welcome back

i am back. they are back. we are back. and it is very, very good. one of the most reassuring things about coming back to school in the fall is the newness. the old ninth graders tear through the halls, hovering at my door to say hi and scream on over to their other classes. they are no longer my responsibility and i am no longer the cross they bear so we are easier with one another. they go away professing great love for me and my class, glaring at the new babies, warning them to be good or else. but the new ninth graders show up and are on time and goofy and timid and very literal. they believe every word i say, so i say as much as i can. two classes meet 8 hours a week each. one class meets 4 hours.

and then there's tenth grade. four hours a week. i agreed to teach a tenth grade class only because i was tricked. there are fifteen of them, which sounds easy. they are fifteen i already know which is even easier. but they are fifteen i know because last year when they were in various literacy classes of mine they did very little. this means some of them passed and some of them did not but none if them is really all that ready for tenth grade. so they got shoveled in together. and the most hideous part? we do not meet in my lavishly appointed room on the fourth floor with two air conditioners, a full library, all my supplies and clean, ungraffitied desks. we meet on the second floor in a horrible room with no air conditioner, no library, none of my supplies except what i carry in a bucket down there and, because of the lack of air conditioning, a stink that can only come from high school kids melting. it is horrific. it makes the eyes water. kids themselves do not smell this stench or if they do it isn't something they register as unpleasant, so i have to tell them.

you guys smell. it is mostly guys. there are two girls. one is very quiet and during the year she was in my class last year, i never heard more than three or four words from her. the other is more vocal, more like me. aware of the stink in the room. she's a writer. she's also a complete pain in the butt, but we tolerate each other as co-sufferers in this swamp of teenage boy stink. one of them comes in today wearing a black hoodie. seriously. he stands in front of the broken a/c which, when on, functions like a very small, warm fan. he leans against the trickle of air. i yell for him to take off the hoodie and get off the small supply of fresh air we're all sharing. suddenly, it feels like we're trapped in a sinking sub. he looks at me like i'm out of my mind. it is at this point i'm remembering him wearing a black hoodie every single day last spring. the 95 degree days in june. all of them. i assumed the a/c was too much for him. but no. he's cut the sleeves off this one so his skinny bare arms stick out and there's fleece on his torso and his head, because, of course, he's got the hood on. he is out of his own mind. after several exchanges during which he realizes i'm totally unreasonable and he'll never win, he slinks off to a desk, drapes himself across it, hood over his eyes, and sighs.

we are trying to recall how to do a five paragraph essay. i know, i know. i've already told them that in college they'll have to shed all this information in exchange for something better, but for now, this completely disorganized community needs the structure. so we're talking about persuasive essays. and there's this one dear child, super jesus, who truly sees himself as the embodiment of all the suffering ever heaped on young black men everywhere. there is certainly plenty of suffering, but very little of it is really his. his middle class self is always narrowly escaping some supagangsta something, but only in his mind. he has just enough knowledge to be angry but not enough to do anything useful so that others will not have to be angry. the other teacher in the room and i have spent most of a year trying to share more information with him, showing him how to be an example, an advocate, an activist. but he prefers to talk about how many of his boys got shot this summer. so his persuasive essay topic is "being a black man". i ask if he intends to persuade folks to become black men. he knows i am funny but pretends he does not think so. this is dangerous territory. i am a white woman and although i have spent my entire adult life being an advocate for those whose rights are often overlooked, folks with weak minds often misunderstand or misinterpret. but this child knows me and he knows i don't play. he knows "being a black man" isn't a persuasive essay topic and i'm going to pester him until he comes up with something useful. with a direction. because what he wants to write is "how to be a strong black man when the media provides so many ridiculous role models" or "how to raise young children to respect themselves" and it is in him, somewhere, to write this. if he's going to act like he's got strength, he better stand up and be real. he better know what he's talking about because he knows we'll call him out. so he shuts up for five minutes to think.

which is when my precious angel comes in. the precious angel is a child i've known all four years at this school. he's been in my class in one form or another three years. since he never shows up, it doesn't feel like it's been that long. precious angel, who last year slapped a child (look around, the story is in some previous entry) and advocated drug dealing as a lucrative long-term career(another entry), strolled in halfway through class. i loaded him up with presents (class contract, daily planner, current lesson sheet) and he went to the back of the room where he promptly realized he'd left a book in the dean's room. now, believing that he'd been in the dean's room was not a stretch, but that he'd been there with a book certainly was. so i told him to sit down. which, of course, is why he got up and left. when the dean brought him back i made a big production out of missing the sweet baby angel and being thrilled she'd brought him back. i promised him a new notebook with kitties on it, which is what he said he'd left behind. he is a sarcastic, miserable child, but he's beginning to grow on me. i think maybe i'm beginning to grow on him, too, because he stayed.

it was agony getting through topics. they hate to do anything. and i stood there in the front of the room looking at them, at the ten who actually showed up. two were asleep. one sat entirely alone in the back of the room. the girls sat together near the door. precious angel sat in the middle, also alone. the rest sat all bunched up under the broken a/c. i wanted to be sick of them, and probably i will be plenty of days, but i looked out at a room of separate disasters and started laughing. i couldn't get the word out of my head. sweathogs. seriously. welcome back kotter. a class segregated from the rest of the school, small enough they know why they're all in there together. misfits. and i got that freedom in my head i got the first year i taught a bunch of similar kids, only younger, and the principal said, "i don't care what you teach them. i just don't want to see them." so back then i read bits of autobiography of malcolm x to twelve or thirteen fifth grade boys. because that's what they asked for. and amelia earhart. they asked. and now, sixteen years later my head is buzzing with possibility when i look at the room. i can do anything i want. we can do anything we want. those sweathogs better want something magnificent.