Wings, Wingnuts, and the Politics of the Left (-behind)part II

My first day in class was right out of any of those scary teacher movies where the principal carries a baseball bat, and the teachers are escorted by security. I was Gabe Kotter and I was back in my old high school, only these sweat hogs weren't cute and endearing. I was facing real-life thugs. While other teachers were filling out progress reports to parents, I was writing letters to judges responding to court requests for probation and sentencing hearings. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I didn't know I was supposed to be scared. I also didn't know I wasn't supposed to teach.

So teach, I did. I assigned stories to read, and when they didn't read at home, we would read in class. I beat them into submission by plugging ahead and not giving up on them. I even got them to read a play, "12 Angry Men," and they not only read it, but they ate it up. I found out later that I was reading the wrong curriculum, and it was assigned to the honors classes. Oh, well. My thugs did better than the honors kids on that story. Of course, their life experience also gave them an understanding of knife-fighting.

Some months later I met the woman who took that job at the middle school. She was a wreck. The kids would eat chicken wings in her class, and then leave little bone piles as monuments on the desktops, or bookshelves, or wherever they could eat unobserved.

Crazy. Until now.

You see, I teach this college class on Saturdays. The students are capable, if ill-prepared. I still subscribe to the mentality that anybody is teachable (with varying degrees of success) and so I plow on, introducing this group to college-level work instead of dumbing down the curriculum, and dumbing them down as well. There are other issues that they will have to sort out by themselves. Talking about goals and writing about goals doesn't necessarily mean that they will suddenly start working towards those goals. I can't undo in 10 weeks what a lifetime of Pavlovian resignation has taught them. But I try. Maybe I'll make a difference to one.

It's a challenge, though. On Saturday, I gave the class a 10 minute break. I had been walking them through the convolutions in the MLA handbook, a task that even I find challenging, and they were going brain dead from the incessant hum of my voice. It was a kindness--a bathroom break--a chance to check their voicemail. Some joker went down the street to the chicken emporium and came back with lunch, which he proceeded to eat, surreptitiously, in a corner. I chose to ignore it. Maybe I should have used him as an example for the class. I don't know. He came back after all, and sat in for another 2-hour drone-on about margins and parenthetical documentaion. What's a little chicken in the big picture? Maybe it's God and His everpresent sense of humor. It's almost like He's saying, "Ha! You thought you were getting away from where I'm sending you. Here's a little reminder that you're in the right place."

There are those who would argue that this demographic doesn't need saving, let alone saving by a hispanic woman passing for white (hmm, more on that perception another time-theirs, not mine). I don't know. I'm not out to save anybody--I've got my own distractions. But, I am a teacher. Let me teach.