Falling Down

I woke up today in a horrible mood that did not change until the students came in, and then I cheered up and taught a lesson that went very well. I made them personally define history and collected all their responses, then using the unification of their responses, presented different things and asked them: Is this history? I presented them with a lot of music (welcome to jamrock, the corner, some music in Irish) a movie poster from the good, the bad and the ugly, an advertisement, a clip of an MLK speech and a random stick that I had picked up from the ground.

The discussion was very good and brought up a lot of good points about the relationship between history and memory, cultural ownership and co-ownership of history, the scientific past -v- lies written as truth. Each class was very deep.

After class one of the students that I had last year told me that he wanted to talk to me. He was one of the students in my reading group, so I am very close to him. He told me that his uncle had been missing, and on Friday the police found him dead in a car under the dan ryan. A women who was unknown was found dead in the car with him. They had been there for ten days.

The student had to go with his mother and grandmother to Cook County Hospital to identify the body. They left the student behind, but then when they returned he knew that his uncle was dead.

I met his uncle several times. He would come in with the grandmother, a very old women. He was paralyzed and in a wheelchair. Both are from Honduras, so I talked to them in Spanish. The uncle had really taken charge of making sure that the student was going to classes and working hard. The student really liked his uncle.

The cause of death has not been determined yet, but it sounds as though it may have been a double suicide. They should get the autopsy reports this week.

I had already helped this student last May when his other grandmother died.

There was not a lot that I could say, I just tried to keep him talking without making him more upset. He was very eerily calm.

When I finally left him I went to talk to his special ed teachers and the social worker. At first the conversation went well, but then one of the teachers was mad that the student hadn't spoken to her first: I admit that my own pride and vanity came into play, I was glad that I was the teacher he had trusted, but the conversation continued to make me angry.

So by the time I got to our full staff meeting, I was upset and angry.

And then the Director of Education decided to present the new incentive based pay schedule. It is a performance based salary structure.

The director tried to talk about how people always resisted what was right in education, that the state board, the CPS, the teacher unions and old teachers always fought against change at the cost of the students.

And then he looked at me and made a comment about me glaring at him and I just lost it.

I don't know exactly what I said but it was something like: you can push us to be better teachers and you should, but we have the right to push back and ask why you make Hispanic students take Spanish and not allow them to take French, why are class numbers and schedules still wrong after two weeks...and I just kept talking.

You know you did something when afterwards everyone text messages and calls you and wants to know if you are ok and you still have your job.

But then I got one, simple text message that calmed me down: half compliment, half complaint.

"You're all heart"