.  I kept at him, though, even though I know he sometimes hated me for it.  Last year, something in him turned, and he started the year really rockin’… until he wasn’t.  At one point, he came to me and admitted that things were bad at home.   I looked him in the eye and told him that he could call on me for anything he needed.  Ever since then, he’s been my kid, and I love him like I love Bart.

6.  Trevor.  Trevor is a new kid, but he’s already grown on me.  He’s open and sweet, he’s sharp and funny, and he seems a genuinely happy to be with us.  I have no idea if he’s going to be one of mine (really, the kids choose me), but I wouldn’t object if he wanted to be.

7.  Nick.  Nick is also a new kid, and I am deeply impressed by him.  He is infectiously, deliriously friendly, he is wickedly smart and observant, and I’m pissed that he’s a senior because it means we’re only going to have him for the year.  He seems to me the kind of kid who will put himself out for other people, and I already feel like he’s going to be a huge part of my school life this year.

8.  Hannah!  There are a million things to love about Hannah!, not the least of which being that she signs her name with an exclamation point.  She’s in it; she wants to learn, she wants to read, she wants to suck everything out of this experience, and I adore her.  She isn’t really mine – while we get along fantastically, I think she’s bonded much more to another teacher at the school – she is one of the kids I look forward to every day.

9.  Arthur.  Arthur was another kid I thought we were going to lose last year, but who’s somehow managed to come back to us this year; he’s not quite wheels-up, but he’s definitely on the runway and picking up speed.  We’re really starting to connect; he’s looking me in the eye, he’s joking with me, he’s starting to trust me – and himself.  I have a good feeling about this kid.

10.  Betty.  I adore Betty.  She is a firecracker, but I think that a lot of that energy is her way of trying to cover up some pretty hefty insecurity.  She admitted to me, in a piece of writing, that she’s going through some things.  I wrote back to her and told her that she didn’t have to go through them alone; that I would be there for her if she needed me.  We haven’t spoken about it – that’s not the way Betty operates – but I know she knows I’m here.  That may be enough – just that knowing – but if she needs more, and I can give it to her, all she has to do is say the word.

I am so incredibly lucky to be able to do this work, and to work in a place that lets me love my kids the way I need to.

Quick Hit: It Works!

Every morning, my English classes are expected to write for about 10 minutes on a bumper sticker quote I put up on the board.  The first class, they just get the quote; I want them to approach it fresh and as they would on their own.  They find critical thinking questions and prompts from me on the board when they arrive for subsequent classes.  My hope is that these will nudge them to think deeper or more carefully or from a different angle; my goal is for them to practice critical thinking skills, then to transfer that thinking into their writing.

For the most part, these exercises seem to go over okay.  The kids grumble about having to do them – especially the first-thing-in-the-morning kids – but with the exception of a couple of recalcitrant kids (who don’t write on principle, anyway), I get pretty decent engagement.

I had to kinda drag Hatcher through these last year; not exactly kicking and screaming, but for a while there, I was working harder than he was.  This kid is SO smart and SO insightful, but he would give me bullshit responses to the prompts, and it made me CRAZY.  I pushed him and cajoled him and harassed him all year, and he only once in a while let slip how brilliant he really is.

He ended up leaving the school this term (I’m not sure why, and it saddens my heart; I miss him every day).  This morning, I got this message on my facebook page:

Dear Mrs. Chili,

After the second day of [standardized testing], I can honestly say that I would have had an incredibly hard time on the writing sections without the daily quote writing from your class.

Thanks,

Hatcher

I live for these notes.

Confidence/Competence

…Or is it the other way around?

I met this afternoon with Carrie, a student I taught three years ago in one of my Local U. freshman English classes. I had bumped into her again after all this time when I ducked into my colleague Charlotte’s room at the end of her class – Carrie’s class, as it happens – to tell her about this article. I turned around after talking to Charlotte to find Carrie, grinning from ear to ear. After a lovely hug, she asked me if we could get together. I told her to find me on facebook and we’d make plans.

She’s working on a paper for Charlotte, and it seems she’s been stymied a bit by the prospect (Charlotte is a remarkably sharp and demanding thinker, and she expects the same of her students. I am in love with this woman, but that’s a post for another time). Carrie, it seems, has been fretting about this paper for a while now – to the point of starting three different drafts of the thing – and decided that now was the time to send up a flare and ask for help.

I met her in one of our local coffee shops where we chatted a bit about her adventures these last three years, her travels, and her plans for her life after she graduates in June. Then we talked about her paper (Charlotte’s asking the students to choose one of the works they’ve read in class, then write an analysis of an element in that piece), and about what kinds of strategies Carrie can employ to get to the kind of specificity Charlotte’s looking for. Carrie had an idea of WHAT she wanted to talk about – she had a topic that was acting as the “splinter in her brain” that she wanted to know more about – but she wasn’t sure how to go about getting down to the kind of focus Charlotte requires. Carries’s smart, though, and quick, and within about 5 minutes, we talked our way to her furiously scribbling notes and seeming genuinely less stressed about the task ahead of her.

I can’t wait to read her next draft.

Just as I shifted the conversation to business, Carrie ducked under the table for a second and came back up with a single Gerbera daisy for me, along with a lovely note about how much I’ve influenced her for the better. As I drove home after what I think was a very productive meeting, I thought about that lovely gesture. Sometimes (oh, who am I kidding? Always!) I am surprised by the ways in which students respond to the work that I do with them. I spend so much time worrying about the ones I’m not reaching that I often miss the ways I touch the ones I DO hit.

I’ve been feeling, since the start of this school year, that I still haven’t quite found my groove. I’ve been worried about that, and concerned that maybe I’m “off” in a real and significant way. As I talked with my former student about scholarly things, easily and with authority, I started feeling a little bit of that groove coming back. I’m good at this; I care about the work that I do enough to do it well. I respect my discipline and the students who rely on me to give them skills and tools they need, and I care enough about that to be diligent and conscientious. With that feeling of competence comes an increasing feeling of confidence. I’m on my way back.

Avatar

I decided to start my Aliens and Vampires in Literature class with the Aliens contingent (though, now that I think about it again, I probably should have started with vampires, since Hallowe’en is coming up… Oh, well…) and, while I’m waiting for them to score copies of Carl Sagan’s Contact, I am showing and discussing films.

We started with Avatar.

Image credit

I love this movie.  Is it formulaic and predictable?  Yes.  Does it tell a new story?  Not really; in fact, it’s nearly one-to-one with Dances with Wolves (which I also love, so there!).  Despite the panning that it received in some circles for its lack of originality, I think it is an important movie, and I was excited to show it to my students.

One of my goals in this course is to get kids to think about the functions that entertainment serves beyond simple entertainment.  We spent three classes watching the film (I got a M/W/F short-day class instead of the long-day T/TH class I wanted, so we’re making do; it’s going to mean covering less material, but I’ll make sure we do more with what we do see), and I patently refused to let the kids talk about the films in class before we’d gotten to the last scene.  (That made them CRAZY, especially since it turned out that I had to stop the film for the end of classes in some really compelling spots; the kids nearly lost their minds when I had to stop the movie when Jake drops onto the creature to become Toruk Makto on Wednesday.)

We had our culminating discussion yesterday, and it was amazing.  All but two of the kids had seen the film before – several of them more than once – but every single one of them said that, despite being very familiar with the movie, there were a number of things they saw when they were “watching it for a class” that they never noticed before.

My absolute favorite moment in the whole discussion came at the very beginning of the class and from my “school son” (whom I’m probably going to talk a lot about this year, so let’s call him Bart, okay?)  We were all talking about the idea that, in typical alien movies, the aliens are always the bad guys* when Bart pointed out that, in this movie, the aliens are still the bad guys.  I pointed at him with my eyebrows-up, “you-just-nailed-it” look on my face and waited for what he said to sink in with the rest of the kids.  One by one, the light dawned; we’re so used to thinking of the “aliens” as ‘whoever isn’t us’ that shifting our thinking to recognize that, in this film, we’re the aliens is a surprise.

The conversation took off from there.  We talked about the ways in which we create an “other,” and how that process of making a pariah allows us to behave in ways we likely wouldn’t otherwise.  We talked about where each character made his or her realizations (and about the characters who never got to the point of change) and about how some of the “good” guys in the film – up to and including the hero – were still complicated and flawed.  We talked about the film as modern social commentary in the context of the Iraq invasion after the 9/11 attacks, and about how some people – particularly Americans and those in positions of political power – don’t seem to understand that “our way” isn’t the pinnacle of human experience; that not everyone wants democracy or McDonald’s or jeans and sneakers.  We talked about the different perspective of this film – the human as alien – and about how the film asks us to think about things we do in ways that we might not have been able to if the Na’vi had come to Earth; that the position of the different ‘races’ impacted the way we think about them (and us).  We talked about power and economics; we talked about religion and belief, about what we value (and how we value what others value), and about the environment.  We talked about what it means to be connected – to our environment and to each other – and we talked about colonialism and its effects on both occupier and occupied (though they didn’t use the term, they still nailed some of the high points of the concept).

It was a wonderful, dynamic, interesting, and exciting conversation.  We’re off to a good start.

*I recognize that not ALL alien movies are about violent invasions and forced occupation – I’m also planning on showing the kids Cocoon and maybe E.T. – but I think it’s fair to agree that most of our alien genre is stacked with stories about invasion and occupation.  Those films bring up ideas I want to get the kids thinking about; I’m trying to train them to see beyond the explosions and action to get at what some of these stories have to say about us and how we treat each other.

I Love Them

Even though I still don’t feel like I’ve hit my stride yet (c’mon, Chili, give yourself a break; it’s only the first week, fercryinoutloud!), today was a very good day.

I have a group of kids, mostly juniors this year, with whom I’ve not yet had the pleasure of sharing a classroom before (they had a former colleague for freshman year and Mike last year).  I’ve been looking forward to having these kids; I’ve had one or two in elective classes, I’ve gotten to know a couple of them over lunch and Socratic Society during the last two years, and I listened in on a bunch of Mike’s classes, so I have a pretty good idea of what they’re like.  The long and short of it is that, for the most part, they delight me.

I don’t know how it is, but I’m reasonably sure that every high school teacher will attest to the idea that there are just some bunches of kids who rock our socks, while others are either entirely neutral or downright aggravating.  Of course, there’s always that one, stand-out kid (whether for better or worse), but it has been my experience that, usually, the trend seems to ripple through entire graduating classes; as a whole, the kids tend to embody a common energy.

This year’s juniors have a particular kind of awesome about them, and there are a few in particular who stand out to me.

This morning, I gave the juniors a writing prompt that asked them to identify and explain the value of one physical object – one thing that they treasure.  When we were all done writing, I went around the table and asked them what they wrote about (eventually, I will ask them to actually read their writing, but for now, it’s enough to give just the big ideas to the class).  We got such answers as photo albums, laptops, and jewelery, all answers that I was more or less expecting.

Then I got to Donny.

Understand before I go any further that Donny is a quiet giant of a kid.  He is literally never in the middle of the action, but I’ve been watching him for a couple of years now and I see that he doesn’t miss a thing.  He is an imposing figure – I am eye level to about the heart center of his chest – but his manner is gentle and serene.  I have never heard him raise his voice, but neither have I ever really seen him kicking back with the other kids.  To be honest with you, I was half expecting Donny to not have anything to say – I was fully prepared for him to say that he couldn’t think of anything to write about.

Boy, was I wrong.

It seems that Donny’s favorite thing is a poker table.

A poker table.

His reason for this thing being so important to him?  He went on to explain that he eats breakfast at this poker table every morning.  That he does his homework on the table, that he wins money from his parents on this table; but more than all that, he said, this table is important to him because it is one of the few things that he was able to recover after his family suffered a devastating house fire two years ago.  The blaze began in the basement adjacent to Donny’s bedroom and, because there was pvc piping involved in the blaze, everything that wasn’t burned or water-damaged was toxic.  Somehow, this table managed to escape both blaze and water and, because it is non-porous, was able to be cleaned of any dangerous residue left by burning pvc.

I was profoundly moved by his explanation, and heartily surprised by the alacrity with which he was willing to share it.

Later, at the end of the day, the AD lead the community in closing circle (it’s a new thing this year; we always begin the day in a community circle, but this is the first year we take 10 minutes at the end to come together).  His task for us at the end of this first week of school was to mingle around the room to find people to shake hands with and thank; his goal was for us to express gratitude to one another for contributing to the success of the week.

I headed straight for Donny and was surprised when I found myself welling up.  I took his hand and thanked him for being willing to share the story about the table, and for bringing with him an open and generous energy.  Then he asked me if I needed a hug, and I was just about done.

image credit

It’s going to be a good year.