This is not one story, but a myriad of stories. Each piece of this growing collage carries different stories--different thoughts at different times. It seems appropriate to start with explaining the purpose of this piece. It is one perspective, at one moment in time. It seems that I would remember different stories on different days. As I look at the collage that has become representative of the past years of stitching together these stories, I remind myself that my personal search for meaning defies the classroom boundaries. Thus, the series of stories that follows is one in which those boundaries are necessarily defied. These and many more are the things I carry to my relationships with students, teachers, friends, and family members alike. For me the journey of teaching is deeply personal, an unending spiritual journey. I hope that the stories to follow echo that sentiment.
The garden and the harvest
Each summer in late august, a crowd of people arrived at our house. In my earliest years, I remember the sour smell of vinegar in bar-b-que sauce cooking on the stove for ours. Potatoes from the garden boiling with piles of chicken pieces in the oven (it seems like before the days of worry about who ate what). Corn on the cob from the local man who sold it out of his truck for a dollar a dozen. How upset we were when it went to a dollar twenty-five.
In the garden, the warmth of the dirt underneath my bare feet made picking string beans bearable. The end of summer was signified by the smells of the last bar-b-que of the season. We had begun in May with my father’s tennis team and ended with the neighborhood children running through the sprinkler on our lawn and adults drinking lemonade mixed with beer. In later years, I would wonder why certain people were not invited. Could we ask my friend _______? I would ask. My mother as she glanced at my father would respond, they don’t really have the same, uh, values, I don’t think they would come. Even later I began to understand, this was the harvest for us to share together all the pieces of our life. It wasn’t about work friends at the private boarding school my father taught mathematics. We came together for one day in late august to celebrate our community together over food grown locally some in our garden and some in others’.
An Invitation
“I never really like math…” begins any one of hundreds of math autobiographies written at the beginning of each class I teach. This exercise, less about mathematical content and more about students’ feeling towards math, gives me insight, however small into getting to know a student individually. Seeing each individual uniquely and through their own eyes, I believe may offer an entry point into building a relationship with that student. There are times when I need a reminder of just how rich, insightful, and honest the information in those autobiographies is.
Andrew, a quiet and thoughtful student entered class in January. At the time our classes were a semester long so I had the opportunity to meet two entirely different groups of students each year. Andrew sat in the back, often with his head down rarely making eye contact, and often hesitant to participate. It was not until the end of the year that I really felt I knew Andrew.
After a series of absences, Andrew returned to school with a note indicating he had been absent due to bereavement, his father passed away. I reread Andrew’s autobiography that evening. The last night struck me. “I’m having a really hard time with life right now,” it read. I suppose I just hadn’t had enough experiences to hear the red flag that would now urge me to dig a little deeper. Andrew had invited me in that first week. I imagine it must have felt aweful when I didn’t know to ask the next question. I learned how to read those autobiographies as entry points for building trusting relationships after that. It does not mean I do it well every time, but I know a little more about the invitation.
This year, Chris, a ninth grader wrote in his autobiography, “I don’t like math very much. …I guess it’s because I was always moving around and in different schools all the time.” The first week of school, Chris sat alone in the lunch room. One day, I sat with him and asked about moving around, what he liked, if it was hard to make friends. This time, I knew to take the invitation.
Kindness
The world I live in is full of ugliness. Systematic oppression of multiple people being the ugliest, I believe. But every so often I encounter an event that reminds me of the intense beauty and kindness of youth. When I worked with students in a leadership program, we used to have one day a month devoted to what I liked to call random acts of kindness. Each day students would think of one act that that could do to help make the world better that day, however small. Sometimes it was giving out pieces of candy in the lunch room. Other days it was picking up trash along the sidewalks of the town. The magnitude of the act was less important that doing something, specifically for this group of students for whom leadership in a traditional sense did not seem very appealing.
Most memorably, however, was Angelina, a young woman, an immigrant from Russia, who had moved into a dorm her senior year because her parents had moved out of town. Her random act of kindness one day was to put flowers and notes on every car in the parking lot to wish everyone a nice day in as many different languages as we spoke in the program (six or seven). So we bought all the yellow carnations at the local grocery store and attached flower after flower to notes in all the languages we knew or were learning. Eight of us, students and adults, filled the parking lot with a random (or not so random) act of kindness.
I guess what occurs to me is how eager young people were/are to be kind. Even now, how often the toughest students are so quick to help hand out books, or push a t.v., or give another student a pencil. In a world so often filled with very hard things for teenagers-- a young woman whose parent’s moved her senior year and left her to live with strangers—here were youth who felt like they may not be able to give everyday, but in this context, they felt like it was not such a stretch to be kind. I often wonder if it will carry over to the next phases of their lives, will they remember to be kind?
Patience with the journey
Sometimes I wish that the world would be different NOW! I want to see the change I know is coming. Every so often, that urgency is also a reminder to step back and have patience with the world—to remember and be mindful of the journey.
Today, I think of a group of senior I taught second semester of their senior year. None of the students needed the class to graduate, but they were taking Finite math anyway. Oddly, I don’t remember the content of the project we were doing, something to do cost/revenue analysis, I think. Unexpectedly, I needed to be absent for the last two days before the project was due. Nevertheless, I set the expectation (perhaps we should have set that expectation) that as seniors they were able to complete the presentation for the day I returned. I gave out an email address and asked the student facilitator to email me with their progress. On Sunday evening, there was still no word. I felt like I was pulling teeth, coercing the class to perform.
On Monday, prepared to deal with my frustration and to express my disappointment, the presentations began. The disappointment in my head was nothing compared to the disappointment and perhaps embarrassment I saw on the faces of the students. I did not have to say a word.
As we gathered in a circle to debrief the process and the product of the project, the mood in the class was somber. Students filled out a grading rubric that graded the class product and process. We had negotiated the standards together. In the circle, I handed back a compiled list of the self-grading scores as well as their comments on each of the criteria. As a class, almost every students failed themselves. As the debrief continued, one student commented, “Ms. T. why did you fail us?” Another student responded, “She didn’t fail us, we failed ourselves.” It was the truth. In fact, my grade was higher that the average class grade.
They continued to talk about issues such as attendance of the student facilitator, taking ownership over the process, practicing this as if it were a job, not just doing what was required. As I listened, I though to myself how my own expectation of the students when the project began were simply not where they were. The process of doing the project, however painful for me to watch, was important for them to experience. What began as not meeting my expectations turned quickly to remembering the journey is not always about the outcome.
For their final presentation of the year, there were invitations sent to other classes, an announcement in school meeting, food, mini-workshops, and brochures. I rarely had to say a word.
Faith
In college, I spent a large amount of my time in various women’s studies, African-American studies, and educational policy classes. Math was a convenient major and social science housed a passionate purpose—understanding social movements and working for social change.
One semester, having read Angela Davis’ autobiography, a group of women from my women’s studies class went to hear her speak in Platteville, WI. When she spoke, Angela Davis asked, “how many of you think we will see revolutionary change within your lifetime?” A hand or two went up (mine was not among them). “In your children’s lifetime?” she probed. Again, a few hands went up, more maybe but not many more. “In your grandchildren’s lifetime?” My hand along with a few others went up.
At the time, I was eighteen. My grandchildren, even now, are a long way off. That is a long time to wait for a revolution, to wait for someone else to fight. Davis went on, “I would raise my hand in the first case because, for my children’s sake, I must believe there will be change within my lifetime. If I believe this, then I have no choice but to make everyday about working for that change.”
Often before that incident, and many time after, I was told that rebellion was a stage I would outgrow. I would at some point, I was told by my first official teaching mentor, realize that things are the way they are and in time, I would understand that. Luckily, my mother is very immature and has yet to understand that things are the way they are. As a child, I was carted to the local peace center at least once a week while she worked on the nuclear freeze campaign. As a teenager, it was a community dinner at the adult education center she ran, or some event we thought might be interesting. It seems that there were always things to learn and more work to be done if a change is to come within our lifetime.