Exit Story

I had to write a story about my year as part of my paperwork for AmeriCorps. I want to post it here too; it's longer what I normally write, but it's a good summary of my year here.

Every now and then, as I bend down to help a sixth grader with a math assignment, I am extremely conscious of my blonde ponytail swinging down my back or of the color of my skin next to my students’. I become suddenly aware that I look like a poster-child for charity. You know, the kind you see on a website, the white teacher smilingly instructing minority students, patiently explaining to them how to read, how to add, how to find Europe on a globe.

Mostly, I am aware of this appearance when someone new comes into the school: a parent, a visitor, a new teacher. At other times, I forget. No matter what color your skin, fractions work the same way and the patterns of the solar system are the same. When I came into the school, the lack of knowledge surprised me. I knew I was coming into material poverty; the educational poverty and lack of cultural literacy astounded me. However, I quickly learned that my children had many lessons for me that sprang from who they were. Our society often attempts to disguise differences. I learned from the places where who we were as separate from each other shone.

To lose our differences is to claim a loss. Although the 7^th and 8^th graders hesitate to say the word “white” in front of me, let alone notice our differences, I have learned this year that our differences make us whole. My students’ perceptions of our difference range: from the kindergartner who created my portrait with dark skin and brown hair to the sixth grader who told me he had thought I would be mean because I was white, to the 8^th graders who complained about “ignorant black people” and apologized to me for saying it.

Racially, the difference that fascinates me is hair. With their weaves and extensions, the braids, curls, and straightenings, my girls did beautiful things with their hair. In turn, they couldn’t believe that I had to wash mine every day or that it was all mine and all its natural color (especially because I have bright highlights in my hair). They flipped out when I donated it to Pantene, because it would take them much longer than 18 months to grow enough hair for that. I think they are all beautiful; they love my hair. It was an easy way for my girls to notice that we are not the same without making a value judgment. It is an easy way to show how diversity adds to beauty.

First Realization: Our differences are beautiful.

The hair is for the girls. With the boys, the difference I noticed was the way they jumped. I’m sure if I found another community of boys as intent upon basketball playing, they also would jump. But I had never seen anything like this before, the way my boys flew into the air with or behind the basketball, aiming at the falling-apart hoop. In my neighborhood, we never had to jump that high.

In fact, the playground is the best place to take this story next. The teachers own the classrooms, but the students own the playground. We don’t really have a “playground” – recess is held in a bumpy, pothole-riddled courtyard, with basketball hoops facing each other at fifty feet across the yard and one hundred feet of asphalt stretching around them. On this courtyard, two games of basketball back up to each other. A football barrels match through them and around the four square and jump rope at the far end of the yard. Two or three children playing tag weave in and out of the other games. And a teacher can walk the hypotenuse of the yard without looking and not a single child will collide with her.

Second Realization: We learn from what we have.

Just like the “playground” offers less than what my children ought to have, the computer lab hosts a legion of dinosaurs on which the students learn to operate Microsoft Word. Another volunteer and I hold newspaper class in that room. At the end of the year, the class shrank. When it consisted of two teachers and two students, we spent more time chatting than writing the newspaper. I tried to explain to one of the girls why she had to be in school from eight in the morning until five in the evening. She, in turn, tried to explain to me that her neighborhood was not dangerous. She told me that they didn’t even hear gunshots very often.

I offered her my own story – that in some places, you don’t hear gunshots at all. “Not even on New Year’s?” she asked, not believing. Not having any idea that gunshots were as foreign to me as their lack was to her.

Third Realization: We don’t always know what we deserve.

That same girl had gotten in trouble recently for an altercation with some of her classmates. Then, it turned out, they got in trouble too, because they had been talking about her brother. And try as she might to keep her temper (although, like most 13 year olds, she didn’t always try hard), her classmates had done the one unacceptable thing: they messed with her family. Whatever and whomever family may or may not be, it means something very clear. It means being there. Even when Mama leaves marks on your arms, family trumps self.

One of my sixth graders proved it clearly. I was substituting for the kindergarten teacher and had fourteen little people running havoc across the courtyard. Then one of the littlest tripped and fell. As the tears started to fall and I started to move, her sixth grade sister was there. I almost hadn’t seen her step out of the door of the school, and here she was, halfway across the yard, comforting her sister, the errand that had taken her out of class forgotten.

Fourth Realization: Being there matters.

Not only did the school have a high concentration of families – siblings, cousins, half-siblings – but many of the families had been there for years, generations. So friends became like family, with the same sort of love-hate dynamics that some families have. Stories grew, like family traditions, of the day a new student came to school, the time that the loud girl used to be quiet, the teachers they chased away. Because teachers didn’t stay, principals didn’t stay, people didn’t stay.

I could impart all the classroom knowledge in my own repertoire and that wouldn’t mean as much as my simply coming to school every day. My simple acknowledgement of each child’s beauty, talents, humanity. An acknowledgement of humanity is an acknowledgement of human dignity. For all the pride my children had, they had very little dignity.

Take, for example, on seventh grader. She believed that she was going to go into high school, get pregnant, and drop out. In seventh grade, someone broke up with her because she wouldn’t go far enough with him. Her hurt and bitterness spilled into the way she treated other people and herself. Throughout the year, with the constant attention and affirmation from a few positive women in her life (one of whom was myself), she began to blossom, gaining confidence, self-love, and maybe even a bit of book-learning.

Fifth Realization: We cannot change each other, but we can leave God’s fingerprints on each other.

If I left His fingerprints on my students, they left theirs on me. They showed me beauty and taught me why people jump. They reminded me who was my family and how not to run away. Even on the days I came home raging against God and His world, even on the days I fell like an unbalanced trapeze artist onto my community because I couldn’t take it anymore, even on the days I had to remind myself to breath, they pushed and molded me into the person I am now.

So even those days when I know I look like a poster child for charity, I know it’s just an illusion. I’m not reaching down to give a generous educational gift. My students and I are in a reciprocal relationship, sharing our lives and our differences.