Parent-Teacher Conferences

It should be noted that when embarking on this fellowship I learned I should not expect any parents to show up for parent-teacher conferences. None. Lack of parent-guardian involvement is stressed. That said, nearly half of my 350 students showed up with concerned parental figures. I’m blessed with a great place to work.

Several parents of high-performing students stopped by just to say, “She talks about you all the time, so we had to meet you.” One mother commented concerning her daughter, “She was so mad at me for making her orthodontist appointment during Spanish. She hates to miss your class.” Yet another mother recounted, “We were driving down the street and my daughter yelled, “That’s her mom! That’s my Spanish teacher!”

It’s difficult to explain how this made me feel; the emotion it evoked. Unexpected tears rushed my eyes. A sense of purpose flooded my soul. And the weight of responsibility nearly buckled my knees. “Is it possible that I’m truly making the impact I dreamed of making?” I wondered.

At the other end of the praise train, I absolutely adored complimenting students in front of their parents. It freaked everyone out, especially the kids. Some disruptive, low-performing students showed up as the personification of dog-with-tail-between-legs. They oozed palpable, smellable fear. “I love having (insert name) in class,” I would begin. Because it’s true. There’s a reason each of them is in my class. Yes, some of them are more… let’s say enjoyable than others. But each is purposefully in my class. “Sometimes he talks, but he’s always willing to move seats when I ask him and his behavior vastly improves when he does,” I would continue, always reaching for the positive. “He’s such a great student, I know we can make things better,” I encouraged, attempting to speak it into existence. “He’s already improving.” The kid would look at me like I’d just handed him a free iPhone, and I could see the fervent agreement in his eyes. The pact had been made. He was going to behave. And to my intense pleasure, he would.

Any kid about whom I gave that speech showed up in class the next day, selected a safe seat located far from friends and paid attention as though graduation depended on it. (Sadly it doesn’t, making it extremely difficult to hold the importance of passing Spanish over anyone’s head.) This positive speak phenomenon floored me. The lesson I learned seemed too easy, too basic. Give a kid some praise and garner his attention in return.

Are Your Eyes Real?

I straightened my hair before school today. Judging by the way my students reacted, though, you would’ve thought I dipped myself in gold. Students shouted from down the hall, “Miss, Your hair’s straight!” They questioned whether I did it myself or had it done. They touched it and wondered at it. Boys said, “Miss, You look pretty,” “Miss, You look better like that” (in contrast to my apparently-less-attractive curly hair).

It’s a funny thing being a white girl with light brown hair and blue eyes in a sea of dark-skinned, brown-eyed students. As if being a gringa from Indiana teaching Spanish doesn’t throw them off enough (I’m pretty sure at this point most of them think Indiana is an exotic country in a faraway land), throw in light-colored eyes and a decent wardrobe and most of the time they act like Miss Universe just walked through the door. “Miss, Are you wearing contacts?” “Miss, Are your eyes real?” “Hey Miss Barbie!” In fact, my Caucasian status confuses them so much, that on separate occasions my relation to pop-star Leona Lewis (born to an Afro-Caribbean Guyanese father and an Irish mother) has been questioned, along with my appearance in popular Bollywood films (the Mumbai-based Hindi language film industry in India).

It’s a serious confidence boost, but it also turns into a bit of an issue when male students incessantly request my phone number and refer to me as Miss Sexy. There’s also the time in the middle of a particularly disruptive class when I muttered in pure frustration, “What do I have to do to get you guys to listen?” and I heard one boy respond under his breath, “Take your clothes off.” Nice. (Please understand that I don’t actually take this as a compliment. I know these are hormonal little 13-year-old punks, attracted to almost any animate–and perhaps inanimate–object.) The upside to garnering this unexpected attention, though, is that the little girls look up to me. I have a captive audience. Talk about pressure. (Read “Parent-Teacher Conferences” for more details.)

The Subway

I used to think I had a knack for taking the crazy train. Then I realized that traveling the near-entirety of the A train twice every day like I do means that all trains equal crazy trains. The highlights:

My first crazy train experience unfortunately occurred on my maiden voyage up to my university in the Bronx. I boarded a Bronx-bound D train near my Harlem apartment, full of anticipation, excitement, and of course my standard, Midwest-issued naivety. As I look back now, I’m sure I screamed “White-girl-just-off-the-Midwest -minivan,” but I didn’t know any better then. Not long into the ride a black man took a seat unnecessarily close to me, seeming harmless at first. Soon, though, he began loudly ranting about Obama being his daddy. Being that it was just months from the election at that time, I had seen much of Obama’s family on the news, and was pretty sure this man was in fact not a son of Barack Obama. Therefore, I kept my eyes pointed straight ahead, feigning undistracted attention to my iPod. This quickly proved to be a near-impossible feat as said potentially-homeless man turned his face to within an inch of mine and increased his volume, adding rants about “this white woman” stealing his wallet. I found peace in the fact that the others on the train did not seem disturbed by this activity, so I continued with my “I can’t hear you” bit, as he carried on with his show. Then he abruptly changed his script to “You don’t know how it feels! You don’t know how it feels!” yelling it so many times that finally I meekly whispered, while maintaining my steely, forward-focused gaze, “I would never pretend that I do.” I’m sure my words made no impact, but regardless, the train arrived at its next stop and the man quickly departed. I debated feeling sorry for myself for being the randomly selected victim upon whom my friend chose to unleash years of enslaved angst, but decided that a weak response and resolved to shouldering a bit of reparation.

Fast forward five months to another interesting experience, this time during my daily commute home from work on the beloved A train. A man wearing dark sunglasses and a long, dark leather coat boarded the train about midway through my one-hour trip. Think Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus in the Matrix. For about 30 solid minutes this man repeated “Float like a butterfly sting like a bee. The D-O-double-G.” At first this did not strike me as odd. Many people sing or rap along to their iPods. Then I realized this many was not wearing earphones. Over and over again he loudly sang his mantra. Then it got weird. He stepped to the door nearest me (about 3 feet away), unzipped his pants and started peeing onto the train floor. I need for you to understand that this was a packed, rush-hour A train, and this man was creating a pool that quickly crept throughout the car. As the train slowed to a stop, sloshing the urine around a bit, Morpheus put the evidence back in his pants, and stepped to the opposite door just in time for a mob of people to board the train and wade squarely through his toilet, never noticing a thing. As the sweet smell of urine permeated the stale, subway air I clenched my jaw for the duration of my ride home, lest it drop into the sewer below.
All this talk of bodily fluids reminds me of the time I had a drink with a few friends down in the financial district and took a late train home. After the end of a perfectly lovely evening I somehow picked the train car containing a girl silently puking a large pile of vomit directly onto the subway floor. She went about her work very quietly, occasionally wiping her mouth with a tissue, only to go right back to increasing said puke pile. This went on for about 100 blocks before I eventually departed. One might ask why I didn’t exit to another train car, and the only analogy I can make is to that of watching a train wreck, which is just plain inappropriate when discussing subway experiences.

Of course, there are many other stories: the self-proclaimed “professional musician” with his bright green mohawk, measuring about 1-foot in radius, who sat down in the middle of my train car and began to scream and pound on his guitar, performing what he must have considered to be a song; or the homeless man who garnered the entire end of a rush-hour train car to himself by reeking of excrement and presumably pleasuring himself under a blanket; but now I’ve said too much so I will move onto discussing other happier topics.

Nine months later…

I teach Spanish at a middle school in Queens. I’m responsible for half of the 8th grade, which ends up being about 350 students. As far as inner-city schools go, I got the country club version. We have air conditioning and don’t share the building with any other schools; both are rarities. My school, which shall remain nameless until I decide it’s a good idea to publish its name, opened its doors in 2002. Our student body of about 2,000 is 37 percent Hispanic, with the remaining students pretty much all being from Bengal, Pakistan, India, or something of the sort. My students speak mainly Spanish, Punjabi, Hindi or Urdu, plus a little Guyanese and Italian. (Yes, I see a lot of turbans.) We have a few security guards on each of the four floors, and several NYPD officers who work at the school full time.

My first day was awesome for several reasons. Just as the day began I attempted–in complete futility–to console a hysterical 6th-grade student from El Salvador. (He was not as excited about the first day of middle school as I was.) In the midst of talking him down from the proverbial ledge, I turned just in time to see another 6th-grade student puke all over the hallway. It was amazing. And apparently puke control hasn’t evolved since my own middle school days, because one of the assistant principals radioed down to custodial staff for the special vomit-dissolving powder while I illegally rubbed the puking student’s back.

My classes (all 11 of them) were pretty well behaved. The only drama came when I kept one girl after class for dropping an f-bomb. By Friday, though, I was calling students’ parents at work to report flagrant misbehavior–speaking only in Spanish to one of them. One funny moment occurred in class while giving a lesson on why it might come in handy to know Spanish. I showed the students various
statistics regarding the number of Spanish speakers in the states, and asked them why this is important to us. One student (seemingly of Indian descent) raised his hand and said, “It means that George Bush
didn’t secure our borders.” After stifling my own laughter, I informed the class that we would not be making politically-charged comments.

Aside from school, I have two great roommates, go to an awesome church, hang out with friends from college who live in the city, and in general feel very blessed with God’s provision here in New York.

The search for a noble cause

My grandpa was the kind of guy who looked at his retirement home as a death march. He hated bingo and probably wanted to start an underground fight club at Wynnfield Crossing, just like the valiant old men in tonight’s episode of Private Practice. My grandpa boxed back in the day. He also fought in World War II, hopped trains out West in hopes of making it into the movies, survived the Depression, started several businesses throughout his lifetime, fathered six children and loved my grandma and his children with his whole being.

My grandma went to college at a time when women didn’t much care about higher education. She moved from her small Indiana town to L.A. and then Chicago, much to her parents’ disapproval. She too survived the Depression, gave birth to six children, supported my grandpa in his ventures, and committed herself to her family.

It’s no wonder, then, that I turned out the way I did. Heck, if I have to claim my grandma’s bunions, I’m going to also stake claim in her adventurous attitude and “I don’t care if it’s never been done before” mentality. I’m also going to claim my grandpa’s entrepreneurial spirit and iron-clad commitment. Some seem to think those two qualities don’t mix well, but my sanity is banking on the chance that they do.

I just received notification that I’ve been invited to interview for a New York City teaching fellowship. It’s an impressive fellowship, not to mention somewhat selective, but I find myself hesitating because moving to New York would just add one more location to the laundry list of places I’ve lived in the past four years. Will my family members roll their eyes and start a collection for therapy? (I’d take it if they did.) Will my friends stop being supportive of my vagabond nature? Will I one day end up like Chris McCandless, wandering in the wilderness and losing all perspective on what life’s really about purely because I tried so hard to figure out what life’s really about?

I’ll continue contemplating all of the above, but, for now, I know that corporate America is not my home. Helping form the life of an underprivileged, inner-city New York student who is trying to master the English language in a foreign land? Now that seems like a noble cause. For now, I’ll continue to pray that God will take my hand and lead me in his direction.

Remembering me

Today’s a big day for me. It’s the first day after the end of a two-and-a-half year relationship. I’m of marrying age, so I thought I would see this as a waste of a decent-sized portion of my life. However, by the grace of God, I see it as I should–part of the learning process of life.

I’m not sure when life became so complicated, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I step up to the challenge of complication. I remember when I used to date boys based upon their Abercrombie clothing, or uber-gelled hairstyle. Now the make-or-break issues have turned into potential mothers-in-law and religion. The ability to provide and the desire to commit. I’ve grown tired of introspection and retelling the break-up story to friends and family. But more than that, I’m tired of breaking up with myself for guys who aren’t strong enough to do it on their own. 

I’d love to have an in-depth discussion with the man who clandestine-style taught a top-secret class to 20-something men across the nation about “getting their ducks in a row” before they decide to start a family. I’m positive that he stressed the importance of getting ahead in business before loving a woman. America’s Greatest Generation may soon get up out of its coffins and try to teach what’s left of this country about the commitment of love and the importance of family.  Love doesn’t get put on hold for a career. Tragically, it dies a certain death.

But just because love dies,  does not mean I do with it. Quite the contrary: I feel like I’m alive again. I already remember parts of me that I forgot along the way. And I’m going to keep remembering me until I’m whole again. I’m going to make friends with whomever I’d like–male or female. I’m going to attend the church right down the road that I think I truly always wanted to attend. I’m going to watch a few movies that never made it through the compromise stage.  I’m going to talk too much to a perfect stranger. I’m even going to reinstate the phone numbers of male friends who got axed along the way. Most importantly, though, I’m going to write.