Strawberry Parfait

It's the good kids who get you

The kids I teach are very difficult. That may be an example of Southern understatement.

Some are just loud. Some are actively mean. Some will do anything to get out of doing work.

Every day they say, “We don’t have to do work anymore, it’s almost the end of the year.” We’re there until June 13, mind you. I asked the principal to come in and address the myth that we don’t do work after the standardized tests are over. She did. She’s great. It didn’t help.

So I keep assigning work. I am teaching vocabulary now. Their vocabularies are very, very small. This is common in black kids and well documented. I have actually had some great success in working with them one on one or in small groups on the vocabulary exercises, but I frequently have to excuse myself from groups of students who are trying to learn in order to break up fighting or stop kids from running around the room knocking over desks and chairs or call the amazing climate staff to help.

But…

I have some amazing kids. Some kids who make you cry, they are so sweet.

One of my best ones is always the first girl in the class in the morning. There is an order they come in. The first one, who is super sweet, comes in first every day. The next three are his best friends. These are smart, hardworking, polite and respectful young men who are my “chrome book captains.” They are in charge of putting away and plugging in the chrome books on the occasions when I have the kids use them, and they have created an incredibly efficient system for doing so. I give them a lot of stickers. One of them is also obsessed with cleaning the room and volunteers to sweep all the time. I love these kids.

The first girl in, I’ll call her Jessie because that’s not her name, is quiet. She talks with me, but she doesn’t hang out too much with the other kids. She totally separates herself from the kids who make trouble. She hangs out with two really nice girls, one of whom is not in my homeroom but runs in, gives me a hug and says, “Hi Ms. Smith.” It’s so sweet.

Jessie is quiet, and sometimes she struggles with the work, but she always tries hard. She is a favorite of all the teachers. She is oddly self-possessed for a seventh grader. I hear her parents are great.

On Friday my homeroom has cooking class. This is wonderful - a real world skill! They like it.

This Friday I was stressed out and down. My homeroom comes back after their afternoon special class, which is my prep time, and then they get their things for dismissal. They tend to be wired up, running around, fighting and play fighting, all the things they are not supposed to do at this time. And they were.

But Jessie came in and brought me a strawberry shortcake parfait that she made in cooking class.

I almost cried right then and there.

That little gift meant more to me than a diamond ever could.

I was exhausted on Friday and I was wondering how I would make it through the day. After Jessie’s strawberry parfait, I felt great. I stayed, finished my lessons for next week, made a zillion copies, and had a nice conversation with a fellow teacher. I love my fellow teachers at this school. In fact, I love the entire staff. The team spirit of all of us working like hell to try to help these kids have a chance at life is amazing. We are all frustrated, we are all somewhat burnt out. But we keep at it.

In the chaos of one of my classes, with kids crowded around my desk getting their papers graded so I could go over their mistakes with them and help them learn (if they learn and correct the mistake I give them an A. I give grades largely based on really trying and learning, not on getting it right the first time. The kids who try need to see the reward for working!), a girl asked me for a bathroom pass. I was a little short with her because it was so loud and I was so stressed out trying to help a ton of kids while monitoring for violence in the rest of the room. I realized immediately that I had been short with this girl, and I asked her to wait a moment. In front of all the kids at my desk, I said, “Kelly (not her name), I was just short with you when you had done nothing wrong. In fact, you asked very nicely for a bathroom pass. I apologize. Can you accept my apology?” She said yes and seemed to feel better. I do not want to be a part of the cycle of anger and hate. But it’s just so hard.

Then there’s a strawberry parfait. Or a kid who picks up the broom to clean the classroom that the other kids have trashed with their candy and chip wrappers, throwing the pencils I buy with my own money on the floor, and tearing up their assignments.

Then there’s the kid who got a lot of answers wrong but tries really hard, stays at my desk and works with me on the difference between “contemporary” and “concurrent.” These kids are struggling with the words. There’s the awesome kid who sits far away from the others and writes incredibly insightful entries in our daily journal. He has an opinion on whether or not schools should be taxpayer funded and he articulates it clearly.

There’s the kid who comes to me with his latest thoughts about the fairness of standardized testing. He’s starting to realize that education is biased and that the poor go to worse schools. He is frustrated that his classmates are so rude. The work is too easy for him so I’m trying to design assignments to engage his amazing growing brain. On Friday when my desk was swamped with kids trying to learn the words, I said to him, “Zack, teach these kids,” and gave him three kids to go over the worksheet with. He did it. (Also not his name. All the names are changed.) I wish I could give him Jason Riley’s book. I feel like the kid is a Jason Riley in the making. He’s so smart, so thoughtful, so respectful and polite. He wants to talk about the big issues. He asked me, “Miss Smith, what is the point of the Common Core?” Now that, my young friend, is a long conversation!

I wish I could spend more time with the kids who want to learn. No matter what level they are on, if I can spend the time I can help. And I can encourage their wanting to learn. We need to separate kids who can behave and want to learn from those who are hell bent on disruption. It’s not fair to the kids who want to learn, and it doesn’t help the disrupters either. But nobody is asking for my advice on education policy… yet.

Seventh and eighth grade are the ages when kids make big decisions without knowing it. They will either go the way of becoming successful adults, or they will fall in with the wrong crowd and head down a path that usually leads to jail or death. When I see one of my best kids start to flirt with a girl who is a disrupter (though in many ways she is a genius and I see tremendous potential in her. Some days she hates me but some days we figure out how to cooperate. It’s fun, actually. When I don’t feel like screaming!) I get worried. I want to drag the kid by the hair he doesn’t have away and say, “DO NOT DO THIS!” But I can’t. I have to stay neutral and not get involved. I do say, often, “Do not hang out with the wrong crowd.”

The year I taught seventh and eighth right off of Kensington Avenue, the toughest, totally drug ridden part of Philadelphia where you have to walk over needles to get anywhere and a large part of the population is literally nodded out on the streets, I had an amazing eighth grader. I’ll call him Jason. He was of Puerto Rican ancestry, maybe his parents or grandparents had moved here. His father was a Tiger Dad and pushed him hard. Good notes home were gold, and he got tons of them. He was so smart. Early on when I was teaching about what it means to live paycheck to paycheck, he gave the class a short lecture on getting and keeping good credit. He joined in a debate about Covid vaccines, did research, and backed up his points.

But near the end of the year, the girl he liked started going with the kid who was already gang involved and dealing drugs. I actually loved that kid… he was smart, in a clever way, and we managed to make an alliance. Though he threatened to shoot another teacher (nothing happened about it, by the way… there are no consequences in the public schools), he and I managed to figure out how to work together. He had trouble reading so I’d read to him. But he was already down the path of crime.

When Jason’s girlfriend started going with the gang involved kid, Jason started to hang out with him too. His academic performance slipped. He stopped caring so much about school work. My heart broke every single day.

I quit teaching after that year. I thought I’d never go back, but I did. So when I say I won’t go back, if I were you, I wouldn’t believe me.

But I do want to pour my energy into Israel. I want to learn Hebrew and I want to fight for Israel right here at my desk with what I write.

There are other things I believe in that I don’t talk about as much. This summer I’m going to work with an old friend in the low carb nutrition world, and I am very excited to immerse myself in something about which I have been very passionate since I met Dr. Richard David Feinman in 2009. He converted me to low carb. He bought me and egg cooker that I use almost every day for my birthday two years ago. When I am teaching, it’s hard to do anything else. I spend my free time trying to exercise, relax, and learn Hebrew by watching Gadi Taub videos that I can’t understand. After June 13, I’ll be able to breathe again, think again, talk to adults again, and work on my own book and on a book with Dr. Feinman. Basically paradise on earth.

But you know I’ll miss the kids. I even miss them over the weekend. There are some I don’t miss, but even those are entertaining. One girl was so mad that she opened the door during my prep period and threw her backpack in. I said hi to her and continued typing my lesson.

I pray every day to be patient, to not let the anger come out, to be kind and show them what it means to be a professional, functional human being. Even when they are screaming, throwing things across the room, jumping on each other, and calling me curse words.

I pray for patience, and I pray for Israel. I pray for my kids. I pray for my worldwide family.

I pray to make it through the day. And somehow, I always do.

With yellow roses I pray for the hostages, their families, and those who are home for their recovery, and those who have buried or not yet been able to bury their dead.