The first class strolled in. They were as loud and rowdy as any group of problem kids you’ve seen in countless movies, from To Sir With Love and Blackboard Jungle, to Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, Dangerous Minds, and Freedom Writers.
They looked surprised to see me — a new teacher at the start of the second semester. A white woman, dressed in my best teacher drag of beige dress and kitten pumps.
They were tough kids, most of them. One wasn’t tough on the surface, and was deceptively quiet. The class and I learned later how tough he really was.
He was there because he left a war-torn African country as a refugee with his mother, brothers, and sisters. He was twenty-one, the final year he qualified to pass the State Exam to graduate high school. He told me those basic facts when I asked the students to introduce themselves on the first day. He then sat in silence in the back row, waiting for me to calm the class so we could start.
The rest had been kicked out of their own high schools for behavior issues or chronically skipping school. At least one who told me he belonged to a gang, but there were probably more who weren’t as open about it.
They were male and female. One girl in particular gave me as much trouble as the boys. She slammed her books on her desk the first night and stormed out. The policy was that we were to follow them, and then report their leaving to the office. I did neither.
If I had followed her, the rest of the class would have erupted. And she would have won.
My staying showed the others that storming out was a tactic that wouldn’t work. It also let her calm down in private — I hoped — though I wouldn’t know that until she returned the next night. She was still sullen when she returned.
The youngest was 16, and the class clown. He bragged he’d never read a book. In the beginning, he often led the class in acting out and ignoring me. He made them laugh, the key to getting attention and respect, he thought.
When I arrived to take over the senior English class mid-year, it was clear they had been allowed to do things their way. Or maybe they were just hoping to get their bluff in on the new teacher. They underestimated me.
I had to get their attention
I was a new therapist, an older teacher at 43, and had worked for a year with gang members. Before that, I interned in a prison. My black belts in Aikido and the gang member history gave me some street cred, even though I’m petite, white, and 5’2″. They weren’t quite sure what to do with me or what I might do with them.
In the prison where I interned as a therapist, and with gang members, you do two initial things. You find the leaders and the toughest ones and you show them you aren’t afraid — even if you are — and gain their respect.
Then you make allies, although some of them may not want to advertise they’re your allies. That’s okay. They’ll have your back when you need them. Most of the time.
The Rastafarian, who was also a Methodist minister’s son, became my ally. He and his father had their obvious issues, but I respected his choices and supported him. He supported my efforts to get the other kids to read.
However, on the day the principal came to observe my class, he sat in the back and refused to respond or answer when I called on him. I felt betrayed, even though it wasn’t his job to be supportive of me. He didn’t have an explanation for why he shut down. I’m guessing he had authority issues that were triggered by the principal’s presence.
Before the semester was over, they had written and self-published a book
He became the editor of the book I asked them to write and self-publish, although self-publishing meant something different then. Here’s one of his prose poems:
The gang member also respected me and became an ally. We’re friends on Facebook these many years later. For inclusion in the book he wrote about a dream far from the mean streets. Here is the first paragraph:
I didn’t come here to be their “white savior’”
What I wanted was for them to have opportunities to save themselves.
These students were of all ethnicities. Although, since racism is systemic in education, most were LatinX or Black. Part of what I did do was introduce them to their own roots and history through books.
I wanted to empower them in whatever ways they would accept. One unorthodox way was to take their sides.
At random intervals, metal detectors were brought in and set up in the hallway. Classes were brought out one by one and students filed through the detectors.
These were the days which in hindsight were halcyon. Before the first school shooting. Before smartphones and bomb threats.
My students had pagers and rudimentary cell phones, although there were few of those. When the metal detectors showed up the first time, I announced, “If you have a pager or cell phone, bring it to me and I’ll keep it in my desk until they leave.”
I wasn’t manipulating them to get their respect. I’m a rebel by nature. I related to them. As long as they weren’t making drug deals in my presence or disrupting the class with calls, I saw no reason for their devices to be confiscated. That it won some allegiance to me from them was a windfall.
The mistakes many people make working with teens
Many authority figures have forgotten what it’s like to be young. They don’t just forget what it’s like, they forget how they felt as children and teenagers, and how they thought and what they thought about. I haven’t.
Some think the way to “help” angry, rebellious, or even mischievous teens is to crack down and set and enforce rigid rules.
It’s developmentally true that young people react well to structure. But structure isn’t the same as rigidity.
What did I do to reach my students?
I picked out the guy who was the youngest — the class clown. I asked him to give a book report on a book he read. The fact that he read a book at all was a big deal, and he was proud. At age 16, it was the first book he’d ever read.
I also told the class to treat him the way they had often treated me during a lesson. They did that and more. They catcalled him. They laughed at him. They held conversations among themselves. They threw paper airplanes around the room.
At first he laughed it off. But as they continued, he got angry, and with tears in his eyes. he stomped to his seat and sat down. The book had become important to him, and for once he wanted to be serious and taken seriously.
I had a few other students give their book reports to the same raucous behavior of the class.
They were smart. They figured it out. From that day on, they were attentive to my lessons.
Here’s how I got them to read
The first week of class, I asked each of them what their favorite movie or TV show was. If it were today, I’d also ask about their favorite video game.
As they answered, I made a list on the blackboard with their names beside each title. I then perused the list and came up with books, some classic and some popular, that were similar in theme to the movie or show. I gave each one the name of the book or books that were similar to their favorite visual media and took them to the library.
It was the first time some of them had entered a library. They had to be shown how to find the books. There was no internet in school libraries then, so they needed to learn how to use the card catalog. Since that bored some of them, I resorted to pointing out which section “their” book could be found.
The 16-year-old found Treasure Island. He made a lot of jokes about the book — remember, he was the class clown. Yet, when he stood in front of the rowdy class to give his book report, it was clear he loved the first book he’d ever read. His experience giving the book report didn’t stop him continuing to read nor from eventually writing fiction for the book. Did Treasure Island inspire the gore? I wonder. At the end of a story about being hit by a car, he wrote this:
To the gang member, I gave Makes Me Want to Holler by Nathan McCall. I wanted him to read firsthand how a young, Black man from the streets can make it as a writer and journalist who faces and documents racism and other challenges. Whether it was the book, or me, or a combination of many things, he eventually left the gang.
The girl who stomped out of my class the first day? I don’t remember what book we chose for her, however I suspect it might have been a love story. She wrote several love poems for our class book. The most important thing she wrote, however, was to the editor of the city paper. Here are excerpts:
She also gave me a note at the end of the semester.
James was the quiet one in the back of the room. English was his second language. When he wrote an essay for the class book, we discovered he was the toughest.
When they reached the refugee camp, James became the peacekeeper among the other children.
What did prove creative for the students in my classroom that semester was words
Words by the masters. Words by civil rights heroes. Words by Maya Angelou, Nathan McCall, Robert Louis Stevenson, Malcolm X. Words from me. And ultimately their own words, shining back at them from the pages of a book they produced.
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This post was previously published on Mystic Minds.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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