Home

In my new apartment, I wear socks to bed, cozy despite the cold of the home I’ve constructed over the past few months with Chris.

As the sun shifts from the front living room to the back bedroom throughout the day, my plump cat rotates her naps from the bay window, to the worn purple couch, to her nest of blankets on the bed, following the rays of warmth.

I think I could read for days from the library of books our two collections have joined to combine, lazily sipping peppermint tea in the living room on a day when the blasts of fog whisk across the rooftops and mist drenches you on a brief jaunt to the market around the corner. On a sunny day, though, the blacktop of our patio heats up, and it’s not such a chore to grade if I can bask in its warmth.

Never much of a cook before, I suddenly find myself enjoying adventurous forays into vegan chili, green curry, and tiramisu in the tight corner that is our kitchen. Feeding someone and choosing dishes that will nourish us both is, I realize, a concrete way of caring that I’ve never really experienced or wanted to show before.

The coffee pot awakens with a gurgle ten minutes after my alarm trills a rising scale of notes every weekday, and I bluster around, hair, makeup, outfit, breakfast, lunch, and snacks tucked in my bag and out the door in 35 minutes flat. I don’t often return before 6:30 in the evening, drooping with laptop, grading, and gym bag in tow. And though we both have work still to do, and may retire to separate rooms for these tasks after dinner, I can hear the keys of Chris’s laptop clicking and his voice muttering and as he dictates his essays to himself through the thin walls. The cat pads softly between us for a scratch or a massage as we work.

This is what it feels like to belong; this is what it feels like to finally be home.

Cover the Classroom in Pig's Blood

It was about 9:16 Monday morning, the start of second period, when CJ decided to take his last stand in my class. I guess it was a long time coming; he was ready to let me have it, since it had been a power struggle between him and me since the first day he came to class with his earbuds in and mouth wide open. Dude didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut. A constant stream of sewage, a ranting litany of rapped profanity just low enough so I couldn’t quite hear it and thus couldn’t quite call him on it was always brewing. So when he refused to finish a required assignment on Monday morning, I wrote him a referral to the office to finish his work.

CJ, knowing he’d be kicked out of school for another referral, decided he’d better go out with a bang. “This is bullshit; I’m not gonna leave. You’re just making me more mad. I’m not gonna go to the fucking office; fuck this shit!”

Me: “CJ, You’re disrupting class and preventing other students from learning right now; please leave.” Calmly yet firmly: “CJ, take the referral and go to the office.” “If you don’t leave on your own, I’m going to have to call security.” “Ok, I’m calling security.”

When security finally arrived, CJ stood up without hesitation or reluctance. He seemed willing enough to leave, but not without delivering this emphatic final announcement: “I’m gonna rip this bitch’s head off.” He was furious with me.

I felt shaken, sad, hopeless. What had I done to drive this student to such anger? To respond in such a way to me? I know I wasn’t singling him out; I had already sent another student down to the office for the same offense earlier in the period. The rest of my lesson was shot and I was summoned out midway through to speak with a police officer and my assistant principal, since CJ’s outburst constituted a violent threat. CJ was eventually expelled, and after his explosion in my class, I never saw him again.

I stewed over this incident ever and felt like a failure as a teacher. I should be able to reach these tough cases like CJ. I should have better discipline in the classroom. I should command my students’ respect.

Suddenly, though, it clicked for me. Students can be dumb-shits and smart-asses, and it might have nothing to do with me, besides the fact that I’m a handy punching bag and an authority figure who’s difficult for many male students to reconcile themselves to. For I am a young female teacher, one they don’t want to admit is more knowledgeable and experienced than themselves. CJ is like Tyler, my high school boyfriend.

Although Tyler and I didn’t start “going steady” until our junior year, we met during sophomore year. Tyler spent his fourth periods slouched in the assistant principal’s office working on homework because he’d been kicked out of his fourth period teacher’s class and wasn’t allowed to return until he wrote her a letter of apology. I was always in and out of the AP’s office during fourth period because I was an ASB nerd and needed various signatures and approvals for the school activities I was planning.

I got to chatting with Tyler whenever I’d pass through the office, and I asked him what he was doing in there. He had that bitch Butler as an English teacher that year. She was so anal. I had her too, and suddenly the story she had recently related to my fifth period class after the incident with Tyler came rushing back to me.

My fifth period classmates and I filed into class boisterous and excited from lunch one day to find Mrs. Butler in a near hysterical state, blonde curls quivering in anger. “I tell you!” she told us, “In all my years of teaching, I’ve never had a student behave this way towards me. I’m just speechless!” she proclaimed and proceeded to speak the whole darn story. During fourth period, she had asked students to take out a piece of paper as usual for the reading quiz. One student, Tyler refused. He didn’t understand why this was important, or why anything the teacher asked him to do in class was important at all, for that matter. In fact, Mrs. Butler was a Nazi! She was a fascist, anal Nazi! He wanted to pour pig’s blood all over the classroom and burn it down! I know Tyler, he can be quite forceful, scathing, and dramatic when he wishes.

After this violent and disgusting outburst, Tyler was allowed to return to class on one condition, that he write Mrs. Butler a letter of apology. This, however, went against all his principles. He was right, and she was a Nazi, as far as he was concerned. So, as a matter of principle, Tyler spent the remainder of sophomore year in the office during fourth period.

Karma’s a bitch, though, and Tyler had to retake sophomore English during his senior year in order to graduate. And guess which teacher he got?! Mrs. Butler. Just the luck of the draw. By senior year, though, Tyler had grown a little bit in the way of humility and forgiveness. He made his long-overdue apology to Mrs. Butler, then passed sophomore English with flying colors, albeit a bit of annoyance at being stuck with the immature 10th graders all semester.

My take-aways from all this?
• Nice kids do stupid things.
• My students aren’t any shittier than my own high school boyfriend was, and I thought he was pretty funny (though also stupid and incredibly rude) at the time for standing up to Mrs. Butler. Thus, I must have been a little shit back then, too.
• Be transparent and explicit about your reasons for doing everything in the classroom.
• Student buy-in to the lessons is important.
• I will probably be able to laugh about this years later, though I’m crying about it now.

Post Script to these events:
After having this profound realization that everything was going to be okay, kids are kids and life goes on, I had to share my story and take-aways with my freshman class who’d been witness to the demise of CJ’s high school career. Their take-away from my profound story? “Ahhh, Ms. Sterling goes for bad boys!!”

Another week later, Frank, my student and CJ’s enlisted messenger, came to tell me, “Ms. Sterling, CJ said to tell you he’s sorry.” I responded, “Tell CJ I say thank you.” I was very thankful, and I was sorry, too, sorry that I could not help CJ more in his reading skills or in the difficult hand life had dealt him. Unfortunately, though CJ’s apology is enough for me, it will never be enough to salvage CJ’s academic career, to reverse the disservice our school system has done him in allowing him to reach 9th grade without achieving the reading and writing skills of a middle schooler, or to counteract the years of struggle he now faces. Life is supremely unfair.

Time Flies

Wow, somehow almost an entire year has gone by since my last post. But, it's a new year, I've got a new job, and I'm going to make a fresh start on blogging. Hopefully, the middle schoolers will provide me with some fresh, awkward, heart-warming material. For now, here are a couple links I've come across recently worth checking out:

1. A teacher in LA Unified discusses the challenges of teaching in a too-large, heterogeneous classroom. I identified with many of her experiences. Here is further evidence supporting my belief that smaller class sizes make for a better learning environment and happier teachers and students!

The LA Times Article

2. And here's a great clip by another champion of public education, Matt Damon, speaking at the Save our Schools Rally in Washington:

See Matt Damon bald and in charge

Poking Fun at the Freshers

Five weeks into the school year and my freshman class is already providing me with plenty of fodder for poking fun at them. Here are just two of this week’s shining jewels…

1) This first one is my fault really—word to the wise, never feed chocolate to freshmen students, especially not before nine in the morning. Nevertheless, that is exactly what I did on Tuesday as part of an exercise in writing using sensory detail. The object: brainstorm words to describe how the chocolate stimulated all five of the senses, then write descriptive paragraphs using vivid sensory detail. The chocolate, though, only served to wind the students up to the point that when I asked for descriptive words for the sight of the chocolate, shouts of “Poo!” and “I can’t say it because it’s too rude!” were accompanied by wild laughter. Things got out of hand, and as a consequence I threatened to take away the class’ break. This greatly upset poor Ashley. Just as my department chair poked her head into my classroom to ask me a question, Ashley slammed down her hands, rose abruptly from her seat and screamed at the entire class, “Shut the fuck up! We’re gonna lose our damn break!” Needless to say, I had to send her packing, but she of course worked hard to maintain her tough image by stomping her feet and muttering curses at me under her breath as she left. So much for impressing my department chair with my classroom management skills. (Side note, same student is now suspended for three days due to some other unknown incident outside my classroom.)

2) Frank and Carlo are shrimpy freshmen boys, best friends both suffering serious cases of ADHD. Have you ever experienced a moment when there’s a lull in the conversation, just at the moment you say something dumb? So that the entire dinner table hears your remark loud and clear? This is just what happened to Frank and Carlo today. As the whole class poured out of the classroom, I turned my head to urge Frank and Carlo on just in time to witness their chorus of “I like to eat- eat- eat- pussies and vaginas!” sung to the tune of “I like to eat- eat- eat- apples and bananas.” Charming. Although I put on a show of disgust and lectured them about appropriate classroom language, really it is ridiculous moments like these that make teaching worthwhile. What goofballs :D

Teaching

A lone student’s shifty eyes
follow my ramble through
the rows of desks, hunched shoulders,
slouched shoulders, and
perilous backpacks askew on the floor.
How did I,
who know so little,
become “master” of this domain?
Sometimes, sun nudges fog away,
the squeak of chairs, tap of feet, turn of pages
slows as concentration settles the room;
my moment to ease into a desk and
join together in the labor of writing.

The Most Spirited School in the Bay

I have the privilege of working at the “Most Spirited School in the Bay.” That’s right, for two years running, my high school has won Wild 94.9’s radio contest to have such innovative new hip hop performers as Flo Rida and New Boyz serenade our students in assemblies in the school gym. We blew all other schools out of the water in terms of votes online. South City pride y’all!


For those whose ears didn’t immediately perk up at the mention of Flo Rida’s name, you’d probably recognize his song/laundry list of sexy items of female apparel: “Apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur, you know the whole club was looking at her… them baggy sweatpants and them reeboks with the straps, she turned around and gave that big booty a slap. She hit the floor, next thing you know, shorty got low low low low low low low.” In case you didn’t know, it’s a major hit. If you didn’t recognize that one, perhaps you’d know the catchy, “Oh hot damn, this is my jam. Keep ya partyin’ till the am. Y’all don’t understand. Make me throw my hands up in the ayer, ay, ay, ayer, ayer.” That was two years ago Flo Rida rocked our gym. Obnoxious, materialistic, objectifying women, but innocuous for the most part.



Last year, though, brought us a surprise performance by New Boyz, a group who will, I predict, only be known while they are actually still new—my guess: this two-hit-wonder group has the shelf-life of its current fans’ pubescent hormones. New Boyz is made up of two super-fine seventeen year old boys known as Legacy and Ben-J. You cannot imagine the thrill in Ashley’s voice as she excitedly told me about getting to touch Legacy’s abs during the concert in the gym. The music video for “Tie Me Down” is actually pretty charming, featuring Legacy and Ben-J clad in fresh baseball caps, cardigans, and kicks. With backpacks strapped on, they look just like any of my students. They wear skinny jeans hanging off their narrow butts, and they look pretty darn cute, as in I could imagine them seated in desks in front of me stumbling through lines of Shakespeare and groaning about the homework posted on the board.



The title of New Boyz’ big hit, “Tie Me Down,” is actually somewhat misleading, since really the boys sing in the chorus about how, “She ain’t gon’ tie me down.” Alright, fair enough. It seems like a good thing for teenagers to hang out with lots of friends and keep their options open. But, curious to know more, I looked up the lyrics, and what I found horrified me. The rap portion of the song, which must have been incomprehensible auditorily to my principal, contains such choice lines as,

“Yea you cute. So what?/ But lets get it through your head,/Yea we make love, sex, weed all in the bed,/…/ Now you stuck like a stain and I cant believe that,/…/ There’s too much girls and I ain’t lettin go,/ Cause my life is great,/ And you ain’t nothing but a ho,/…/ Ay yea you know I’m a man,/ And I have no feelings.”

Is this some kind of joke? It almost seemed too bad to be true.

Now call me an old fogey if you will, but I don’t think I am. Well, only partially anyway. I would say that I am not a fogey but a feminist. I object to the disrespect of women in this song, but also I object to the portrayal of masculinity. Perhaps I take myself and life too seriously. However, I saw Sarah and Lisa bouncing off the walls in anticipation of the concert. I saw the photos and doodlings of New Boyz on Brianna’s binder, and I fielded countless questions from these teenyboppers about who in my opinion was hotter, Legacy or Ben-J. Needless to say, I pleaded the fifth. These rappers are under-age minors, after all.

My students are a weird mix of innocence and experience. Strict Catholics, many of them certainly believe in “saving” themselves for marriage. However, one day I discovered an empty, discarded Trojan condoms box lying in the center of my classroom. I was horrified to realize that, thinking it was merely a candy wrapper, I had allowed it to lie there for most of the day. In class discussions of Romeo and Juliet, at least half of my students argued that love at first sight is indeed real. Their rationale? You see it in movies all the time! I quickly learned that the worst supervision duty at my school is the dances, because the main responsibility is to patrol for freak dancers, trolling the dance floor with a flashlight to break up such lewd and lascivious behavior. Seems incongruent, given our leadership-sponsored performances by Flo Rida and New Boyz, right?

In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy argues that with the rise of raunch culture and the porn industry, images of women have again been co-opted in the interests of men and making money. Women, rising in their careers and the workplace have had to play by the rules, becoming one of the boys in terms of chauvinism and giving the boys what they want and expect in terms of image. We’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that women’s lib has come so far that we don’t even need such a concept anymore. We’re living in a post-feminist world, in which women are so sexually “liberated” that we’re free to flash our tits on Girls Gone Wild and dress as skankily as “we” (i.e., the male world) desire, all in the name of sexual self-expression. Yet, as Levy points out, in the midst of all this “liberation” many women still may not be freely expressing their own selves, but really playing into the artificial, unrealistic, even dangerous ideals we’ve been steadily spoon fed by the media. Free, informed choice doesn’t necessarily exist. So, to be a cool chick, one that is most desirable, my female students must now make themselves sexually available and emotionally unattached, as recommended by New Boyz, and drape themselves in the right brands, becoming walking billboards and victims of consumer culture, as exalted in Flo Rida’s song, “Low.” These are the values that we, as a school, are actively supporting when we sponsor concerts by such inane, commercialized performers.

South City, I think we can do better than all this. There must be some positive, socially-conscious hip hop groups we could endeavor to bring to our school via Wild 94.9’s spirit competition this year. Any input?

Back to School

The sweetness of a carefree summer lasted only until about mid July for me. Summer vacation was halfway over and I began have nightmares about the school year to come. In one scenario I showed up late to the first day of school because I had lost track of time while on a date. I crashed my car across the campus frantically trying to drive right up to my classroom door. In another dream it was the first day of school and I didn’t have any of my handouts prepared. I stood there exposed, a fraud pretending to be a responsible teacher, in front of 35 expectant, overachieving honors students. Worst though, was the nightmare in which the guy I’ve been seeing filmed us having raunchy sex and posted it on the Internet with my name as the tagline for Google searches. Needless to say this horror of a dream did not end well; I lost my job and my teaching career was destroyed.

Whoa, I guess I have some anxiety about returning to the classroom. Last spring was rough, and I succumbed to depression. Being laid off, toiling on my thesis, my grandmother’s illness and death; it was all bad. Having to perform for students, putting on my teacher face day after day felt oppressive. I am scared of feeling that way again this year; more scared of that feeling than I am of actually teaching another school year.

This, then, is a little feel-good motivation. These are some gems from the end of last school year that I’ve kept tucked away for a moment such as this one to remind myself why I teach. I only hope I can recreate some of this magic again next year!

“This Feeling for You”:

This is a poem written by a tall, soulful, Dumbo-eared boy from marching band. His previous credits include a short story about his numerous crushes and unrequited loves. In that story, the names of his crushes were anagrams of many girls from our class, eg Stephanie became Epishtiane in. Tim read this poem, though, as part of our open mic at the end of the year.

This feeling for you is something I can’t explain,
sometimes it’s fantastic, sometimes it’s horrid.
It’s horrible when I’m not with you,
And it turns terrific when I see your face the next day.

This patience for you is something I can’t explain,
waiting 30-40 minutes after school for you,
to say hello and goodbye to almost everyone you see,
just to spend 25 minutes walking you home.
But that’s ok,
because 25 minutes can feel like a lifetime with you,
it just depends on what I make of those minutes.

This way I act around you is something I can’t explain,
doing crazy things,
from swallowing the legs off of gumbas,
to licking tampons with fake blood on it…
don’t ask,
But it’s all just to make you smile,
and to make you feel better when your [sic] down.

This feeling for you is something I can’t explain,
sometimes it’s marvelous, sometimes it’s detestable.
It’s awful when I’m not with you,
and it turns amazing when I see your face the next day.

You can imagine the uproar when Tim came to the tampon line in his reading. It was difficult to quell the pandemonium in the room, but luckily everyone was curious to hear what outrageousness would emerge from his mouth next. I’m choosing to overlook the fact that Tim clearly took nothing away from my lesson on run-on sentences and the use of the semi-colon to separate independent clauses.

Another Romantic Moment from the Poetry Unit:

On the final day of class, I asked my students to write anonymous appreciations on slips of paper that I would then read for the entire class (ie, “I appreciate (insert a classmate’s name here), because (give a heart-warming reason here)…)

Rowan, a kid who’d almost failed freshman English, but had shown dramatic growth and elected to go into junior honors next year, wrote this in his anonymous appreciation: “To Adrienne: my last poem was about you.” Rowan had sat opposite Adrienne for most of the year, though I had never witnessed any interaction between them. When it came time for me to read and grade Rowan’s poetry portfolio, I eagerly flipped to the final poem:

Words Never Said

I look at you everyday
Never having anything to say
So I play it off
And keep it cool
And not act like that big of a fool
But what can I do
When I think I might be
In love with you

Added now to my list of goals for the next school year: orchestrate an encounter between Rowan and Adrienne. Perhaps I can pair them together for groupwork…

And Finally… The End of Year Familial Drama that both Broke and Gave Faith to My Heart:

Charlotte and Maria were two sisters both enrolled in my fourth period sophomore class. Both were quick learners, articulate writers, and eager for an adult mentor. They came from a family of three girls, all in attendance at El Camino High School. Charlotte was actually concurrently enrolled in both my sophomore and freshman classes, having failed English the previous year. Maria applied to be my TA for next year. Thus, I spent much time with both girls, and being one of three sisters myself, I felt a special kinship with them.

They’d emigrated with their mother from the Philippines to the US about ten years previous. A single mom, their mother worked two fulltime jobs from 8:00 am to 12 midnight daily to support her family. This toil and sacrifice bespoke her love and dedication to her daughters, but it also meant that the girls were expected to raise themselves. This was a tall order, and might have worked out better in the Philippines where sucking it up and working hard, supporting the collective family unit were the values in the dominant culture. But Charlotte was an American girl now, and this was a lot to ask. She roamed the streets with her friends after school, experimented with drugs, explored her sexuality, fought fiercely with her family and got in lots of trouble. Mom decided, “I can’t deal with this unreasonable, wayward daughter anymore,” and sent her to live with Grandma.

Spring semester, Charlotte seemed to fall to pieces. She cut my fourth period class every day and came tardy to fifth period an emotional wreck. Usually, she’d then ask to see the counselor or school nurse or excuse herself for a 20 minute trip to the restroom. When I confronted her about this pattern, she tearfully explained her situation and told me she could not stand to sit in fourth period across the room from her sister. “I feel like my family doesn’t want me anymore. We never talk. I can’t stand to sit here and see my sister looking at me. She doesn’t care about me.” I doubted this very much, and told Charlotte so. The counselor spent a couple sessions working with all three sisters, but Charlotte was defiantly silent. The counselor advised me to just try and hang on with Charlotte till the end of the school year. She’d likely get shipped off to the continuation high school soon enough anyway. Charlotte was now failing every single class. One day, she fled the classroom in tears. I teach in the portable that time forgot in a far corner of campus, so it was okay for her to hang out on the blacktop outside for a few minutes. Suddenly, though, a booming crash like a minor temblor shook the room. Startled students looked up from their group work alarmed. Hurrying outside to investigate, I found Charlotte nursing some bloody knuckles and heaving in sobs. She said Maria’d been mugging at her. I began to think the end of the year could not come soon enough for Charlotte.

As previously recounted, there were some pretty cute appreciations written on the final day of school. As I sat on my stool in the center of a horseshoe of desks reading them aloud for my rapt teenagers, Maria warned me, “Be careful, Ms. Sterling, some people wrote their names on the backs of the slips of paper.” So far, I had not encountered any appreciations signed in this fashion, but I diligently cradled each in my hands thereafter. And when I came to Maria’s appreciation, I understood her fear of exposure, for she had indeed signed her own appreciation in this way. She wrote, “I appreciate Charlotte for being the strong girl that she is. I appreciate her as a person.”

A few minutes later, I came to Charlotte’s appreciation. She had written, “I appreciate Maria because no matter what happens I’ll love her till the day I die because she’s been with me my whole life.” It killed me that they had written these sentiments for me to read aloud anonymously, but they could not openly share their feelings with one another. But then again, maybe they knew each other’s voices. Sisters can tell. Despite everything, I think they’re going to be okay.

As a teacher, I am a witness and a rock. I witness my students’ joy and suffering, and I am a rock in their lives. Always there. I bear witness and I stand by consistently. It is worth it, and I’ll keep coming back no matter how hard it gets.