A teacher considers what lessons students really need.
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After six years of teaching in the public schools, I've learned how to deal with a Googled essay, a water fountain scuffle, the under-the-desk text messager. But the news that hit our school one morning last month caught me completely off guard: Brandon Brown, a handsome basketball maestro who'd scraped his way to a diploma just two years before, was dead. He'd ended up outside on a wintry night, likely under the influence of alcohol, fallen into a snowbank and frozen to death. He was 20 years old.
As a human being, I allowed myself to feel anger, grief and sorrow for his loving family. But as a professional educator, I had no idea how to react. On some level, I'd been bracing myself for years to receive news like this about one of the kids we failed, one of the kids who dropped out or was expelled. I know our school and our system did not serve those kids well, and I know they've got a dangerous road before them. But Brandon? Brandon was one of our success stories. With Escalante-esque efforts from his teachers, coaches and family, the kid had overcome his academic insecurities, picked up discipline on the basketball court, inched his way through 26 credits and earned a bona fide high school diploma. And this-a late night snowbank-was his reward?
In the summer of 2004, another student of mine, 15-year-old poet-to-be Chris Callewaert, was killed in an unreckless daylight motorcycle accident. It was a senseless death, unfair and random as a lightning strike. I mourned the loss, but I did not question myself as a teacher.
Brandon's death, on the other hand, has filled me not only with grief, but also with profound doubts about what I-and the public schools-are trying to accomplish with the young people who are legally required to spend the better part of their childhoods with us. Ostensibly, our job is to give them the skills and knowledge they will need to survive, and hopefully thrive, in society. When we handed Brandon his diploma, we could say with confidence that he knew how to read and write; he'd picked up the requisite smattering of history, science, math and the arts. But were these the skills he needed to establish himself once he left school? Or did he need something more?
I didn't know Brandon well, but I do know that many of my students, especially my seniors, have needs far more pressing than developing a good understanding of mitosis or mastering the congruent angle. I understand well that teachers are not social workers, and that schools can only do so much, but Brandon's death has got me wondering if it's not time to re-examine the way we go about helping young people transition out of the sit-down-and-listen atmosphere of our schools and into the get-up-and-do-something atmosphere of our world. I would never advocate getting rid of academics, or denying any student the joy of learning abstract concepts, but perhaps in some cases, a student's last years of high school should not be so much a scramble for a diploma as a rite of passage, a thoughtful, guided exploration of the opportunities and obstacles that await in college or the workplace. Maybe if we teachers are less focused on meeting Adequate Yearly Progress under the No Child Left Behind Act, we could be more focused on meeting the people we teach.
Last spring, my brother asked me to hire some kids to help with the annual ditch cleaning by his land on the Pecos. At $10 an hour, we got plenty of takers, including Brandon, who'd already graduated. As anyone who's tried it will attest, acequia cleaning is unhappy work, long hours of cutting through carpets of overgrown grass, shoveling wet dirt over 6-foot walls of willows. It's also communal work: The diggers are lined up and assigned 10-yard stretches, or tareas, and the line doesn't advance until every tarea is declared clean by the ditch president, or mayordomo. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my students, who could be loathe to lift a pencil, were eager to pick up the shovels. I can still see Brandon chopping at the brick-hard earth of the acequia wall with a flathead, toiling to square the cut before the mayordomo came by. As the day stretched on, and my own back began to ache, I expected to see the boys slow down. They didn't. Through blister and sunburn and Dr. Pepper daydreams, they kept digging for China. And they weren't working that hard for the hourly wage. They were working that hard because they understood they were an essential part of the line. They understood that everyone was depending on them to get us through that stretch and into the next, and the next, until we could finally climb out of the ditch and get home to a well-deserved shower, a cold drink, a clean couch.
Our public schools could learn something from the centuries-old acequia cleaning tradition. We get so caught up in counting credits that we fail-I fail-to push away the transcripts, now and then, and step out of the All-American Diploma Race. Brandon's death reminds me that I didn't become a teacher to package Hemingway and semicolons into easily digested morsels for my students to swallow, recite and check off. I got into this profession to spend time with young people and help them navigate their adolescent Styx. And although I would love to see every student leave school with a diploma, I now know that it is far more important-even a matter of life and death-to make sure every student leaves school with confidence, inspiration and, above all, the genuine belief that he or she has an essential part to play in cleaning this overgrown acequia of a world.
Santa Fe Reporter