I work in a boarding / reform school for low-income, troubled youth. We teach a blue-collar trade and help students earn their GED or HS diploma. I teach the reading & language arts section of the GED.
Last Friday my favorite student was kicked out of the program for, frankly, a pretty serious offense. I was crestfallen.
Most of my students don’t want to be there in the first place. Most who do want to be there usually want the trade skills and couldn’t care less about the GED. For those that do, most think math is the most important part of the test because that is what their trade instructors tell them. Therefore, I have 131 students and 95% not only don’t want to be there but actively push back against any effort I make to teach them. I’ve become a babysitter and a disciplinarian, and not much else. It sucks.
This kid, though, she wanted to be there and wanted to earn her GED. She was ADHD and was functionally illiterate when she entered our program, and had dyslexia on top of all of that. Those were the primary reasons that she didn’t make it a traditional high school environment. She was probably the most difficult student I had to actually teach. I had to learn new ways of presenting material, new ways of explaining things, and discovered new limits to my patience. All on the fly. We would both get So. Fucking. Frustrated with each other. She would flip me off and call me an asshole or storm out the room in a huff, and I would take an unscheduled bathroom break to go to the teachers’ lounge and pour a cup of coffee, just because I needed to take some deep breaths and collect my thoughts a bit. But she would always come back, sit down, and start reading again. And again. And again. I would push her to complete a worksheet or sit with me and go over vocab, and she would push back… hour after hour, day after day (we have these kids for 4 hours at a time, we don’t do periods). As of a couple weeks ago when I did her last assessment, she was just a couple of points away from passing her Language Arts portion of the GED. So we doubled down and she studied harder, and I pushed her more, and we both kept being frustrated with each other.
We also talked a lot about life. She told me a lot about her abusive upbringing and living on the streets of Portland. She told me that when she was 15 her high school principal told her that she would never amount to anything, and if she got her GED she would be no better than a dropout — that no college would ever accept her and nobody would want to hire her. To that I told her that I had my GED and have 3 degrees under my belt, all from real, accredited schools. She told me she liked my classroom because she knew nobody would be waiting around to pin her to the wall after hours and stick his hand down her pants. She would give me suggestions on books to read aloud in class, books that she would painstakingly work her way through when she was hiding from her tormentors while still in middle school. She would tell me about her dreams of going to college to be an elementary school teacher, and that her biggest achievement in our program so far was that she lost the desire to cut herself. She was barely 17.
And then she was gone.
She went to Disney World over Christmas and bought me a mug as a Christmas gift because I drink coffee all day. However, she didn’t realize that it said “MOM” on the handle so she didn’t want to give it to me (a middle aged, bearded and balding man). I told her that made it extra special because I’d get a good laugh at it, and it would make a great convo piece with future students. She said she would still feel bad about it every time she saw it. So it became this daily joke: “hey, it’s almost 8am and class is going to start but I can’t drink any coffee because I don’t have a good MUG to put it in!” “Oh yeah, well that sucks for you because you’re not a MOM!” and so on. I figured she was either just jerking my chain about getting the mug, or had left it in Florida, or or or… I wasn’t ever going to see it.
On the day she left, her roommate came into my room as I was locking up at the end of the day. She handed me something wrapped in newspaper and told me that as she was watching my student getting hauled out of the dorm by security officers at 0730 that day, my student hollered over her shoulder to retrieve the damn mug and give it to me. Apparently she had squirreled it away somewhere where a locker check couldn’t find it – they aren’t supposed to have anything glass in their dorms as there are number of cutters and the occasional suicidal student. Only my student and her roommate knew where it was and were simply trying to drag out the joke as long as they could.
Standing there in my empty classroom, holding this stupid Mickey Mouse coffee mug with MOM emblazoned on the handle, I broke down and cried.
Our program is overwhelmingly filled with people who were abused, who were shunted from foster home to foster home, were homeless on the streets, and in pretty much every other bad situation you can imagine. The only thing they know is survival and defense. A student once said, in class, that the one thing they all have in common is that they’re social outcasts. The rest of the class murmured in agreement. That was a real eye-opener. From that day on I pushed myself to be more open-minded, to listen better without opining, and to try to be there when a student needed someone to talk to. I came to realize that my primary job is not to teach basic reading skills to kids who might, if they’re lucky, have a middle-school level education but rather to be a mentor, a guide, and a compassionate adult to cheer on their successes in life — something most of them have never had. Without that they will have no desire to learn the curriculum, and we’ll just go in circles.
(As an aside, I’ve had very strong words about this with other teachers who claim our fundamental job is to not be their friend or buddy but to teach them the curriculum so that they can pass their standardized tests [in this case, the GED]. I reply that, without emotional support these students won’t be able or willing to learn. A standard educational program did not work for them, so it’s my job to think outside the box a little [or a lot] and to get these kids willing to learn. Being “friends” with them is pushing it a bit, but we have to have a closer relationship than the standard high school teacher does if we want to be successful. They need to trust us, be able to confide in us, and know that class is a safe space. That’s the first step. Most disagree with me. I tell them to come teach my students for a week, and see if their tune changes.)
As teachers we aren’t supposed to have our favorites, and we certainly aren’t supposed to show it. I think I failed on both those. This kid was hands-down my favorite, and a couple of students have made comments over the past week about me losing my favorite student. I suppose I need to work on that a bit. But when 110 of my 131 students will likely leave without ever getting the gains that they need, the 21 students who want to succeed and want to make the program work for them I can’t help pushing even more. I want to feel like I’m doing some good in the world rather than just being a damn babysitter.
And with this one student, I felt like I was actually making an impact. She went from illiterate to almost passing her LA GED in less than 6 months. Then she made a stupid decision and paid the most serious consequence.
Yesterday was one of the first really nice days of the year. The sky was clear and the air was warm. I took my students on a hike into the forest that abuts our campus. Being fat and out of shape, I began to fall behind a bit on the walk back. The boyfriend of the student who was kicked out slowed down until I caught up with him. He told me that he had talked to her the previous night and she had said (to him) that we, that is, me and her boyfriend, were the only two good things about being enrolled in that school. He told me that she told him she felt that she could talk to me about anything and that I wouldn’t judge her or yell at her or call her names like other people have always done. I told him that every student can always come to me and talk, and while there are a few boundaries — I won’t talk to students about anything sexual or violent in nature, that sort of thing — I’m a pretty open and non-judgmental person. He told me that he felt that was inappropriate that she thought I was her “best friend,” and I told him that was her label, not mine. Secretly, though, I was really flattered.
We walked along in silence for a few minutes. He then shared that they now have a competition going on to see who can complete their GED first, and asked if I could help him study. I was caught off-guard a bit: he had once introduced me to his buddies as “the mean teacher” and had always avoided my class like the plague. I told him that was great, and that I’d help him study whenever he needed it. He walked on ahead, leaving me to finish the hike alone. I started crying again. Maybe I did make difference in this kid’s life after all. Maybe she’s out there, somewhere, believing that there are adults who actually support her success and not just want to beat her down and hurt her. I doubt she’ll be able to get her GED without assistance, and that makes me sad. But maybe this experience made her see the world a bit differently, and maybe she’ll set her sights higher from now on.
And God knows she made me see the world a bit differently.