The Innocent Bystanders

This year, I lost more students and colleagues to violence and illness than I have in all the years I have been teaching. I've lost close family, too, particularly my godmother Mary Pearce, and I've written about her elsewhere on this blog. This is the first time I've been so inundated by unexpected and accidental deaths of people younger than I am. The most recent student, Michael Gonzales of Tilden HS, was a sweet kid -- a true teenager in the best of senses. He liked to skateboard, dance and he mostly had his head on his shoulders. He was not an academically aggressive student, but when pushed, he tried. He was navigating the academic world better than his skills might've allowed.

Tomorrow there is a candlelight service for Michael. I don't know if I will go because I sometimes feel as if I join in grief almost to prove my own life was important. I was at Tilden for one year. In that time, I must've talked to Michael almost every day. But, I never had him for a class -- I subbed for his advisory teacher a few times. I spent a lot of time convincing him to GO to class, and he mostly did. Like a lot of kids, he rode the limits of how far he could stay out of class without pushing it to the point of not graduating. He graduated last week. He died July 4, 2010. A bullet meant for somebody else hit him in the chest.

So many of the students' postings on Facebook ask the familiar question -- Why Mike? And some speak of wisdom far beyond their years and experience. Some students talked about how this taught them not to hold onto anger -- whatever fights they might've had with Mike paled now in perspective. Some wrote the equivalent of W.H. Auden's haunting warning, "We must all love one another or die."

If I were to try to explain to those students (and to myself) why so many "good die young" it might be an extension of Auden's warning adapted to 2010. We must all remember, whenever we bring violence into the environment, whether it be gun violence, whether it be the violence that propels us not to get people appropriate health insurance or just anger, we ENDANGER everyone in our environment. (I lost a student to Ketoacidosis. I have a friend who has survived that many times: the difference is education about Diabetes and insurance.) Our "beefs" are minimal -- the world, and life are not just about us. Whether we foolishly build a post office near a runway because it seems convenient, or, as I did a few years ago, we let off steam out of hubris, we inevitably endanger someone who will come into contact with our work who does not see our mistake coming. As a colleague once said to me when I faced punishment for my mistake, "You weren't thinking about the students who would need you the next day." Whoever brought that gun on July 4th, wasn't counting on missing. That's hubris, too. Not to be callous, but if you think you're going to be perfect at taking revenge, and then you hurt someone completely innocent, not only did you not get your desired goal, but you are now going to be punished for something you didn't want to do. So, even if you "made peace with the consequences" of hurting your intended victim, you royally miscalculated and now two people will have their lives cut short -- you and the innocent bystander. Even if you got your revenge, you weren't thinking about the people around you who need you -- maybe people you haven't even met yet but whom you could have/were intended to meet. If you say to yourself that you don't care, that G-D lets the violence happen in other places and doesn't stop it, you are just fulfilling a cycle of violence which inevitably hurts people whom you or someone you had no intention of hurting loved and helps no one. Do something positive and watch -- people you care about and people you didn't even know will benefit. And the energy will come back to you.

So, why does G-D let this happen to innocent bystanders: to remind us that we are responsible for everyone we come into contact with. That every decision we make, especially one involving violence, includes everyone in our immediate world. As people often say these days, "It's not about YOU." It's about everyone around you.

If I could give Michael's friends advice tomorrow, I would say to remember a time in which they had pure fun, whether it was with Michael or someone else. Hold that moment. The next time you feel angry in any way, reach for that moment. And remember that you don't want to deprive more people like Michael, like Terrance Wright, like Nakemia Riley...like Karen Hunter, of that moment. Give more when the instinct is to pull away. Be extra careful when you feel like you can "let something go." Have no hubris. And recognize that the people you care about do need you. The world needs more of the good people I have lost.

Hold tight to those memories of fun. Be generous -- let the world have the care it needs. No one should die because of something which can be prevented. We should never let our prejudices get in the way of medical research as we have with so many diseases. When in doubt, give. If you're a doctor, take on the extra patient. My uncle is very lucky. His friends gathered around him when he was diagnosed with cancer and his network got him to the best of care quickly. People put him at top priority. A veteran, a father and a good man, he deserved that treatment. But so does everyone.

This country could feed the world if everyone donated 15 dollars a day. There are limits to how much profit anyone needs to make. Anyone who has been in an emergency room knows that good, smart doctors know how to find a way to get people the priority of care they need. It can be done. It is done. And I can list tons of airports with grass alongside their runways -- room for error. Because none of us are perfect, and its hubris to think we can be.

I am lucky for the good memories I have of those I have lost. I will try to hold onto them when I feel angry, stingy, lazy or "above it all." I will try.

Mike's friends have put together a really thoughtful site on Facebook.: RIP White Mike http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=137750112917814

High Anxiety

I think I heard that Gary Sheffield is on the disabled list because of anxiety.

As an ATR unable to navigate a new place with no real roots or space of my own, I believe I understand how debilitating anxiety can be. Every night, before I go to bed, I plot out a "plan of attack" on the school building. I'll spend the morning in the programming office between classes and the afternoon in the students' cafeteria when I'm not "pushing in" to someone else's class. As for those teachers who don't seem to enjoy my presence, simple: I won't go. There are other teachers who would like me instead. None of the haters will report me as they don't want me back and none of the lovers will squeal as they want me to be able to come back unobtrusively.
No way any AP who happens to be watching members of either group (because there are objecters to the hideous curriculum we employ on both sides) is going to catch me (perhaps one of the most outspoken critics of said lessons.)

Needless to say, it's an exhausting enough prospect that after two sleeping pills, plus melatonin, I doze off for about four hours before waking up in the complete realization that THIS WILL NEVER WORK. The prospect of going back into the teachers' lounge and sit and be ignored, "whatever-ed," "dismissed," or accorded so much fear that my colleague's mouth dries and she legitimately reaches for sound along the vein-color pallor of her lips, makes me want to feel my worst symptoms of my most difficult ailments, just a little more intensely.

And simply put, I can't sleep until I over-sleep.

Honesty

I was given the AP class in my school to teach while the teacher who normally teaches it is ill.

I feel guilty. Yes, I asked to cover the class -- the teacher's entire schedule about a week ago. I didn't do it with the idea in my head of whether I deserved it or not. I just did it because I wanted to do it. I didn't get the rest of the schedule, but I got the AP Class. I sort of get why -- I never got the Ramp-Up training so maybe I don't know enough to lead a class in it. I've taught AP English before, though not with a class as good as this one. I was mediocre at it. I'd've been better had my students done homework.

However, I feel like the senior teachers should be teaching AP English and I shouldn't be. I don't know why I care, or why it bothers me when I have a shopping cart full of books waiting to "Proceed to Checkout" which I want to buy to help me with the class and I'm up now to work on my lessons. It's not that I don't like teaching it. I do. Clearly, I do. I'm spouting off as much as I can remember ever learning and I'm thinking about reading Oedipus Rex aloud in my passable Greek.

It's wrong, though. Much as my outburst last week was wrong. I don't have the right to outrage or preferences. These people have been here for twenty years. I'm just part of the Occupation.

It's not just politically correct politics. It feels god-awful.

So, I'm going to send an email to my chair and the principal expressing the wish that a senior faculty member take the class and I'm going to talk to my union rep as well. My colleagues are all teaching this hideous Ramp-Up curriculum and it's killing them. Plus, they've earned this in this place and I haven't. I believe that.

I don't even mind if my colleagues feel schadenfreud if one of them takes the class away from me. They deserve to feel it. I am feeling self-conscious and miserable in too many ways. Plus, I know I can teach this class some other time in some other place. This isn't my school. It never will be. Even though I also have a Tilden baseball cap in one of my many "Wish Lists" on-line. For me that's fashion, whereas for the other folks at this school it's history.

The trouble is, I don't know if my saying anything will do anything positive, but I'll try. No one at my school reads this blog so they'll never know what I felt. That's okay, too. I write this as one of many ATR's and teachers-who-also-write-and-do-art-in-their-other-lives.

When the war is over, someone buy me new toys

There is no doubt Bloomberg and Klein are fighting a war against teachers. You need look no further than the insanity of my weekly experience. Perhaps the most hilarious moment yet was our professional development on Monday. We were introduced to "Mimio" technology, which is all well in good if we weren't working in a school with a shrinking budget about to be closed. And, the curriculum we are mandated to use in English and Social Studies specfically forbids the use of streaming video and the internet which makes the use of Mimio no more than a blackboard trick, certainly not one worth over 500 dollars to start.

Why keep teachers in a professional development in which you teach them about a technology they can't use and you can't afford to buy anyway? To frustrate them and make them feel obsolete, that's why.

How much did it cost for the demonstration? One of the teachers who attended a workshop for this product was given a t-shirt by the saleslady. Couldn't we, at least, have all had t-shirts? How about backpacks for the students with the logo? No?

Can you hear me? No, I mean, really.

A few days ago I called a parent about her son's lack of focus. I knew her son was deaf, but since he gets to work with a hearing teacher twice a week, I thought his services were in order. Plus, as I am continually reminded, I am the NON-SPECIAL-ED LICENCE-HOLDING person in the room. In the early part of my conversation with the parent, which spanned all three main floors of the building, the mother asks, "Is he wearing his earpiece?" "What earpiece?" "His teachers are supposed to wear this halo which is connected directly to his earpiece." This would've sounded very odd except that as a college counselor I went to conferences were I learned about all the fantastic devices out there to make college possible despite disability, one of these being a device which the teacher wears which does look kind of like a halo around your head and connects back to an earpiece and microphone on the student. I walk my phone over to special ed deptand ask the question about this. "I've got to find it," remarks the woman temporarily in charge of the dept while our chair nurses her newborn. My suspicion is it was lost long before her temporary tenure began. She tells me go down to the principal and ask. I take my cell phone, parent on the other end down to the principal's office. No, he won't just come on the cell phone. She has to call and see if her call is worthy with the principal's secretary first. I tell him what it's about and that the parent is more than concerned. He says she should call the Guidance Counselor for Special Education who is not in that day and with whom I have not had a lot of excellent experience. I find it laughable that he called me on being "not in compliance" when I took a few special ed students out of our classroom to work with separately because they were faster and more rambunctious than the other half of the class. Did he know that WE WERE ALL not in compliances as far as this young man's hearing headgear? I mean, basically, he's deaf as a post. And he sits through the same class he has with us in the period before he works with us -- so he is inundated with aural blur of the same kind for 100 minutes. We wonder why he goes to sleep?
My colleague in the class with the Special-Ed license says that she hasn't ever worked with this device on this young man and she has taught him for most of this year. No one told her a thing about it. That it was once, then that it was lost, etc. As she is meticulous, I believe her. In fact, from the conversation in the special ed office it seems that it was assumed the student would just go without this earpiece and they saw no reason to mention it.
But, I wasn't in compliance working with this kid one - to - four at one table where he could definitely hear me. I am sure that he hears my colleague and much of what goes on in her class because she is clear, but he has other classes which are chaotic and large and not so artfully run. He has often brought up points from the book we are reading which he says he has heard in his other class -- the very same English class taught by another teacher with three times as many students. The points don't seem familiar and I suspect he has half-heard them.

The Jupiter Symphony

An astrologer friend told me that the past few days have been my "Jupiter Time" -- which is supposed to indicate good fortune, at the very least in friendships, I think. I was skeptical and things came late, but for the first time in years, I have finally got a collegial bond with members of the department in which I work. Some of it is shared perspectives on the new curriculum we teach, but a lot of it is very sweet, mutual respect. I'm especially lucky because I wouldn't have earned this by a long shot, but by accident of fate I ended up working with a small group of really good veteran teachers. BCNHS was a collective of such folks, but it's been a while since we were a unified group and, once it was announced that we were closing, people were sent to different schools on very short notice and our department dwindled to just one or two. Of course, my colleagues are experiencing THAT feeling -- the feeling of tremendous loss of a host of old friends. I'm in the unique position in which making a new friend makes some sense, although I still feel like a refugee from BCNHS. I don't feel like I work at Tilden, still, but I do work with these colleagues and I do understand a little more of the politics which they face. You see, we Aspies can be empathetic, we just are so through our brains and then our central nervous systems.

Anyway, it's just faintly glorious to have people whom I respect and am friendly with at work again.