teaching

A National Emergency

/ lovizmytrio / 1 Comment

A national emergency is a series of hurricanes on one coast and as many fires on the other coast, the direct results of climate change that our country chooses to ignore. A national emergency is the healthcare crisis, where we can’t get prosthetics if we’re missing a limb or pay for cancer treatment even if we’re dying. A national emergency is CEO pay which has multiplied exponentially for five decades and left the common worker with a salary too low to buy a house, buy eggs, or pay rent.

There is no national emergency at our border. There are millions of people, despite all of our national emergencies, who have faced far worse: farms that can no longer grow coffee due to climate change, dictatorships that have taken away all rights, medical care that includes fewer options for cerebral palsy or cancer than we have here.

Their emergencies trail behind them, left in their home countries weeks, months, or years ago, and like that train that they cling to carrying them across Mexico, they hope never to see again.

They are here now, families in tow, babies in tow, ready to work, ready to enroll their children in school and provide jobs for teachers like me, ready to take into their hands the American Dream that you have declared doesn’t exist for them.

They are not criminals.

They are not illegal.

They are not a national emergency, an executive order you’ve used to circumvent Congress on your first day in office.

They pick your food and clear your sidewalks after snow and build your roofs and work in your restaurants and run your factories and teach your children and make you rich. They are professors and lawyers and engineers and mechanics and everything in between.

They are human.

And after more than four hundred years of forced colonization and enslaved labor indoctrinated in our blood by imperialists like you, the only national emergency is how far back we’ve moved the dial of progress, and for how long we will make Suffering the motto of YOUR AMERICA.

Seventeen

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I’m already starting to count semesters left, though I have nearly a decade to win my pension. I have seventeen left. Seventeen semesters to deal with the pain, the argument, the love/hate relationship I have with this career, and today it hurts me more than it helps me.

Why is he in the hallway now, laughing his ass off and GOOFING OFF WITH HIS FRIENDS? Why do I hear his voice, after he cheated on her, after he convinced her back, after she came in distraught with handmarks on her arm, her breakfast tossed to the floor, his controlling words still ringing in her ears? Why did I call the dean, the assistant principal, who came jogging to my classroom to extricate her, to hear her story, ONLY TO HEAR HIS VOICE IN THE HALLWAY three hours later? Why wasn’t he sent home, after the long list of inappropriate behavior, everything from intentionally using racial slurs to skipping class to cussing out the admin to refusing to do work to taking advantage of a girl in the bathroom and allowing his friend to film it and post it online…

Seventeen semesters left of arguing with kids about their phones, convincing them that English is important, and telling those in charge to do something about kids who should be nowhere near this school.

And sometimes it feels like seventeen lifetimes.

Work

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment 
i'm back at work today
after a solid two weeks
of rest and relaxation

in which i found this schedule
from my first job
age seventeen
(started there at sixteen)

where i'm scheduled for all but four days
of July of '95
and i've never stopped since.
really stopped.

even when i was
home with the babies
i watched other people's babies

and the two weeks
thirty years past due
just seems 
so
short

Stamina

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

The Atlantic and many other news sources have recently reported that students at elite colleges can’t even finish a book, and probably only read one book in high school, if that. The article focuses on the inability of students at elite universities who are struggling more than ever because of their lack of focus and literacy.

As a twenty-two-year veteran English teacher, I can verify that much of this argument is true. I have seen the curricula of high school English shift from reading novels to focusing on shorter, nonfiction texts since Common Core was implemented soon after I started teaching. So, yes, in school, students aren’t reading many books. But what about the rest of their time? Are they playing sports, playing on their phones, playing with drugs, or all of the above?

As my career has shifted from a typical English classroom to a Newcomer classroom, I am challenged with many more pressing issues. Students who don’t know how to cope with the trauma they have experienced. Students who only went to school sporadically at best or not at all. Students who have never held a pencil and students who have witnessed gang or war violence all of their lives.

In my attempt to teach them functional English–everything from the 44 phonemic sounds of our English alphabet to how to ask for directions–I must also teach them about the way our world works… or, at least, how to function in this new country.

When I find out that one of my students is pregnant, I feel it’s my fault because I didn’t tell that shy, sweet child to walk downstairs to the clinic and get the free birth control Colorado provides.

When I find out one of my students doesn’t only speak Sango but Ngama and was forced to attend school in Chad where everything was taught in French, I know I need to find more resources for her family so she can finally learn to read… in English, her fourth language.

When I find out one of my student’s stepfather is abusing his mother, after they crossed the Darién Gap together and weathered the immigration storm only to discover things aren’t much better here, I know I need to connect him to housing resources and domestic violence shelters.

When I discover that none of my students has ever read a book and can barely read the ten-page phonics stories in our weekly reading groups, but stumble through every word in their attempt to learn English, I think about what a waste our world’s resources are. We have the richest country in the world and public libraries every half a mile, and as usual, teachers are blamed because students can’t read, even these elite students who have the world’s books at their fingertips.

These “elite” students can’t get through a novel, and sometimes I feel like I can’t get through a day. Maybe they feel the same way, but I don’t know why. I don’t know why our government doesn’t open its arms to welcome the burning desire that every immigrant I’ve ever met has had to work and be a part of something that they couldn’t find elsewhere.

Instead, Trump comes to my town and tells his followers, all from a luxurious resort with six restaurants and an indoor water park, that immigrant gangs are ruining our city.

My classroom is mostly Venezuelan, and most Venezuelans are the most literate and hardworking students I have. He doesn’t know a goddamn thing about why they’re here or what they’re doing or where they’re living or what they have to offer. Just like those elite university students who can’t get through a novel, he couldn’t possibly survive a day in their shoes or stand at the front of my classroom trying to convey the cultural nuances of this country while also bridging the gaps between what they know and what they have to learn.

Now, who should we be more worried about–the elite students who don’t have the stamina to finish a book, the candidate who has likely never read one, or the immigrants whose lives are already more traumatic than any novel, and are here to tell their story and make this country part of it?

You tell me… if you’ve had the stamina to read this.

$1000

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

What can I buy with $1000?

A color printer for my classroom so I can make posters pop for my Newcomer students. Eighteen credits at ISU so I can try to earn a livable wage with a salary lane change. A week in a hotel for one of my students and his family who were out on the streets.

What can you buy with $1000?

The last shred of dignity that DPS promised on our September paychecks. You said you kept your promise with extra pay for hard-to-serve positions and bonuses, a 2.06% raise, and $1000.

But guess what? We didn’t receive the $1000 that you are holding because our union wants arbitration against your broken promise. We only got the watered-down raise.

Where is it? Where is the 5.2% COLA raise that you agreed to?

When my student’s family was living in a tent, I asked my English colleagues at South for as much money as they could spare. Within a day, I had collected more than $1000 to keep this family off the street for a week. Why did I ask when we’re all strapped for cash, when gas and food prices and mortgage interest rates keep so many of us from paying our bills?

Because that is what I do. I teach Newcomers who came here for a better life. I work with generous colleagues who would reach into their nearly-empty pockets to come up with $1000 because it matters to a student. A family. A life.

How else can I earn $1000, or a real raise? From my second job as an adjunct professor, where, if the classes don’t get canceled before they begin, I might earn $1000 extra a month to make up for the gaps in my DPS paycheck? From teaching summer school, doing ISA paperwork, coaching, directing, or after-school supervision?

Why isn’t what I do in a day, in a school year, enough to earn $1000 of your respect? To earn 5.2% of your respect?

I plan lessons and grade papers for four preps. I have a classroom of students who just arrived from all over the world and speak seven different languages. I engage them in English, help them cope with trauma, show them where our food bank is, take them on excursions across the city, teach them about cultural norms, and communicate with their families about their never-ending physical and emotional needs. I have kids who have never held a pencil and don’t know their letters in their home language and kids who could write a novel in Spanish, and I work my ass off to meet all of their needs, even if it means giving them $1000.

What I don’t have is a salary proving that DPS believes that what I do is respectable and professional. What I don’t have is my promised COLA.

DPS, you agreed to support your teachers with a real raise, and you couldn’t even give us $1000. If a picture is worth 1000 words, I hope my words are worth at least $1000.

Teach IN America

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Teach IN America

Your Words

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A few days after she was born, my mother held Mythili in her arms, Mythili with her ever-open eyes, her neck craning for me or for another look at the world, and my mother said to me, “This one has been here before. She has lived another life.”

Without the spiritual background that is ever-present in so many lives, but not our life, I was surprised by these words from my mother, a second-time grandmother with her second-born granddaughter. But not shock-surprised. Just surprised. And yet, I knew she was right. Mythili had a presence about her from the moment she entered the world, an energy, an awareness of her environment that was never so obvious in my other two girls.

Mythili looked around at the world and immediately questioned it, even from birth. Where’s the milk? (Colostrum delays). Where’s my sister? Where’s my Daddy? Most importantly, Where’s my Mama? She observed, dissatisfied, her mostly-immovable state.

“You have one of those babies who hates being a baby,” the midwife told me at our six-week checkup. “Once she can sit up at about six months, you’ll see a total change in her.”

Mythili, who craned her neck from birth to search for a view of whoever was walking into the room, knew that her surroundings, and the people within them, meant everything in the world to her.

And you asking her to do this meant everything in the world to me.

I know it was you because I searched the crowd after, my face stained in tears, my hands still shaking, my heart still leaping with pride and disbelief. I found her counselor who told me it was your idea, your encouragement, your words that convinced her.

And it was only a moment out of a thousand moments in my daughter’s life. My daughter’s life that has been filled with happy memories and tainted with sadness these past few years. My daughter, who attended the high school where I teach, where I’m given the privilege of seeing one set of graduates after another pass through this gym before the ceremony. My daughter, who was hiding, sitting by herself at the top of the bleachers, all of her Class of 2023 friends gone, chatting amongst themselves, because of grief, loss, rivalry, meanness, jealousy, bitterness… death. My daughter who took this selfie with me but kept the speech a secret.

My daughter, who during the COVID lockdown, when one of her beautiful art pieces was being featured on the school TV show, couldn’t be convinced, not with note cards, not with me filming an example, not with any words, to record a 20-second video to describe her talent and inspiration.

My daughter took your words and put them into her heart, stood upon the stage in front of a thousand people, and honored me, honored the friend she lost, and most importantly, honored herself.

For a decade I have watched my students, my refugees and immigrants, enter this stage and share their 15-second speeches about how Denver South helped them form a new life in America. I have watched as struggling American students, those lost in the crowd, those never-valedictorians, those never-heard-of students, had a moment of glory.

And I can never thank you enough for giving me this moment of glory in my daughter’s life. For giving her your words so that she could find her own.

Thank you for giving my daughter her words with your words. Thank you for giving me this moment with your words.

Full Ride All the Way from Afghanistan

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sometimes we need hope
when the world feels hopeless 
this student brings it

What I Would Say If I Could

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What you took away with your error:

Trust. Friendship. Education. Love. Accountability. Faith.

What you didn’t hear:

Danger. Toxicity. Neglect. Ignorance. Hate tactics.

What we have lost:

The connection of the Kabul airport that they shared. The trauma of it–of suddenly being ripped from the only home they had ever known, of fearing the Taliban would come for them next, or their mother, their father, their faith in humanity. The collective trauma that bonded them together and allowed them a communication that none of us could fathom. A connection, through Dari, Islam, and kindness, brought to her by her paraprofessional interpreter. A confessional for her to share how horrid her foster mother was. An English classroom where all her friends are, where her teacher loves her and wants to help her. The relationships with her peers who now can’t understand the reasons behind her choice.

YOU are the reason behind her choice. You broke your professional commitment to a system we have in place that is meant to protect children, and you gave power to the toxicity of a human not fit to be a mother to anyone, let alone a fragile, motherless child. You sided with lies instead of the truth, and everyone will suffer because of it. Especially her. Especially this girl whose mother was murdered by the Taliban, whose foster mom has stripped her of her religion, language, and connection to her culture, who has manipulated and molded her to be a completely different human being because she was too fragile to say no to her.

I will never forgive you for all those hours you spent in my house, looking me in the eye, holding my foster son accountable, asking me point blank if I’d had enough, listening to me, trusting my judgment, only for, one year later, for you never to trust me again.

I have been teaching for more than twenty years. I have seen belt marks on children. I have heard stories of sexual abuse. I have called to report starvation, emotional abuse, neglect, alcoholism, and drug addiction. I have done my job to protect the children who shuffle in and out of my life year after year.

And I thought you could do yours.

YOUR JOB IS TO PROTECT CHILDREN.

So is mine.

Only one of us is doing it right today.

And it is not you.

Shoot Photos

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Shoot Photos