Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Great Expectations

Over the summer, hope for a better year turned to obsession--everything would be different. Everything would be better.

Before the first day, I had already assigned and labeled the lockers and tables and pencils, that is, if I could fit little stickies on them. This time, when they walked in, I didn’t wait for them to measure me up, I measured them up.

 “Put your backpack at #4. Sit at table D; you should see your name. Welcome to Mr. Slaughter’s class.”

 And this time, I cornered any parents who showed up, wrote all their numbers on a master list, and I taped that list behind my desk, above the class phone. This year we had a class phone, and I was not scared to use it the first day. I was ready, ready for the Colin who might start talking, or the Sean who might bother a neighbor when there was work to do, or even the Lauren, the queen bee. I was still heavily leaning on my handbook, but the words “never again” felt like they had been tattooed on my forehead. I even followed them to their specials just to see what they act like with other teachers; I took zero breaks the first two weeks, and every time I packed a lunch, I ended up eating it on my ride home.

Those first two weeks everything went just as planned. I saw Mr. Franklin in the hallway at the end of my first week, and I smiled, “I have a really good bunch of kids this year.” “Good, you deserve it after last year.” For the first time, I looked forward to walking my kids down the hallway. We were receiving so many compliments that I told them for every compliment we heard, we got an extra minute of recess. There were days when I stopped counting.

On the 6th day, when I asked the students to come to their assigned seats on the carpet, Laila scrunched up her face when she saw who she was sitting next to. His name was Donald, and he looked like a Donald. “There is no way anyone does that in my classroom. Apologize.” She just sat there. “Well, you’re not part of the class until you apologize; go back and take a seat at your table.” She slowly stood up and walked backwards to her seat, but she didn’t sit down. She grabbed her pencil from her seat and then stood up against the back wall with no intention of sitting down; it was my first duel of the year.

 I wrote her name on the board, “Your name stays up until you apologize, and if it's still up there at the end of the day, I am calling home.” I came back to my lesson, and after a few minutes, she interrupted, “Mr. Slaughter, I’m ready.” Just as she was walking up to the front of the class, an administrator from downtown walked in with Ms. Coan. I crossed my fingers. I had been warned about Laila; I was told she was much worse than Lauren. Lauren might tear up your class in a fit of rage, but then she'd hug you the next day because she was sorry. I was told Laila would still tear up your room, but she would never apologize.

 She did apologize, and everyone was all smiles. I was beaming. Everything was coming together. I finally figured it out. Things were going to be okay.

But it wasn’t until that afternoon that I found Laila’s writing on the back walls of the classroom. When she was hanging on the back wall with her pencil, she was actually scribbling her name over and over again. I may have won the battle, but she was gearing up for the war.

I knew the first two weeks were a honeymoon period, and I also knew when it ended-- day eleven. A ten day honeymoon was better than the few minutes I got my first year. I figured it was a good sign because they kept it together for much longer than most of the other classes. So as they started to chat it up, I barked loud, trying to reign them back in. When they cut up some more, I barked even louder. When they continued to cut up, I barked so loud that I lost voice.

 By the third week, I lost my voice on Friday, but by mid-September, I lost my voice every single afternoon. Things weren’t going the way they were supposed to go, but my handbook said that I had to be very consistent with the behavior management for six weeks, and then the class would be ready to teach. How could I forget this was the same crap I believed my first year. The six week mark was right around my birthday, September 29th. It was the worst birthday I have ever had.

End of 1st Year

By May other teachers were always asking me, “Are you coming back for another year?” and revealing a small smile I replied, “Maybe.” In reality, I had made no other plans, and things could only go up; it wasn’t possible to go down. On one of the last days of school, I took the kids to the computer lab. I leaned against a wall and watched the students play their computer games; there was no fighting over the computers this time. They were just acting like kids, and for a moment, I remembered they were just seven and eight year olds. I thought, “See, I can do this.” It was one of the rare instances I thought like that, and I let it convince me I was at the right place. Things had fallen apart after January, but maybe I was still fulfilling my destiny, and maybe I just had to wait until next year. Maybe pigs will fly.


Tuesday, February 8, 2011

The First Crash

Just then, things started to falter. On my morning walk from the bus to the school, I kept my hope alive, walking around the police tape, believing, “maybe today I will beat them with love.” This idea of "beating" them with love was ridiculous. I was sure that if I let them walk all over me, then they would finally see how much I care about them. When they saw that, then they would love me in return. Instead, they just continued to walk all over me.

Without warning, the class turned worse, my facade of purpose started to fade away, and the real reasons for coming to Daley were slowly, painfully, exposing themselves.

After mostly everyone had been praising class' progress, things went bad, and I turned inward. I became increasingly worried about holding it together in the class, and I made sacrifices, leaving some students to fend for themselves. Randy was one of my best students in the fall. He was far from the smartest, but he was intent on pleasing me. Whatever type of incentive program I had set up, he was following through much more than any other student at the time. But something happened in February. He was getting older, and he no longer cared about me or what I thought about him. Randy had a mom who always seemed depressed. Randy's grandmother on his mother's side would come in occasionally, and always blamed Randy's home life for behavior issues. Then there was Randy's other grandma; I loved this grandma. She was Randy’s father’s mother, and Randy’s father was in jail. This grandmother lived right across the street from the school, and she had no problems coming into school to set Randy straight. She told me that with his temper he might get himself shot someday; she wasn't joking about it.

 By the end of January, Randy started coming in with dark sunglasses on and one glove on his right hand. He didn’t care about learning to read anymore; he was more concerned about staring down Kyle, a bully who wouldn’t leave Randy alone. Someone was teaching him there were more important things in school than listening to a teacher. I tried to figure out what was going on at home, but mom just looked off beyond me as if she couldn’t explain it to me. When I spoke to Randy, I talked to him like my mom used to talk to me when I was in trouble, “You have changed; what happened to the old Randy?” There was a small glare in his eyes. "He’s gone, Mr. Slaughter."

It went from bad to worse when new students starting coming in. Mark, Trent, and Cole joined the class, and they became the tazmanian devils of the class. At least Sean and Lauren had some desire to do well in class; these three just scattered when I handed out their work. They were already way behind, so I did my best to hand them out easier assignments that they could handle. This was a major misinterpretation of what I learned in grad school. This whole idea of differentiation. Each kid is on a different level so we should give them material on different levels. Instead of pushing them to get on the right track, I kept them on the same track.

 I didn't really reach out to them; I pretended like they might reach out to me. They preferred to run around the class. I became less worried about their reading and more about their running.

So when the NPR writer finally came to visit, things were “better” than they were in September, but worse than January. Instead of five to ten fights a day, it was more like one or two, and instead of students running around the classroom, it was more like they got up and out of their seat whenever they pleased. The writer didn’t quite have my perspective on the class' progress, and our interview turned to how difficult the year had been. I was expecting him to visit again later in the year to see how things had improved. Things didn’t get better, and I’m glad he didn’t come back to see it.

Later that year, it was announced that his report was now a broadcast on NPR. There were five segments focusing on different aspects of the school, with one focusing on student behavior. I was sure this was my moment in the sun, the recognition that I had earned after a year of hard work. The segment started with a recording of a raucous classroom with not a sound of a teacher. He explained I was trying to teach over student laughter as a student who was previously put out of the classroom was now crawling back in and hiding under my teacher table. It was Lauren. I was quoted saying, “I know that some teachers say you either have it or you don’t, and I just hope that some day, I get it.” After hearing it, I thought it was a tempered hope, just the right amount to get me through the multiple years of struggle before becoming one of the greats. Franklin brought it up later and said it sounded more like desperation. Maybe it was, maybe the hope was gone, but it took me too long to figure that out.

Rising Sun

In the fall I biked it to school, but when the mornings hit below freezing, I had to take the bus. I need something to read on the bus--it was too dark and depressing. I picked up an unread book from my wife’s college days called Surviving Auschwitz. The author was an Auschwitz survivor, and he described how distinctly new prisoners entered the camp--he could tell which ones wouldn’t make it. If they had too much hope of getting out, the hope would crash and destroy the prisoner in the process. If they didn’t have any hope, then they were a few days from death. It was the small glimmer of hope that kept him going each day.  

Every morning on the bus I read that book, and every morning I walked from the bus stop to the school, praying: “Lord, lift me up with your love.” A big reason I decided to try this whole experiment was my belief in God. You know when the devil tells Jesus he should jump off the cliff and let the angels catch him. Well, Jesus didn't jump, and I did.

I was just a 2nd grade teacher; if the author could survive Auschwitz, then I had to survive a bunch a seven year olds. Whenever I faced adversity in my life, I just outworked it. I was going to outwork them. The book mentioned how the man’s hope grew when he finally could see the sun rise through the clouds because it meant that the lifeless, grey winter was coming to an end. In Candler Park, the days started to grow longer, and in the bus, I started to see that sun rise.

I had put some faith in a line graph given to first year teachers. It charted the typical ups and downs, and just like the line graph showed, things started to improve after winter break. Everyone told me the kids would be out of control after the break, but my kids had calmed down. I wasn’t doing anything differently, so I reasoned that my consistency was finally paying off. I had been doing the “handbook” discipline for 4 months and now it must be sinking in.

 Then the compliments came, “Wow, Mr. Slaugher, your class is really coming along!” At a staff meeting, Franklin asked that teachers offer up compliments to keep the morale up: of the seven compliments given, I was mentioned in four of them. It wasn’t long before I was on top of the world again, persevering through the harshest of conditions. Mr. Franklin walked in the door, saw all the kids quietly writing and announced that my class was his favorite because they had come so far. His compliments only fed the flame.

Our school was receiving a lot of attention because we were a “turn-around” school with a new and unconventional principal, and there was a writer for NPR writing a story about us. He was interviewing a few of the more successful teachers about the ups and downs of the school, and he also came to me; “Mr. Franklin said I should check out your class sometime.” It was just like I had imagined, only sooner.

Believing In The Dream

Even amid the chaos, there was a significant sense of camaraderie among the staff. Franklin called our first staff meeting on the 6th day of school, and said, “I can’t believe it’s only been 6 days. It feels like it has been a year.” He told us how great we were doing, how difficult this population was, and how if we all worked together we could right the ship. I ate it up, every single word.

Clipboard

I started carrying around a clipboard with a class list. At Martha's House, I knew documentation was the key to holding kids accountable. Everything that a resident did was documented so that, as case managers, we could make sure we created a consequence for anything inappropriate. With an even more watchful discipline, I documented every time my students misbehaved. I even had my own code: if they were defiant, I wrote down an A; if they were threatening, I wrote down a B; if they fought, I wrote down a C. So this is how it played out:

Lauren gets out of her seat and starts bothering Sean. He’s looking at her strangely, and I say, “Lauren, sit down in your seat.”
“I don’t have to!”
The teacher dutifully writes down A next to Lauren because she was defiant, and repeats, “Lauren, you have to sit down.”
Lauren yells at Sean, “You better shut up or I’ll steal you!”
“Lauren that was a threat!” as if she was unaware, and I write down B next to the A.

When Sean flicks Lauren off, she charges and rams her shoulder into his chest. I run over to the fight to grab her arm and pull her away from Sean while he begins punching me, trying to reach his fists around me to get at Lauren. As I hold Lauren, kicking my shin and screaming at Sean, I awkwardly drag her over to the door to peak my head out of the door and look down the hall for security. Usually there wasn’t anyone because security was always walking from one classroom to the next. So then I turn around and drag Lauren back through the class to an intercom, where I have to yell multiple times over her screams that I need security. By this time, even my quiet kids are out of their seat jumping and yelling in excitement; it was always the best part of the day. Some thirty minutes later, security comes to get her, and with a very shaky hand, I write down a C next to Lauren and a C next to Sean. There were usually between 5 and 10 fights in a day, including times when there were two separate fights breaking out at the same time. I had to hold onto something to keep myself afloat, and the clipboard was an imaginary flotation device. I pretended that my careful documentation might mean future expulsions but it meant very little to anyone else. No one seemed to care about the fights; they were just happy that it was October, and I hadn’t left yet.

September 12

Here is my first journal entry of the year.

“Things that worked: It's hard to think of things that worked because everything was all over the place... let's see, the morning meeting, spelling test, writer's workshop, math, Read Aloud, none of it worked... I really can't think of a thing... we cleaned up okay (because the security guard made them clean up). Oh, I know, they liked my story of when Abby (my daughter) almost set the apartment on fire. Oh, and the behavior management system was all over the place...”

Grad school had told me engaged kids couldn’t act up. I told a fantastic story of how my daughter put a towel in the broiler part of the oven without my wife and I knowing, and when I turned on the oven for pizza, the whole oven lit up. It was a story that made almost every student silent, and I tragically figured that if only I could make every lesson as fantastic as a real life apartment fire, then they would behave. I followed my journal with a bit on what didn’t work.

“Things that did not work: morning meeting- students were unable to sit quietly at the circle; writer's workshop- students never started writing; incentives- unclear as to how they earn tickets; math- they were only half attentive because they thought they could go to a dance assembly: holding things above their heads, and then not giving it to them only makes them angry...”

It had only been a few weeks of school, and it was apparent that I had the worst class. It turned out half my students had a 1st grade teacher that quit in October, and the other half had a teacher that was on her last year of teaching before retirement. I guess she had a bunch of vacation days saved over the years, and she used them for most of the second half of the school year. The PE teacher told me it was common for him to sit in on the first graders because it was rare for subs to show up. Last year's first graders were known to spend most of the day running the halls, and they even considered themselves a gang, the "baby 12."

This Friday there was a dance assembly scheduled for the afternoon, and the assistant principal, Ms. Coan, told me I should only bring my class if I thought they deserved it. I told the kids if they behaved the whole day they could go to the assembly. They didn’t seem to care, well not until it was 30 minutes before the assembly. It seemed like every 3 minutes I reminded them, “You have to work quietly if you want to go… not everyone will be going you know.” I figured they had done alright, relative to the standard chaos, so I lined them up; I needed the break anyway. Ms. Coan stopped by my room right as I was lining them up and said, “Mr. Slaughter, I think it is best if you don’t bring your class.” So after I held the carrot above the kids' heads all day, Ms. Coan snatched it away. That afternoon I learned a few lessons about behavioral psychology. In my journal, I continued searching for answers:

“What can be changed: when they come back from lunch they need a quiet time activity on their desk so we can get bathroom breaks out of the way; they need labels on their lockers; labels on their tables; clean tables; permanent schedules; more hopes and dreams; a better system for students in time out (they shouldn’t throw things at each other while in time out); more engaging activities; I need spots where I put things; the desk needs to be HANDS OFF. Parents need to be called, GET NUMBERS FOR ALL THE PARENTS, fill out SST/counseling forms for Sean, Wayne, Randy, Lauren, Marlin, and Noah.”

I had never failed anything in my life. In my first year of college when most of the students in my Chemistry class received Cs, or worse, on the first exam I overheard them say they were just not cut out for it. Before the exam, I was studying four hours a night, and a C on the exam only meant one thing: I needed to study more. I made it a goal to stay in the library longer than anybody in my class, and sometimes it meant I had the pleasure of being the first in the cafeteria the next morning for fresh, scrambled eggs and steaming hot apple crisps. I got an A- on the next exam. I didn't care if I wasn't the smartest; I knew I could outwork anybody.

At Daley, I came in to school at 7am every morning, an hour early, and if the custodian had opened the school any earlier, I would have made it earlier. There was no way a class of seven year olds were going to beat me; I just had to outwork them.

Day 1

Out on the blacktop, I shook hands with my new students, and it was no surprise they were all black; there were two latinos in the school, and zero whites. There something very odd about how black the students were and how white the teachers were. An uncle walked up to me and gave me three different phone numbers while trying to conceal a concerned look. “I’m Jerome’s uncle. He gets into a lot of trouble. Call me if he starts acting up. Here's my mom's number and her cell if I don't pick up. She lives real close, so she can just come and get him.”
"I'm sure that won't be necessary."
"Just call if you need to."
A woman with an oversized t-shirt and tight jeans turned to me, “I’m Sean’s mother. He is ADHD. I don’t have his medication yet.”
I smiled. They’ll be just fine; I’ll take care of your little babies, I thought. I didn’t know at the time they were less concerned about their kids, and more concerned about me. Too many teachers had come and gone, and now they had a young white guy in a suit with a handbook and a bright smile with little chance of staying past October. Colin was my smallest student and the Special Ed teacher was holding his hand. “He’s a little shy around new teachers; he’ll warm up to you.” Ahhh, I thought, poor little guy, I’ll make sure he has a great day.

When the students came in and took their seats, they were all looking at me intently, in complete silence. They were just staring, extremely carefully just like my old dog, Stoney, froze when he saw a turtle for the first time. Stoney didn’t know what to do - “What is this strange animal? Is it friendly or mean? Will it mind if I pounce on it? Let's find out.” He ended up jumping on it until I had to pull him away fearing he might just have killed it given the chance. My little friend Colin was the first to budge, and he started whispering to a neighbor, “Please be quiet,” I said in my best teacher voice, but it sounded more like a flight attendant. They both looked up and stopped,and I continued with my description of the nametags but then they started talking again. They must not have understood me, I thought. “Voices should be turned off,” I said; maybe a different phrasing would do the trick, fingers crossed. But they kept on talking without even a pause. Then it occurred to me, Oh! They must be bored with what I’m doing, let's hand out the crayons, and then they will be engaged. Engaged was the buzzword of my grad school; it was explained over and over again that almost all behavior issues could be solved by creating an engaging lesson. Their behavior didn't depend on me as a teacher, but it depended upon the lesson that I had written up the night before. It wasn't like they saw me as a young, white, 1st year teacher who happened to be smiling more than their previous teachers. It was more like they were eagerly awaiting my engaging nametag activity. At least, that was what grad school had taught me.

Preparing for Day 1

Before school started, the whole staff met together in the library, seated in a large circle, I wondered if we would break out in song. Most of last year’s teachers had been fired; the school had been failing for too many years and heads had to roll. At the summer meeting I saw the new staff that included a few of the previous teachers, but also a new group—young, white women. Franklin read us an essay he had written about the various homicides that happened over the summer, he said this was the moment when our school and our neighborhood would turn around.  Our school, our neighborhood. Right.

He brought out a detached car seat that had an extra seat belt attached on the opposite side; he had found it in one of the storage closets, and it looked like straight jacket. If someone had made this, then someone must have used it. No wonder they had in the storage closet, the screams must have been loud. It was clear the kids had years of baggage coming from a homicidal neighborhood and a criminal staff. A young teacher asked me why I had come to Daley. I said, “Well, I guess I’m a little crazy.” She smiled, “I think we are all a little crazy.”

I finally walked into my very own classroom—there were scrapes, scars, and graffiti everywhere. Along with the f-words scribbled on the chairs and the table veneers peeling off, most of the whiteboard was marked up. The whiteboard took up most of the front wall, and knowing of all things, the whiteboard needed to sparkle, I started there.  Everything had to be shining when the students came in for the first day.  I was the new teacher, and students needed to know that everything had changed.  A clean slate.

 I bet most of my predecessors before me had the same thoughts. They scrubbed and scrubbed with thoughts of a new year swirling in their mind. I'm sure they never imagined themselves losing their grip of sanity, screaming at children who no longer care. I thought I was different—where they failed, I would succeed. I would scrub harder, prepare better, and do whatever it took.  The cleaning and rearranging took much longer than I had anticipated. I spent more time cleaning, I ran out of time to decorate.  While other teachers where hanging up pictures, I was scrubbing at gum.  By the end of the week, things looked slightly better and barren.  No one except me really noticed much of an improvement.  No matter how hard I scrubbed the white board, it never shined; most of the old marks still remained.

I spent most of grad school worrying about my first day. Every day I studied the sacred behavior management handbook that told me it was wrong to be too authoritarian and right to create a safe environment where kids could solve their own problems.  Instead of telling kids they needed to respect me, I needed to teach them to respect me. They would follow rules because it was right, not because they might lose their recess if they broke them. I read that students who were engaged in exciting activities would never act up.   Their first activity would be writing their names and coloring their name tags. It was simple and easy, everybody could do it, everybody likes coloring; it couldn't fail.

Looking For Daley

Martha's House was over, but I had my path, and I prayed for the courage to follow it. My wife and I were deciding between New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. I figured they all had needy public school systems, and we ended up in DC because they were offering scholarships to anyone who would commit to teaching in the city for two years. If I was determined to teach the poorest of the poor, might as well get my education subsidized at the same time. For the grad school interview they asked if I had any interests in certain areas of education, and I said “urban education."  At the program’s orientation, I asked the teacher supervisors, “How bad are DC schools, really?” Strangely, I didn’t want to come to a Nicaraguan dead end so these schools had better be just as bad as advertised. They were.

In my grad program, as scholarship urban teachers, we turned up our noses at the other student teachers who worried about finding a “good” school.  How dare they. We came to grad school to save the world, how could they possibly worry about finding a school where the cops didn't roam the halls.

There was an awards ceremony that our program had at the end of the year, and one of the awards was “Most likely to teach across the River.” The river was the Anacostia River; most of DC’s worst schools were over there, and all of its good schools were west of Rock Creek Park. I won the award, but it didn't make any sense. I had already found a school where I wanted to teach, and it wasn’t across the river; it was in Candler Park, an area well-known for its drugs and homicide rate. One of my classmates shouted out that Candler Park was much worse than any neighborhood across the river. She was a long time resident of the district. It was exactly what I was hoping for.  I found this school by looking through the list of city wide test scores. Daley Elementary had a 10% passing rate for both reading and math: it was  the worst elementary school in one of the worst school districts in the country. There were many teachers and grad school supervisors who were begging me, "You're going to get eaten alive."  I smiled, thinking I had angels, saints, and even the holy trinity at my back, "I'll be fine," I thought. 

When I first walked into Daley, I met the interim principal, Ms. Coan, who was filling in because the previous principal had been fired due to poor test scores. When she saw my tie, she thought I was another suit from the central office, but she beamed when I told her I wanted to teach there. I told her I was interested in 3rd grade, and as an old 3rd grade teacher herself, she leaned back in her chair, “The best teachers are 3rd grade teachers.” She mentioned most of the classes had long-term subs because so many teachers had already quit. This was clearly not Nicaragua. I walked into one 3rd grade class where the long-term sub was rambling on about homework, and she asked me to step up in front and talk about grad school because “they don’t know what it means to graduate from anything.” I talked a little, and then I took some questions. They kept on asking questions—anything was better than listening to the sub. When they ran out of things to ask, I sat down and the kids got rowdy.  She told them all to stand up and stay standing until everyone was quiet.  Instead of getting quieter, they were getting louder.  They were clearly performing for me. The tension in the room was palpable. I thought, how could she do this, she was wasting away their education.  I would never do anything so pointless to gain control, I thought. It was time for me to go, and the sub asked the students, “Would you rather have me as a teacher, or Mr. Slaughter?” They all began to chant my name, “Mr. Slaughter! Mr. Slaughter! Mr. Slaughter!” Just wait, I’ll be there soon, I thought. This was my school.  I had taken the bait, just a few papers to sign, and the hook would be set.

Over the summer, I found out a new principal was coming to Daley, and his name was Ryan Franklin. He was previously a very successful principal at the top elementary school in DC and was asked by Chancellor Rhee to take on a challenge, Daley Elementary. His previous school was the best, but it was also majority white and rich, a rarity for a public elementary school in DC. For me, it was another sign that I was following the right path. Franklin's choice to lead at Daley made me wonder if he was like me, maybe we both thought we were God's gift to the classroom. When I went to the DC Public Schools job fair, Franklin was hiring for eight positions, while everyone else only had one or two positions open. All of the previous teachers at Daley, except one, had either quit or been fired. There was a line to speak with him, but I was in front; it was my first and only choice. When he interviewed me, he only asked me one question: “What are your thoughts on behavior management?” I had just read the behavior management bible of my grad school program, and I remembered the term “logical consequences.” I replied, “I believe students should be given logical consequences for their actions.” I thought it strange he didn’t want to talk further about teaching, but he was only checking one thing—did I prefer to dominate rowdy children with strict discipline, or did I want to listen to children and teach them how to behave.  A better question would have been: have you ever been suicidal?   And if you haven't, how will you prevent it from happening?

Martha's House

It was just a snag.  It wasn't long before we found a homeless shelter in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. With their beautiful beaches and mansions, Ft. Lauderdale wasn’t exactly Burkina Faso but we were working with a very needy group, the homeless, and it was good enough. My supervisor thought I was great, mostly because I actually really cared about the kids.  I also was a volunteer.  I could have stayed there, but I kept thinking, “this is only the beginning, I have much more important work to do.” My wife and I felt special because we were still saving the world by helping homeless kids get jobs, and it was nice that people were appreciating our extra work. But something was growing inside me, slowly and unconsciously.

It was a small voice that was always there, telling me I was special, that I was different from everyone around me.  Even worse, maybe I wasn't just different, I was better than everybody else.  It's start as confidence, but can quickly turn to hubris.  Once, when I was dropped off at a hospital with one of our homeless kids, we were told it would take a while for our ride to come back and pick us up. So we took the bus. The director was amazed that we had taken the bus and mentioned to me how all the employees couldn’t get over it. I started to think, “I am special, God has something planned for me.”  I should mention here that I was religious in the sense that I believed God had a direct hand in my future, that there was a path laid out before me, and all I had to do was to courageously follow it no matter what. There was path.  But I didn't know I was the one paving it.

Nicaragua

Sand and wealth surrounded me at high school. It wasn't rare to see huge, shiny SUVs parked next to station wagons with surfboard racks in the student parking lot. High school was easy for me— I was a starter on the baseball team, a captain of the swim team, I got slammed most weekends, and I got straight As. Things changed when I went to college.

I went to preppy Southern university, I was one of the drones in khakis and collars who worried I didn't know enough girls to pass through the front doors of the fraternities. By the end of college, I was the one walking barefoot with an unkempt beard and a frisbee in my backpack—how else could I make ultimate practice when it was directly after my anthropology seminar?

I also met the love of life.  She was a dream, and she thought my scraggly facial hair was cute.  We married right after college and went to Nicaragua, joined the Peace Corps. Through the three months of training, most volunteers described us as the perfect volunteers, diligently practicing our Spanish outside of class, taking our projects seriously, and smiling smugly at those who thought the trainings were too tough. We were begging for a tough site.  We wanted to walk miles to a river to get our water. We wanted to live on rice and beans.  We wanted the Peace Corps life you see in the promotional videos.

When we arrived at our assigned site, we found a small town filled with fields of pineapples, internet cafes, and pizza restaurants.  We wondered, maybe it's at night when the drugs, gangs, and prostitutes come out. But all we found were a few teenagers that smoked pot. The neighbors told us those same teenagers also liked to help out the community. They greeted their neighbors from their hangout, and even cut the grass.

We visited our local school and found out it was one of the best schools in Nicaragua, a Blue Ribbon school. They were happy to show off their new computer lab, recently hooked up to the internet.

There was an indigenous reserve up along the mountains beyond the pineapple fields. Neighbors told us the people living in the reserve were alcoholics, and there was no reason for anyone to visit. Unless you were Peace Corps volunteer desperate to do something. We came upon a one room wooden school with children running outside, playing soccer with a plastic bottle, barefoot. If I had taken a photo of it, it would have been on the cover of Peace Corps magazine. They stopped the game and came running to us, curious about white strangers. We told the teacher we were volunteers and asked how we could help. She told us they didn’t have any books for their school. It was perfect.

We had found our spot, the perfect Peace Corps village. Peace Corps had made a mistake, and they would be impressed that we had already found a new, more deserving site. But when we traveled to the capital to tell them the good news, they did not care about the indigenous reserve in the mountains; they told us we had to stay put and find work to do in the award winning school. So we told them if they didn't let us find another site, then we would leave.  They said we had 72 hours to get out.

Red Cruiser Bike

Young and idealist.  Privileged and guilty. Another teacher enters the streets of Washington, DC to brave fighting and foul language and glassy-eyed parents to balance an unfair world, to give eight-year-olds a solid education, a ticket out of purgatory.  Those eight-year-olds needed a teacher who did whatever it took, who refused to give up.  By the end of the year, these students might pass the standardized tests, and most importantly, find the spark of hope that they might find a way out the multi-generational trap of poverty. After graduation, they might go on to be doctors and lawyers and teachers.  Maybe that teacher that made all the difference would have been me. I believed he could be  me.  But not all stories that start out as a stereotype end as one too.

Daley Elementary was four miles away by bike. My bike was a gift from my mother-in-law, who had bought it from a neighbor.  I would be surprised if she actually bought it; I think my mother-in-law saved it from a dumptruck.  It was a bright red and white Cruiser with long, wiry handlebars that arched up like they were from the 50s.  It only had one gear.  The commute had five hills each way, and there were two hills that I couldn’t ride up without getting off the bike and walking.  Imagine pushing a 100 pound bike up a hill with a hiking backpack filled with notebooks; it's not the best way to start your first day of work in the late summer in DC.  When I finally got to school, I didn’t know where to lock my bike so I rolled it to the back of the school and locked it onto a rusted metal railing of an abandoned trailer. There were three unused trailers in the back of the school, and they were all surrounded by knee high weeds. By the end of the day, my shiny new Wal-mart helmet was gone. It didn't take that much ingenuity; you can just cut the strap.  But still, who wants a Wal-mart helmet with a cut strap?  The next day I locked up my bike again, but this time behind the trailer, wedged between the moldy vinyl siding and a chain link fence.  Whoever stole my helmet might not see the bike now.  But, at the end of the day, I saw the culprit, or actually, culprits.  There were four young kids who were students at my new school with a hacksaw sawing away at my chain.  They must have had a thing for bright red and white Cruisers with the grandma handlebars. They heard me approach, and they took off, screaming and laughing. It didn’t seem that funny to me so I dropped my backpack and started running after them.

I chased them around a corner along a back alley, further into the school's neighborhood known for its gangs and record-breaking homicide rate. Over the previous summer, this neighborhood had so many homicides the police department set up checkpoints to block the neighborhood’s entry points. The kids lead me to the back of a sloping yellow row house. It was up against an alley, and the late summer wind blew the street trash along the yard. Next to the yard was a telephone pole with an over-sized grayish-pink teddy bear taped to it. There was a school picture of a small girl with pigtails; I wondered if she was hit by car or maybe a bullet.

The kids squeezed through the backdoor, and a woman that wore glazed eyes and a nightgown was hanging her clothes up along a wire that lazily stretched across the backyard. Between breaths, I explained that I saw her kids trying to steal my bike.  It didn't seem like she understood, there was no reaction—the same slack jaw, eyes unblinking.  After a few long moments, she yelled out of the side of her mouth to the eldest daughter to come out and apologize. The daughter sauntered out and muffled an apology with a large grin on her face. I walked back through the alley to the school.  I was quite close to where I had started as I didn't realize we had made a circle.  I picked up my backpack, unlocked my sawed up chain, and I slowly pushed the pedals up the beginning of a hill that I knew I wouldn't make. It was then when I first thought, “what the hell am I doing here?"