12/17/19: because we have to

I’m not an optimist by nature, so when Jo called to talk about the piece I’d been working on for the newsletter—this piece—I had a feeling I knew what her feedback was going to be. She didn’t actually use the word lugubrious, but she certainly could have, and it would have been apt. I’d written this dreary, somber essay, all big sad cow eyes and mournful violins—there was even a line about the hero’s quest and gaze-into-the-distance rhetorical questions including why choose the harder path and look, fine, I can absolutely admit I have a tendency to get a little carried away.

It’s just that when I visit classrooms like the ones BtB does programs in, my instinct is to notice the kid in the back who spends the whole period playing on a phone, completely ignored by the teachers. I fixate on the boy who’s freaking out at his desk, vibrating with energy he can’t use, and I imagine the school day as one long test of willpower for him. I think about how many times a day he must lose the battle only to hear, “Jesse, be quiet! Jesse, sit still!” I am drawn to the kids whispering to each other in Spanish, trying to follow the teacher’s directions by mimicking the motions of the English-speaking kids around them, their saucer-shaped eyes betraying their total incomprehension.

There are plenty of positive things happening in these classrooms, of course, but we all see what we see and what I see is often the cracks between the light, not always the light itself. But then again, I’ve been on the board and a volunteer for Behind the Book for more than 10 years, so I know the light is there—my eyes just gravitate to the darkness. So, whenever I talk to other people, especially teachers, who spend time in these classrooms, I always end up fishing around trying to figure out how they do it—how they stay in the light.

Spoiler: it turns out it’s not always easy for them, either, but the one truth I’ve come to in ten years of these conversations is that we don’t have another choice. In fact, I have come to believe it is a moral imperative for every one of us to stop waiting for “someone” to “fix the system” and instead step up and try to help: one individual, meaningless-feeling drop at a time.

Ms. M. was in her first year teaching fifth grade at P.S. 4, Duke Ellington, in Washington Heights when I cornered her with my question, this time phrased as why she chosen her second career—the first in interior design—to work for the DOE. Ms. M. has an open face and a ready smile; long brown hair, dimples, and a hint of freckles. She looks young but she’s got an air of confidence that gives her an air of authority, which is a pretty important thing to have as a teacher, and like a good teacher, she smelled the real question my cynical old self was asking and she turned that question right back on me: “Is that it might not work a reason to stop trying?”

I believe my response was a long silence during which I blinked a lot, as, well, no, that wasn’t exactly the question I was trying to ask but then again, okay, yes, that was kind of the question I was trying to ask, I just didn’t have the nerve to do so. But Ms. M. saw through me, the way good teachers do, and she knew what I wanted to talk about, so, the way good teachers do, she didn’t judge me or scold me or shame me, she just let me ask my questions and she answered them openly and with compassion.

The question I’d come in with was ostensibly about why Ms. M. was such a passionate advocate for BtB’s programs—I was looking for some fawning over how great we are and how important the work we do is, largely so I could write it all up and send it out in the newsletter and people would give us money to keep doing this great work—but having spent an hour as a volunteer in her classroom, my face must have reflected my emotions when I asked her, rather bluntly, why she’d chosen this path.

Ms. M. is the kind of person who says “Bless you” when a stranger on the subway sneezes, the kind of person who seems to have infinite resources of patience and fortitude. I know she’s human like the rest of us, but in the time I spent with her the trait I saw over and over and over again, after humor, was determination. Ms. M. is not the kind of lady who gives up, and when I pressed her on the greatest challenge she faces in the classroom—looking, as I do, for the negative—I could hear the frustration in her voice when she talked about students who have a kind of learned helplessness; the ones who default to saying, “I can’t do it,” or “It’s too hard,” and then give themselves permission to quit. She wasn’t frustrated with them, but with a culture and surroundings that had taught these kids, even at such a young age, that they probably couldn’t do it, that it might actually be too hard, when she was absolutely convinced that wasn’t the case, if only someone could help them be brave enough to try.

The student population at P.S. 4 is overwhelmingly Hispanic, with more than a third classified as English Language Learners, and the school has an economic need index more than 17 points higher than the rest of the city, at 89%. Some 18% of students, 94 out of the 523 in the last school year, were classified as effectively homeless. Ninety-four kids coming to school from a shelter, from living—not by choice—with a relative or family friend, or from the street.

Overall, this school underperforms compared to the rest of the city schools, and Ms. M. sees a lot of students who, she said, have little desire to do well inside of school because of what happens outside of school. Many of them are angry, they’re unhappy, and school may not always feel like the warm and fuzzy safe space we see in movies: sometimes, for these kids, school might feel like just another place they go where adults tell them what to do. What these kids don’t know, of course, is that these adults are trying to challenge them in order to help them, are trying to encourage them in order for them to grow—but kids who lack confidence or strong support networks outside of school can get discouraged and down on themselves very easily. It’s much easier to say, “I can’t,” than to actually try and run the risk of finding out that “I can’t” is true.

Here's the thing: it's not just kids who feel this way. “I can’t” is how so many of us, myself included, turn our backs on doing the right thing because we don’t believe it will matter, we don’t believe that what we can do might be of value enough to be worth doing. “It’s too hard” is the lie we tell ourselves when we are afraid to try.  

I sat in on a class with 26 students present that day, 26 students making various levels of effort at completing an assignment amidst the surging pulse of life in an elementary school, everybody needing something, the reading teacher coming in to grab a couple of kids, hands raised over there, a coordinator stopping by to check on a kid who’s been chronically absent, an eruption of noise from the hallway that could be a fight or a celebration or both, almost never a moment of quiet or silence. Amidst that chaos, I saw kids who looked withdrawn, disconnected, who were slumped over desks, just letting the minutes tick by. Other kids were boisterous and physical, focused more on their peers than on any assignment, a thrumming energy pulsing from them. I looked around the room and saw all of the cracks, all of the fissures opening up around our kids, and forgot entirely to look for the light. It took a fifth-grade teacher giving up her planning period at 11:05 on a Thursday morning to show me how to see it.

Ms. M.’s students had read The Honeybee Man and met the author, Lela Nargi, and wrote stories and made art and took a field trip to an actual rooftop farm with bee hives and even had their own work published in a beautifully designed book we presented to each student at a class party. It turns out that the field trip was cool and having a real-life author in the class was great, but the reason Ms. M. wants to shout BtB’s praises from the mountaintops is because of the people, specifically the volunteers.

Thanks to an unbelievably determined and organized volunteer coordinator and a lot of time and effort, BtB programs bring as many as 10 or 12 volunteers into classrooms to help students with research and/or with writing. Having been one of these volunteers many times, my first reaction was, “Really? Us??”  

Ms. M. was insistent, “Yes, the volunteers! You have no idea how important it is for our kids to have random people they’ve never met giving them the time of day and helping.”

I pressed her for more information and she gave me the example of a particular student who is just always angry: she’s not even sure why, as while some kids have real reasons to be angry, if this kid does, Ms. M. doesn’t know what they are. But he’s angry, he’s always angry, and when the BtB volunteers came to the classroom one day and he was assigned to the butterfly group, she watched a volunteer ask him if he wanted to do something and he said, vehemently, “No.”

The volunteer said, “Okay,” and turned to ask another student, and then something happened, something Ms. M. could not explain, where this kid just…changed. His anger melted, he moved his chair closer to the group, he had a look of interest on his face, and then suddenly he was asking a question and listening carefully to the answer and then he was getting out some paper and joining in on the assignment and Ms. M. couldn’t say why this happened except that maybe this volunteer wasn’t a teacher, wasn’t an adult grading him or judging him or about to tell him to be quiet or to do something, and all he needed was just simply someone paying attention.

I’d been in the classroom for the book publication party the week before and Ms. M. called out the book as an example of the power of the program: every single kid in the class had something in the book. Every. Single. One. When BtB was in the classroom, she told me, she never saw her students work so hard. The entire class was focused at the same time, on the same thing; they helped each other and worked together and no one put his head down on the desk or said “I can’t do it,” or if they did, a volunteer was there to say, “Yes, you can,” and then…they did. Every single one of them.

And that’s why this essay should be—is—a positive one. Because there are teachers and people and organizations and programs that are there for the kids who need a little extra time and affection and encouragement. And those same teachers and people and organizations and programs and the kids themselves are there to give all of us the help we need to be brave enough just to try.

I’ve realized that looking for the cracks is the easy part—they’re right there, stark and visible, while the light is hard to face—it’s bright, it demands a response. The darkness would let me be, would let me hide, but it’s the light that burns away those shadows and requires us to be brave enough to face it, to admit it in, to open up our hearts to hope. And hope requires action, hope only stays alive because people keep it that way, breathing life into it over and over again.

It had only been a few minutes into our conversation that I had somewhat rudely asked Ms. M., this lovely, cheerful, determined woman ,why she did what she did; why she bothered, why she threw herself into caring for these kids even when they didn’t always seem to care about themselves, and after she responded with a question of her own, she answered it: “Why try? Because we have to.” She said it just like that, simply, plainly, easily: Because we have to.

At first I thought her answer meant the alternative was unthinkable, but now I realize that what she meant was that the alternative is all too thinkable, all too seductive: it is all too easy to look into the darkness, into the void, and to turn away from whatever is in there we cannot see. It’s the work of a minute to watch a kid ignore the teacher and stare out the window; it’s the work of a lifetime to go toward him, to crouch down at his eye level, to say, Hey, how are you doing?

The darkness is made of the walls we erect, the barriers we build out of I can’t, it’s too hard, it won’t work. The light is made of the possibilities that stream in when we are brave enough to try to pull those barriers down. In talking with Ms. M. I have learned her confidence isn’t unshakable, and the vulnerability she has let me see has shown me exactly how brave she is. The choice to try is an act of optimism, a statement of belief in the possibilities ahead, a line drawn in the sand that marks a border where I can’t is no longer an option, where it’s too hard isn’t a good enough excuse, where it might not work, but we don’t know that yet. Tearing those shelters away can leave us exposed and blinking, sometimes too blinded to see a way forward, but meeting the Ms. M's of the world is what reminds me I’d rather be scared than safe, I’d rather be in the light than hiding in the darkness

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For a string of Thursdays, Behind the Book came into Ms. M’s classroom to help her lift up, to help her be brave enough to try, and that mattered, she told me, that mattered a lot. Why try? Why bother? Because we have to, she said, because we have to.

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily represent those of Behind the Book.