A couple examples of the diversity of South HS, our city, and our society: one family had a 105-year-old Caucasian great-grandma, a 70-something grandma (a South alumnus), an adopted son from Vietnam (also a South alumnus), his Vietnamese wife and freshman son.
Another family lived in a duplex. On one side lived two moms. We walked through the younger son’s bedroom to the other half of the duplex where the two dads lived. They are all raising two sons.
Both families received us warmly and had well-spoken, artistic, athletic children who want to come to our school for its friendliness and DIVERSITY.
These are eye-opening experiences. You can see firsthand that the only thing that really makes a family is LOVE.
If you took a moment to really see what it’s like on the other side of closed doors, your whole worldview could change. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
teaching
Call to Prayer
my morning prayer call:
please end these flooding puddles
water can destroy
our house ruined thrice
our hope so oft washed away
ponds where there was lawn
but look at the view
the first-world rainy view
to make my request
after the drenched walk
to a surprise bonus check
to start my summer
it’s like He listened
by midday? pools and blue skies
walking can save souls
The Same Zip Code
we make home visits to welcome freshmen
who haven’t set foot in our school.
on the drive we discuss gentrification,
how these kids are coming across town
to our school because they think it’s better
(but it’s so much better than the remnants
of gangs that linger in their northwest ‘hood,
in the high school that hasn’t caught up
with the white money-chasers)
inside the first house, a blond bombshell
(shy as a country field mouse) lets us into
her gutted bungalow, replete with
granite counters all around, tells us she chooses us
because the people at our school were nicer
than the pompous competitor next to City Park
we make our way back to the south side
and step into a mansion built
on top of one of Denver’s many scrapes,
with oriental rugs leading from
hallway to music room to never-ending kitchen,
with a nice mother and a moody teenage boy
who grunts responses to questions
(because manners can’t be bought)
and then, within the same zip code of
block after block of mansions that
have all but stomped out the middle class,
we pull up to our last stop:
The Red Pine Motel,
settled along Broadway
between a bar and a pot shop.
in a tiny apartment without a table,
a man stands eating a bowl of soup,
his hand half broken and bandaged,
his pony tail tied at the nape of his neck,
his high-heeled wife potty training
her three-year-old in the adjacent room.
“you can come and look, do your check,
do what you need to do.”
we exchange glances.
do they they think we’re the cops?
are they used to this?
my colleague reassures him that this is a friendly visit,
that we have papers and t-shirts
and hope for a better tomorrow
(God save us all)
we sit on the bench-like singular piece of furniture
in the kitchen/living/dining room,
(no more than 100 square feet)
with a miniature gas stove and not a single
speck of a counter, granite or otherwise
the boy is running late
and both parents engage in disgruntled talk
when he arrives,
and they plain as day tell us what he’s like
and he plain as day answers.
they use words like imaginative.
engaging.
photographic memory.
and the little girl sports her
oversized South Future Rebel t-shirt,
and the uncle waits outside and begs
to have a t-shirt too,
so proud are they of sending their boy
on the one mile
(the one million mile)
walk between their dwelling and
the grandiose Italian architecture
that will be his high school,
where he will walk past
block after block of mansions
in the same zip code
through the disappearing middle class
into the institution
that will grant him a future
or place him right back
into the thin line of poverty
that hovers over our city.
and this is what it’s like to be a teacher
in today’s world.
The Buck that Burns Across My Back
It is 14:52 on the eve of ESL summer school. We have spent an entire day, AN ENTIRE DAY, planning for a sixty-five-minute lesson from curriculum that we first laid our eyes on this morning after a completely different and unrelated ENTIRE DAY presentation of curriculum yesterday. And at this moment, he announces that tomorrow, for the first day, the schedule will be “different.” That all our lesson planning has just been flushed down the toilet that has become our society.
I cried on my two-mile walk this morning. Not because it was too hot, or the views of the Perfect Denver Neighborhood weren’t impeccable. Or because I had to teach summer school for four weeks to pay for summer camp for my girls for ONE. But because of an article I read about the University of Phoenix, of all things. About how, in five years, their enrollment has decreased by fifty percent. And starting July 1st, a new law will require that they prove that their graduates make enough money to pay back the loans that their for-profit greed has forced them to take.
I was thinking these things as I made my way across town to the locale of this year’s grant-funded summer school, the University of Denver, a NONprofit institution with gorgeous grounds and transgender bathrooms and air conditioning and classes that start at $1200 a CREDIT.
And how screwed I am. Not because I think that the University of Phoenix is so damn amazing that it could grind up the 100-year-old trees of Denver’s “Ivy League of the West.” But because I have to do this. I have to do this damn summer school and have a part time job as an adjunct-but-never-real professor, that I have to bend my will to the beck and call of disorganized, incapable-of-communicating administrators, all for the buck that burns across my back.
That the measly $600 that I sometimes earn in a month at the University of Phoenix is sometimes all that keeps us from bowing down to debt.
And when he comes in at 13:33 and tells me that they haven’t been able to contact more than 11 students for our summer school, I ask him if it will be cancelled, if I will be shit out of luck on all counts this Tuesday. “No worries… it’s already accounted for… a grant. No pasa nada.” And his blue eyes and Argentinian accent are slappable. “And who paid for it?” I demand, the third time in two months I’ve asked, a question he’s dodged until this moment. “Well… you have. The taxpayers. The READ Act.”
And it all circles back to me. The University of Denver grounds I stand on that have been manicured by professional gardeners. The school I could never afford to attend, nor will any of my children even think of applying to. The public education that is filled and funded with so many holes, twenty-seven gorgeous textbooks, full-color photos and activities galore, a slew of classroom supplies including an electric pencil sharpener, that 11 students will take advantage of … all the rest? To waste.
The “for-profit” evil University of Phoenix that has allowed my family to break free of the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle that is a teacher’s salary, that allowed us to live on a pittance in Spain, that has allowed me to… breathe.
What is an education worth? Why won’t parents commit to a forty-five minute bus ride for free materials, expert teachers, individualized classes, and free breakfast and lunch? Why won’t the University of Denver be asked to publish data on how many students graduate with a super-fancy psychology degree and start their salaries at $22,000? Why won’t our government ever just see that EDUCATION SHOULD BE FREE??
This is my Tuesday. Let the games begin. The Hunger Games, real world style.
Recycle
a wasted training
a waste of district dollars
a waste of my day
but at six-thirty
they shoveled mud off the path
giving me my ride
at least there’s a view
a day’s cycling release
to shed off the waste
The New Drive-In
summer-teasing sky
in the midst of finals week
beckons this field trip
free lawn movie night
we can pretend school’s out
just four days early
Weights and Measures
a half day of waste
for undeserving seniors
with enough credits
the choices they make
based on so few students’ needs
hurt everyone else
education’s weight
while in line we stand. and wait.
weigh in: their way out
can they hold their weight?
while the society waits
an old way to weigh?
let’s measure anew
let loose the weight we all bear
find another weigh
A Visit from Charles Schwab
a day off of work
for three hours with students
plus!–small donation
refugees’ lives
summarized in two chapters,
questions that plague them
if they saw their day,
their actual student day,
they might learn something
instead, they murmur
over plot complexities
and students’ English
they might realize,
when to mansions they return,
the true complex plot:
they can’t give answers
to high school reading questions
nor inequity
work, in equities:
invest in students, not stocks.
buy them a future.
That Reminder of Parenthood
i didn’t get a photo
of that bright face looking out from the crowd
of the circle of middle school spur-of-the-moment dancers
jamming to a Middle Eastern tune
with their white black brown faces
and her Latin American dress spinning out from under
a tunnel of happiness
there is no way
no possible way
my phone could have captured
the enraptured joy of that moment
of the confidence instilled back into my
fifth-grade-turned-sour timid child
who has found her place
in the oft-militaristic
ever-loving ever-respectful
intensity of love
that is this school
and when i see those
bright twelve-year-old eyes
shining back at me
because she knows i know
(to pain and back, we’ve been)
it is that moment of parenthood
that reminder of why we are parents
why we bring them into this world
and spend our Saturday nights inside a school
eating foods from around the world
listening to the intricate threads that sew together our humanity
why we love
why we live
why we still hope
for a better tomorrow
Catch Me a Moon
before dawn, i walk
full moon of icy danger
to be there for them
classroom lit, open
first day, students new to me
i set standards high
phones, backtalk, shouting
first impression resistance
shake me to my core
after school begging
for schedule changes, fallbacks
they hate and love me
i missed my girls’ smiles
their good-morning kisses, hugs
to face this chaos?
slushy post-school walk
to their bright eyes, warm faces
lost in built-up play
then, online ranting
plagiarizing grown student
demanding grade change
why you, and not them?
the question of my moon day
please… catch me a moon
make it bright like them
shining beyond snowy morn
lighting, guiding love
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