The month of May is swishing on by, and with it the end of my teaching career in Miami. I know it sounds a bit fatalistic, but I can safely say that I will never teach for Miami-Dade Public Schools after May 31st of this year. Summer is fast approaching; in the 305, this means palpably humid afternoons, a searing summer sun, and the softly beckoning beach. I have indulged in several of these summer pleasures over the past few weekends, heralding the end of spring and the beginning of my long-anticipated freedom. Added to that was the commencement of the Summer Movie Season: the release (and subsequent opening-night viewing) of M:I 3, c/o everyone's favorite screenwriter, J.J. Abrams. Bravo, J.J., you made a movie with Tom Cruise in it, and people want to see it anyway!
Standing outside of Tamarind Thai last night, the four inhabitants of apartment 266 took a moment to gaze around in the breezy crepuscular Normandy air, bewildered by the circumstances for our reunion. Teach for America sponsored a "Reflect and Reconnect" dinner featuring Thai food and education-related talking points. It was hard to believe that we were finally at an end of year event, let alone an end of committment event. Alumni Induction next weekend is going to be positively surreal. It was good to see the twenty-odd other '04 corps members who have stuck it out this far, for whatever reason. Carlos and I decided that a lot of the reason that some of us are still working seems to be perverse stubbornness. I'm okay with that. If anything, I'm too damn stubborn to quit, even in the face of destruction and calamity. Hyperbolic conditions, you say? Well, these things seem to follow me wherever I go, tagging along doggedly behind the best of my intentions. See: "Reflect and Reconnect" Dinner. Of course, everything seems to be going along swimmingly, and then, because it's a large party and restaurants are rarely careful, I discover that I've eaten a peanut. While all of this wonderful and interesting conversation is going around me, there I am sitting in my chair staring at the wall for twenty minutes waiting for the benadryl do alleviate the constricting pain in my chest. Boo.
I was really sad at work today, and it took me a little while to figure out why. Part of it was probably the aftereffects of my emergency antihistamine last night, but there were other factors involved as well. Now don't get my wrong; this melancholy mood has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I'm leaving Miami Central (South), or that I'm moving from the Sunshine State and its turquoise waters. It has more to do with things unravelling around me. I mean unravelling in the sense of decadence and downfall, not psychologically.
As part of our end of the year project in my reading classes, I wanted the kids to read a graphic novel. There are a bunch of them in the Read 180 library, but none of them are particularly spectacular, as they are merely adaptations of classic novels. They're making their own books, and as an accompaniament they are reading Maus, everyone's favorite graphic novel (and really the only one I know of). I spent a boatload of my own money on the books, mostly because I felt strongly that my students should read them. There was a bout of antisemitism on campus: swastikas on the Jewish teacher's desk, lots of throwing around the term Nazi without really knowing what it means, just more evidence of the childrens' lack of a sense of history. In any case, Maus was a success, and a bunch of students really took to it. One of them, A., has literally slept through 70% of my classes. He comes in gregariously, half-asses his Do Now assignment, usually yells at me, then falls immediately to sleep in a petulant huff. He is one of the most childish teenagers that I teach. On Friday, A. fell asleep again, but this time he did it on a copy of Maus. We've had severaly chats about how one treats a book, so I was pretty unsympathetic when he woke up at the end of class. A split second after waking up, I mention that it's time to leave, and probably had something flippant to say like "Good morning, A." A split second later, he begins to shower insults at me from across the room. Impassively, I write down everything he says, words and phrases loosely strung together with interjections such as "What, huh, you speechless! Yeah, huh, you ain't got nuthin' to say to that?" Yes, A., I've got absolutely nothing to say. It's all being written down for your referral.
An hour later, A. and I crossed paths near the AP's office. No more of the blustering aggressive male; A. was bawling his eyes out with his suspension papers in his hand. Pathetic.
This morning, easing out of last night's Benadryl, I taped back together the 35 pages that had fallen out of Maus I after A. broke the spine during his nap. For whatever reason, it made me incredibly depressed.
3rd Period's final SRI scores also depressed me. Every student made at least 1 year's learning gains, but only 55% made significant gains. 5th Period redeemed the day, wiht an astounding 92% of the students with 2 years's learning gains, and a few kids haven't even taken the test.
Still, there are other demolition projects around me that just make me so melancholy. Biscayne Boulevard, the city's major throughfare east of 95, has been under construction since I set eyes on Miami. September '04 the cones went up, and right now a 2.5 mile stretch right next to our apartment is being peeled away from the surface of the earth. The chaos might be justified if it were for some larger purpose; if the streets were being widened, left turn lanes added, or some sort of functional rehabilitation were going on, I would bite my tongue and keep the proverbial stiff upper lip. But the only reason that Biscayne is being resurfaced is to put an island of royal palm trees down the middle of it. Surreptitiously, the irrigation and drainage system will be marginally improved, but the ostensible purpose is the palm trees. Why, in a city which is so desperately in need of real public transportation, are hundreds of millions of dollars being wasted on a *cosmetic* overhaul of Biscayne?!? It baffles me with its absurdity. The shallowness of the entire project screams "Miami," so I shouldn't be too surprised. Total wanton destruction for no purpose. It's not even the cathartic sort of demolition that breaks ground for new growth and creates the possibility for something better to take the place of the old fashioned, the outmoded, the obsolete. This is no cleansing purge that precedes a rebirth, it's an immense waste of time to perpetuate an already doomed system. Why does it seem as if I'm the only person who thinks this is a bad idea? Couldn't maybe, the city planners, whose job it is to make the city function better, have anticipated these issues? Apparently not. [NB: best line, hands down, in MI:3 :"Don't interrupt me when I'm asking rhetorical questions!" ha! a man after my own heart.]
Ick.
Furthermore, there are several students in my classes who are engaged in the process of self-destruction of various sorts. Both of them are so different, but the end result is the same.
The first is a girl, we'll just call her Nasty. Nasty is a truly special sort of person, exemplified in the manner in which I met her. She did not choose to attend school for the first three months, then the truancy officer showed up at her residence threatening reprisals, so she attends my 8th period class. She arrives 10 minutes late, I ask who the hell she is, and she sits down. I explain the ridiculously simple premise of the class: read for 35 minutes each day, and she proceeds to take out a bottle of hooker-hot-pink nailpolish to paint her nails. She has done a total of three assignments since this first precious day of class. In addition to frequently missing classes, Nasty likes to express herself primarily with profanity. She once put gum in my water bottle, convinced a student to put gum in my hair, and put gum on my chair. She's also been pregnant and had an abortion. While she was visibly pregnant, she wore crop tops to show off her growing abdomen. How classy, no? On the same Friday when A. broke my book, Nasty spent 25 minutes of 8th period on a narrative explaining how one of her friends, who gives head to various ex-students of mine from last year, was jumped in the park. She said the word "fuck" 25 times, and "bitch" 19 times. I am sure that I can recall a conversation in which my vocabulary was at least that colorful, but the key difference here is that I have the mental capacity to choose whether or not to use such language, while Nasty's range of diction is somewhat limited.
Nasty is morally, physically, sexually, verbally, socially, academically, and intellectually disgusting...and people like her! The truly tragic part of this whole ordeal, however, is that a large quantity of the female population idolizes her. Children will do whatever she tells them to, just to win her favor. Girls and boys grovel at her Steve Madden clad feet, worship her bleached blonde weave. Her power over lesser minds is astounding, so much so that it is difficult to catch her actually doing anything wrong except for exuding an air of putrescent morality. She coerces, connives, betrays, and cheats her way through the school day, using class time as social hour and added ammunition for her already deplorable reputation. What a joy.
The other student who has engaged in an impressive masochistic self-destruction over the past few months is Boy 2 (see post of February 22nd). He went from being one of my most involved, athletic, energetic, enthusiastic, and intelligent students to being the most apathetic student and worst disruption in the class. Case in point: he just made a farting noise behind my back. What scares me is that after several parent conferences and multiple referrals, he's just getting worse. It's not just academically either. He went from a playful jokester to an intentionally hurtful tormentor. He doesn't even take care of himself either. his shoes are dirty, his clothes don't match, and he doesn't cut his hair. It's bizarre to see this kind of academic and spiritual destruction manifest itself physically, but in his case it's true. He's failing both of my classes right now, when he used to be close to an A. He gets suspended all the time, fights in between classes, and sometimes doesn't even bother to show up to school. If I weren't so tired, I would want to cry.
I'm at the end of my patience, the end of my energy, and the end of my commitment to Teach for America. It's time for all of this to be over so that I can move on with my life. There are so few kids that I will genuinely miss, and there's nothing to keep me here any more. I don't feel like I'm losing a connection to the school or to the mission to improve education, because that all ended for me when I shipped off to this damn sattelite campus. I had to say goodbye last year, and this entire school year has been more like a state of limbo than an actual part of my life. Being bounced from place to place, administrator to administrator, policy to policy, it just exemplifies the lack of continuity which destroys these childrens' educations. On days like today, and days like every school day for the past three weeks, it makes me so angry.
The irony of it all is that this year I truly did teach my students. Most of my kids achieved amazing things. With the exception of a small group of ignorant, bigoted, pieces of shit (who happen to be in my classroom right now overshadowing the decent kids), they tried hard and worked to their potential despite incredible odds. I just wish they saw that too.
I'm ready to be in a place where I don't have to wash my hands every 2 hours because of the filth all around me. I'm ready to be able to leave my lunch in the closet without finding a roach in it. I'm ready to not hear the word "gay" every thirty seconds used as an insult. I'm ready to not have to tell children to stop hitting each other. I'm ready to not have to wake up at 6:00 in the morning. I'm ready to not have to tell anyone "how many grades is this worth?" And I am certainly ready to leave Miami Central.
I'm ready for it all to be over. The end is near, so near that I can taste it. Please, could you hurry it up a bit?