"My grandma loves you and she's never even met you," my student said to me out of nowhere as I'm driving. He then proceeded to tell the student in the back seat that his mom was telling his grandma how I fought for him all through middle school, then fought to get him back into high school when he was kicked out, and then created a program to get him to graduation."My grandma says she has eight kids and never once did a teacher fight for one of her kids to graduate, and that's why she loves you". I replied with, "It's because I actually love you, I'm not pretending to, or forcing myself to...I actually do." He then turned and stared out the window and said, "I know". At that point the student in the back seat started to pretend to cry, everybody laughed, but it was a beautiful moment for me.
The focus of my first month of my new program, The Empowered Program, was on creating a tight knit family community that will succeed together and love each other. All ten of my students have experienced the type of abuse in childhood that initiates post traumatic stress disorder, most of them have Oppositional Defiance Disorder, some level of drug addiction, and an extreme lack of emotional control. In the first week of class, a short trip to McDonald's for breakfast ended in a class fight with a drunk man who was holding a golf club. As I pushed one raging student across the parking lot and then watched him loose physical control on a massive garbage bin, I realized that nothing was going to matter more to these kids than teaching socialization and respect. No amount of academically based material matters if a simple successful breakfast out in public can not be achieved. So I dove in head first.
On a beautiful sunny morning I took my class to the river to walk along a popular exercise trail. With their hood's pulled over their heads and coffees in their hands, my students stared at me as I instructed them to walk along the trail and say, "hello, and how are you" to the morning trail walkers. Their immediate responses were, "We are on the wrong side of the tracks, we aren't wanted here", "We look like hoodlums", and "If they don't say hi back I'm going to smash them". They were terrified, however, I persevered. This walk proved extremely emotional for me. I watched as my students engaged with the young and old trail walkers. I witnessed them become positively fueled by the responses they were receiving. As people returned greetings and stopped to small talk, my students began throwing me the thumbs up and smiling wide. I was blown away by their very real surprise at society's willingness to engage with them. Their feelings of inferiority were all of a sudden very exposed, I could almost hear their emotional "walls" falling down around them.
This trail walk led to a class trip to the mall on Valentines Day to hand out flowers to random people. My students amazed me. I watched as these very angry teenagers walked up to people of all ages, shapes and social classes, said "Happy Valentines Day" and offered a flower. The response from the public was both loving and infectious. My class talked about this experience for three days after. It may have even changed a few lives.
Of course, this past 30 days has not been all trail walks and roses. I also spent this month witnessing first hand the very real dysfunction occurring in the homes of my students. A mom's frantic phone call to my classroom at 9 am one morning had me rushing out to stand in my student's living room, in the middle of a family fight. I walked in his house, listened, assessed, and decided it was in everyone's best interest for me to remove this student from the house as fast as possible. This is exactly what I did. He cried the whole way back to the school.
I jumped into a fight at the kitchen table during cooking class, I very painfully introduced the law of positive attraction to negative thinkers, I played enough basketball to think I'm now good enough for the NBA, I acted as counselor, social worker, taxi driver, friend, mom and teacher to all ten of my students, and they are now saying that they are starting to see this class as a family.
On three separate occasions I was out in the middle of nowhere getting a student who works at night out of bed. I fed him breakfast and watched as his mom raged around the house throwing beer cans, in an angry effort to get him to go to school with me. When he finally did come to class, he left during art and sat outside by the smoke tree. I followed him outside and sat beside him. He was smoking a cigar. He turned to look at me, took a long drag off of his cigar, and through eyes that seemed a lot older than his sixteen years he said, "Tell me what the point of all this is." I replied with, "To learn how to function in society". He then said, "'I'm not smart. Graduation means nothing to me. I have a job at night that makes 400 dollars a month, but I need two jobs, my mom needs money. Did you know she had to sleep with someone to pay rent a little while ago?" I had no come back for this. I agree, it probably seems pointless to him.
I feel that now that I have started to create a solid class family, my job is to work on giving my program real individual meaning for each one of my students. To give each one of them a path to a better life. My question to myself is, how the hell am I going to do that effectively? Nobody ever said this was going to be easy.
