Matching Tracksuits

I have encounters with students sometimes that leave me wondering whether there is any good left in the word. I know there is; I see it all around me. But some interactions make me realize that some don’t see that, and so for them, it doesn’t exist. There is no good; it’s all bad. Even what they see as good is in fact probably bad.

Suzanna is a young lady who makes an impression immediately: she is, in a word, strikingly beautiful. All the teachers on the eighth-grade hall willingly admit it: she’s probably one of the most physically attractive young ladies we’ve had in the eighth grade in a long time. With a perfect dark complexion and hair that’s always in lovely curls, she’s striking. When she grows up, she’ll be the time of woman that commands everyone’s attention and admiration the moment she walks into a room.

Until she opens her mouth, for she is as unattractive on the inside as she is beautiful on the outside. Case in point: the first day of school, one of her teachers was taking roll. He called out her name, Suzanna Smith-Jones.

“Don’t call me ‘Smith.’ That’s my daddy’s name. I don’t like him. And I don’t like you.”

The first words out of her mouth. Her first impression.

“She said it with such anger, with such hatred,” the teacher explained to me later as I was checking up on her — I don’t teach her — after she and I had had a run-in one morning in the hallway.

“What kind of life has she lived to get that messed up in only thirteen years?” I asked. “What kind of a future does she have?”

The encounter I’d had with her was instructive as well. It was in the morning, before the actual school day started when students who arrive early are to sit outside their homeroom teacher’s door and wait quietly and patiently. I’d noted early in the week that she was sitting at the top of the hall, so I assumed that was where her homeroom was. I was stationed at the middle of the hall, so when she came to my area and plopped down with some friends, I politely said, “You need to go back up there to your homeroom, please.”

“I ain’t goin’ up there,” she said, her voice instantly on edge with anger.

These types of reactions — instant and unqualified disrespect when I’ve made a conscious effort to be respectful — constitute my one big button. I don’t lose my temper with students often, but this does it. Still, I’ve been conscious of it for some time now, and I’ve largely managed to get that under control. So instead of responding like some teachers would, with instant anger and disrespect in return, I simply restated my instructions: “I’m afraid I’m not asking you. I really need you to go back up the hall, please.”

“I’m just gonna sit here like I do every day.”

“Don’t do this, please. Make a better choice.”

At this point, her friends began encouraging her: “Come on, Suzanne, just do what he says.” I find that when I’m polite at all times, I earn a reputation among students for just that, and in such encounters, they often respond by suggesting that their friend is making a mistake. I was glad to see it happening then, and I really hoped she would comply. That would be the end of it. But she wasn’t giving in.

“I ain’t doin’ nothing. I’m just sittin’ here.”

It occurred to me that perhaps her homeroom was in fact in the middle of the hall, and I realized that this was going nowhere: I couldn’t force her to move, and she wasn’t complying, so I simply stated, “Well, I’m afraid you’ll just have to talk to Mr. M when I refer the matter to him.”

“I guess I will.”

After some checking later in the morning, I learned that her homeroom was not at the top of the hall, not in the middle of the hall, but at the far end of the hall.

Often, with such kids, I make a special effort: I actively try to cultivate a new relationship after such an encounter. These relationships sometimes turn into some of the closest, warmest relationships I have with students. I become something of a coach to them, something of a mentor. Such students often seek me out when they’re having a conflict with another student or a teacher because they know they can vent their frustration safely with me and that the only thing they’ll get in return is a little coaching and a lot of encouragement.

I tried to cultivate such a relationship with Suzanna. She was not simply ambivolent; she was openly hostile to the idea. I waited, tried again. Still the same reaction.

A girl trapped in her own frustration, feeding off her own anger, as such a dismal future in my eyes that it makes it difficult to watch that person move through her day. She’s a pinball, batted about by the whims and accidents of the people around her.

Written several years ago during the school year.

A young man this morning had a run-in with me. I say “he had a run-in with me,” but I guess the opposite is equally true: I had a run-in with him. But in a way, it’s a matter of semantics, for it seems all our interactions are negative like this morning’s. In short, he does not like being told what to do by anyone, and though I don’t teach him, I am still responsible for him as a teacher on the hall, so I have to tell him to do things. Like get in dress code. Or take off the headphones. Or stop chasing this or that girl. Or get to class. Or get to your locker. Any number of things that he knows perfectly well he’s expected to do. This morning’s encounter was another in a long line of meaningless conflicts that arise from his instant disrespect whenever he’s told to do something.

At about six-two, Terrence is taller than almost all his eighth-grade peers, perhaps because he’s supposed to be in ninth grade. He struts down the hall and is admired by boys and girls alike. Boys and girls who see his supposed toughness as a virtue. Boys and girls for whom his probation-related ankle-bracelet adds to his prestige. Most teachers think a little less highly of him than do his peers.

“Terrence, you need to get to your class. It’s girls’ locker time, not boys’.”

Instant conflict: “Man, you see my teacher ain’t here. You see I gotta wait in the hall!” in such a bellicose and hateful yelled tone that it’s a wonder he was surprised at all what was coming next: a reprimand for disrespect.

“There’s no need to talk to me that way…” and he turned his back on me and stood with his back to me. Fairly typical behavior.

“That’s fine, Terrence. I’ll refer this matter to the administrator.” Which means really nothing because he’ll get a day or to OSS for it, and kicking a kid like this out of school is no kind of punishment at all. It is, of course, a relief to his teachers because they don’t have to deal with his nonsense. It’s a relief to his classmates because now they can get some work done. But for Terrence? It’s meaningless, and he didn’t mind telling me so.

“Man, I don’t even care.”

That could be his mantra, and he’s not the only student like that. They’re the ones that are the toughest to care about because they don’t even seem to care about themselves or others enough to see the harm their behavior causes, to themselves or to others. Their lack of self-confidence displays itself in bellicosity and anger, and the only way to get through a protective shell like that is not to take their verbal strutting personally — much easier said than done. And so such students just jostle about through the day, bouncing from one conflict to another, all of which serves as just more evidence to their victim mentality that the whole world is out to get them.

Later in the day, he was sauntering down the hall while I was out working with a couple of students who’d asked to work in the hall to avoid a potential conflict in the classroom (Some days, it’s all about the “drama” as the kids call it). Terrence stopped briefly to chat with a friend who was returning to another classroom from the bathroom. He explained that he had a day of OSS.

“Why?” his friend asked.

“Because of him,” he said, pointing at me.

I’d written the administrative referral during my morning planning period, and the grade-level administrator had already processed it. It’s telling because of the simple fact that Terrence’s referral received top-level priority. I’m not sure he would have grasped the significance or irony. In honesty, though, none of that entered my mind at the moment. I simply replied with my own mantra of sorts, the standard response I give to students who blame a teacher for their behavior issues: “No, Terrence, it was because of the choices you made.”

“Man, I didn’t even want to talk to you,” he sneered.

There, in less than ten words, was the summation of his whole problem. In fact, he only needed four: “I didn’t even want…” If Terrence doesn’t want something, he doesn’t do it; if he wants something, he does it. Anything that gets in the way is going to cause a conflict, and Terrence has learned that if he is aggressive enough, disrespectful enough, and consistent enough, he can get what he wants from a lot of people who in fact are in positions of authority over him. Clearly, he behaves thus with his parents (or, more likely, with  his mother — statistically speaking, he’s likely from a single-parent home), and clearly it works, else he wouldn’t do it. It’s probably also worked with teachers who are just tired of the fight and give in from exhaustion. But I’ll stand my ground with a Terrence. I’ll be part of the wall that he crashes himself against. “It’s better that he learn now when the stakes are not as high,” I might even justify it to myself. Truth be told, a significant portion of it is pride — same as Terrence.

“It doesn’t matter whether you wanted to talk to me or not. I’m the one in authority, and when you don’t…” but it was useless.

What I really wanted to say was, “Well, there will be lots of people you don’t want to talk to, like the judges you’ll appear before throughout your life. But they won’t really care whether or not you want to talk to them, and if you talk to them as you speak to any and all adults in this building, you’ll have some pretty hefty consequences.” I thought of Ebony Burks and her encounter with a judge during her arraignment.

We might be troubled by the way the judge seems to antagonize the situation, but in the end, Ms. Burks is responsible for what comes out of Ms. Burks’s mouth, and she could have stopped at any moment. Terrence is easy to imagine responding in a similar fashion.

That’s what I wanted to say but of course would never say. “Less said, easier mended” our previous principal’s email signature read, and it was something I really took to heart. Besides, to tell Terrence that would be to tell him one day he’s going to sprout wings and become a flying turnip: he’d never believe it.

Terrence is the type that has such an impact on the hall that when he’s missing, it’s immediately obvious, and so in the afternoon, I noticed he was missing but assumed he’d just been sent to ISS for the remainder of the day. Perhaps he’d given another teacher trouble, and the teacher simply sent Terrence to the administrator straight from the classroom.

It turns out he’d continued making poor decisions after our first encounter, but the decisions of the morning were nothing compared to the decisions he’d made even earlier in the day, before he left for school, as he was packing his materials, such as they are, for a day of instruction — choices so dire that his hypothetical appearance before a judge I’d been imagining transformed to the afternoon’s certainty. In short, having brought a pistol to school, he is in about as much trouble as a young man can be in, and he will not be coming back to school.

And my reaction? I smiled at the thought of almost-instant karma. In fact, walking out to the car, I couldn’t wipe the stupid grin from my face. It was as if I’d experienced the greatest “I told you so” moment in my life. “Of all the kids to bring a gun to school,” all the teachers had been saying, “I would have picked him.” Of all the students to do something that would land him in front of a judge, I would have picked Terrence. Our clairvoyance instantaneously confirmed.

And now? I think to myself, why in the hell was I smiling at another human being’s misfortune? Certainly his misfortune was a self-created condition, borne of his consecutive poor decisions. In short, from a certain point of view, he got what he deserved. But for a child of that age, no more than fourteen, perhaps fifteen (if he’s been held back a year), it’s tragic to think that his worldview, his reactions, his existence has been so poorly shaped that he already has virtually no future. He had no input regarding his environment. He had no input into the involvement of his father in his life. He adapted to the laws of the street and simply never learned to turn those behaviors off when in a situation with said behaviors were no longer positive but in fact detrimental.

I’m not saying he’s just a victim, for he’s had seven or even eight, possibly nine, full years of school in which to watch other students who don’t find themselves constantly in trouble and learn to copy their behavior. Still, there is an element of victimization here that only leaves me shaking my head, determined to try to get through to the next Terrence I meet (I have a couple in my own classes every year) and thankful that I am able to provide my own children with the stability that these children never experienced.

Addendum: Background

The above was written some time ago–I held off publishing it because I really didn’t know how the story would end.

I know now.

Terrence appeared before a judge and faced charges. He appeared before the school board and was expelled. And he committed another crime in the meantime and is now locked up.

I held off publishing also because I thought he might end up back at our school if he’d been expelled. Unlikely, but a possibility, for expulsion in our county means expulsion for a full year, after which, the student can return to the school and pick up where he left off, so to speak. With his later charges, Terrence likely won’t be coming back ever again.

We heard more about his situation as the year progressed. Apparently, his father had just gotten out of prison when all this started. I can only imagine the sense of complete failure his father felt when he learned what his son had done, the frustration he felt driving to the school to meet with administrators and police officers about the choices his son had made. I can imagine a conversation like this when he sees his son:

“Didn’t I teach you anything going to prison?”

“Yeah, you taught me plenty.”

It was a difficult poem, to be sure. But I’d adjusted accordingly.

First, I’d given students plenty of footnoted definitions. Words like “smouldered” and “pungence” (the poem used British English) would have left them flummoxed otherwise.

Additionally, I’d asked a fairly simple series of questions as part of our weekly inference practice: “What can we tell about this lady? What does she look like? Is she old or young?” As always, I expect the students to back up their answer with the text, and I’ve given them a simple formula to follow.

• Make a claim: “The lady is x.”
• Back it up from the text: “I know this because the text says…”
• Explain your thinking with one or two sentences: “This shows she’s x because…”

I really don’t feel like it’s all that challenging. Besides, it’s something we do every Friday — inference work.

“It’s like shooting free throws,” I tell them. “It’s the most basic skill we do when we read, inferring.” It’s why we do it every Friday, week after week.

Thirdly, I’d cut the text: we were only working on the first stanza. The rest of the poem, I felt, might confuse them more.

Finally, I am always walking about the room as students work, offering help and answering questions, helping redirect or clarify thinking or ask questions that help them see the text in a new way, and there is a co-teacher in the room as well.

The text itself was a poem by Amy Lowell, “The Lady.”

You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colors.

So given the questions — “What can we tell about this lady? What does she look like? Is she old or young?” — and the formula we’ve been using all year, something like this was my objective for student achievement:

The lady in the poem is beautiful. I know this because the poem starts with the words, “You are beautiful.” The poem wouldn’t say “You are beautiful” unless the lady was beautiful. The writer might be joking, but I don’t think so.

Also, the lady in the poem is old. I know this because the poem says, “You are beautiful and faded.” I know from my own experience with clothes that usually it’s old things that fade. So if the writer says the lady is faded, she must be old.

Of course there would be varying degrees of writing proficiency with that (I don’t teach writing — I’m the literature/reading teacher), and I would have to help some students reach that second realization. Also, that final sentence of the first paragraph requires some evidence as it makes a claim. What in the poem suggests the writer Still, most of them saw these things and wrote something similar.

Many, but not all.

There are several students who receive special ed services in that class — it’s an inclusion class, and there’s a co-teacher in there for that very reason. Many of the inclusion students have behavior issues that accompany their learning disabilities, but some just quietly do the best the can.

One such student produced the following in reply to the above prompt:

we know about this woman that she is beautiful and she likes an old opera tune and the perfume of her soul and she is young and her appearance is a grow mad with gazing and eighteenth-century boudior and her personality is blent colors

The lack of punctuation and capitalization is fairly typical of average eighth-grade students these days, at least in my school. That’s not my concern with this excerpt. What initially fascinates (and saddens) me is the content: it simply makes little to no sense at all past the first two clause-like elements: “we know about this woman that she is beautiful and she likes an old opera tune.” Beyond that, it seems like just a random collection of elements from the original text.

There is, however, a pattern. She clearly referred back to the questions: she explains about “her appearance” and then “her personality.” So this was not an apathetic student just randomly grabbing some words and throwing them together. This was not a vindictive act of “I’ll just put complete nonsense there because…” It’s a genuine effort at answering what was for her an incredibly difficult question.

Yet there’s more than just that. Look closely: she links “appearance” with “gazing,” a verb connected to seeing. She links “personality” to “blent colors” because the poem says “your blent colors,” so she clearly recognized that possessive pronoun and made a stab that that might be related to “her personality.” It’s not a bad interpretation, to be honest.

It’s really a valiant effort, truth be told.

But I didn’t see that at first. Grading so many such assignments, week in, week out, I get to where I’m only scanning, truth be told. Which is to say, I read it, but I read it so very fast that I’m not really reading it in the truest sense of the word. I’m not reading it like I read a book that I’m really enjoying, or even an email from a colleague. I’m looking for specific things very quickly.

I’m doing what I tell my students not to do.