The Line

We’re outlining our final writing assignment for A Day No Pigs Would Die. I’m asking the kids to take either the role of a parent who wants to ban the book from our library, or a student who is defending its presence. We’re using the persuasion map from the NCTE Read, Write, Think website (a GOLD MINE– not kidding) as our guide; the American Library Association’s banned categories for our vocabulary; and somehow everything is, miraculously, coming together. Their arguments are solid, nuanced, metacognitive. You experimental souls will understand my bemused joy when I say I’m not really sure how this happened.

I had a student four years ago who was this kind of thinking crystallized– it flew out of her mouth like birds. A brilliant, passionate, headstrong Afghani refugee, she had risen above her every circumstance, mastered English in three years, and earned a full scholarship to a local college. The last time I saw her, just before she graduated last year, she had taken her head scarf off, and flew at me from the doorway of her house to give me a huge hug.

I learned yesterday that a few weeks ago she came home and was stabbed several times by her older brother, in what appears to be a shame retribution. She survived, barely.

I kneel next to a student who is still working on her Pigs outline. “Tell me more about what you mean when you say, ‘This book teaches you about the real world’.”

She thinks. “You know. Like, there’s death, like Pinky dies.”

“Yes,” I encourage her. “That’s an incredibly important theme. Life is beautiful, but there’s death and suffering, too. That’s just a part of it all.”

And I suddenly have to close my eyes, bite my lip, and walk away.

S., who earned himself an earlier post, is paging through his binder for a paper he has lost about nine times. The binder reminds me of a molting adolescent songbird, stuffed to bursting and shedding. (The discovery of clear plastic sheaths to protect individual papers has saved this boy’s hide, and I would recommend that any teacher who has recurring problems with wrinkles, rips, food stains and footprints have an available stack of these in the classroom.)

As he riffles through the binder, without looking up, he asks, “Ms. S, what is that thing where you’re super organized? It’s like a, I don’t know, a disorder?”

I try to put myself into his synapses, and then grab it. “You mean, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?”

“Yeah,” he says matter-of-factly, papers flying everywhere. “I ain’t got none of that.”

I’m sitting at lunch with one of the worst slackers in my entire team of students—he’s in to make up a quiz from three months ago. Bright, gangly; often out of school during the first day of any given hunting season. The words “You’re so gay” are about as prevalent in his vocabulary as, well, nouns.

He has a kind and ironic sense of humor, though, and it is this that has me laughing like an idiot about a story he’s relating about a sub, who apparently cemented his power structure in the class by introducing himself as “King Johnson.”

“And then we started talking about rainbow t-shirts, you know, tie-dye,” says my student, “and then I said I didn’t like them, and he called me homophobic.”

He pauses.

“Like, what does that MEAN, Ms. S?”

I have struggled with nearly every aspect of teaching in this first mainstream year, but one of the things I can manage to do with kids is navigate fairly sensitive topics. We start a very matter of fact conversation about what people mean these days when they say colloquially that someone is homophobic. I wait for the putdown, the expected profession of revulsion, the unthinking spitback of adult conservatism. Silently I start marshalling my defense of treating everyone with dignity, regardless of whether one agrees with their choices.

My kid pauses again, now for a long time.

“But one of my family members is gay,” he says. “And some of my neighbors. And they’re fine.”

And now it’s my turn to pause.

“Then you’re not homophobic, Jack,” I finally tell him.

He squares his shoulders. Shakes his hair out of his eyes. Looks at me.

“No,” he says. “I’m not.”

Dear Lupe,

Did you ever wish that you could save the world?

Awhile back a student of mine, in seventh grade English, turned in an assigned poem. I loved its simplicity, its rhythm, the way the lines broke on the page. What made my heart even more glad was that it was from a kid I’ve been trying to reach for several years now.

Anyway. I was so proud of him that I posted the poem on my teacher blog earlier this week. And that’s where I found out he hadn’t written it at all. He had plagiarized “Kick, Push,” and confirmed that he had done it deliberately when I asked him about it. And not knowing your rap until this week, I had no idea.

It’s been an interesting journey, these past few days. I’ve cried once or twice. I’ve rethought how I give and support assignments for second language kids. I’ve been surfing your sites, pulling up your stuff on Youtube. I’ve fallen in love with your work. And I’ve rejected completely the punitive coercion that could serve as the consequence for plagiarism in my school. That stuff won’t work. This kid is too smart.

The only thing that will work, I’ve come to realize, is if, somehow, he talks to you.

This might strike you as overkill. What is plagiarism, after all, next to cheese heroin addiction, or teenage pregnancy, or gang bangs? But I would argue that it’s just this kind of tiny, critical choice, and how it’s handled by the adults involved, that can tip the balance in a pre-adolescent kid. Towards a life that is ruled by a living sense of the dignity of human beings, or suffocated with the stale mediocrity of selfishness. Towards a life fortified against amorality, or one that invites it in—in small ways now, and perhaps much worse ones later.

So now is the time.

I don’t really know what I am asking you for. Five minutes on speakerphone would do it. Perhaps a letter. Something that makes you real to my kid. Something that it is not yet, or may never be, within my power to do– try as I might.

Because you see, it’s not enough that you’re like a god to him; it’s not enough that he listens to you constantly and can recite your raps with passion and accuracy from memory in the middle of class. None of it matters—not the poetry, the positive role model, or the message—unless he internalizes it enough to know that in the destructive habit of taking the short, easy way out, he cheats everyone. You. All of us. And most importantly, himself.

I can’t guarantee that this will save the world. Maybe not even this kid. But it might. Will you bank on hope, with me?

Please give me a call.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ll be sending this via snail and email to Lupe’s production company, 1st and 15th Entertainment. Anyone else got any bright ideas? Contacts I can use? How much does a full page ad in the Chicago Times cost?

“Would the fact that a character swears a lot be an internal or external characteristic?” asks my student S. today.

“Well…” I respond. “Is swearing something he is, or something he does?”

“Something he does.”

“Then it’s external. But it’s a clue as to what is internal.” I try to bump up his Bloom’s Taxonomy a bit. “What is inside the character that makes him swear a lot?”

S. thinks. Then he looks at me and literally twinkles.

“The devil,” he says.

Perhaps I should have titled this post “How To Hide Giggling Silently During an Entire Class.”

Next up: Ed Deci’s Intrinsic Motivation Theory.