It's been A Week

The end of the school year is never easy

There was a huge fight at school this week. The last few weeks of the school year are often fraught with tension. Kids are tired; teachers are tired. Holes form in the social order. Classroom management feels like fixing leaks with chewing gum. “Just keep it together,” I plead with students, daily.

I’m not really sure what the fight was about, but students have told me it was Haitians vs. Somalis, two large populations at my school.

I didn’t see the fight, but I knew something serious was happening when the principal came on the intercom five minutes before lunch ended, warning kids to go to your third period class now!

A fight attracts kids like nothing else. They run toward it with phones out, thumbs on record, because that’s what social media has taught them to do. Hundreds of spectators, very few helpers.

When there’s a fight at school, the rest of the day is shot. It takes seconds for the videos to be shared, passed around, posted. By fourth period, every student had seen multiple angles, critically dissecting it in ways that I wish they could apply to their learning. Even if they weren’t in the fight, their adrenaline spikes, they’re out of breath.

One student showed me a video. It looked like a melee, a battle royale. Over fifty kids. The fight moved from one end of the building to another. Students, cranked up, swung their fists blindly, sometimes even hitting teachers and admin trying to intervene. I watched one of our school’s security guards take a hit, then proceeded to suplex the kid into submission. Many students will be suspended; many are seniors who will not walk for graduation.

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But the day before, a student farted in my class. It was not on purpose. He is not the type to be disruptive. In fact, he and his two friends—all Vietnamese—might be the most engaged students in all my classes.

It was about five minutes before the bell rang when it happened. It sounded like it had been building up for days. So dry, deep, and toneless, like someone scraping the toe of their shoe against rough carpet. The Sahara Desert would be proud.

I looked over and the kid had his head down. His friends were falling out of their chairs laughing. The Haitian girls who sit nearby were shocked and looking at me—all of us unsure of what we had actually heard. Then they started laughing. Then the perpetrator lifted his head, his face flushed with embarrassment, but also laughing.

Soon we were all laughing together. Haitians, Vietnamese, Ugandans, Tanzanians, Mexicans—all unified in this amazing moment.

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I finished Induction this week. Induction is a two-year graduate-level course that all California teachers have to take to “clear” their credential, which is essentially validating it. If you don’t clear your credential within five years of earning it, you lose it.

Nobody likes Induction. It’s not a ton of work, but it’s enough to be annoying. Weekly meetings with your mentor, lots of observations, so much reflection. Its goal is to make us better teachers, but it’s really just a shitty cherry on top of being a new teacher. Hey, we know you’re in survival mode most days, treading water, but here’s something else for you to do. I’ve lost many Sundays over the past two years because of Induction homework.

But I’m finished! I’m finally a real boy teacher. And, goddamnit, I hate to admit this, but I think Induction actually made me a better teacher. This year was the first that I felt competent at my job, and I did a lot of cool things in the classroom that I thought would not be possible with English learners, like reading actual texts (we read graphic novels of Macbeth and Frankenstein), getting students to read together in small groups, and speaking with each other. This is a huge shift from rote grammar, phonics, sentence structure practice that have been so prevalent in my past ELD classes.

Here’s my presentation if you’re interested.

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I had two pieces of writing published this week. I go for months and years without publishing anything (apart from this amazing newsletter), and then I’ll have back-to-back publications. It’s either feast or famine. But I’m very proud of both pieces.

Farewell Transmissions posted the opening chapter from my unpublished mailman novel. “Novel “being a loose term because it’s very much based on my actual experiences delivering mail in San Diego from 2010-2011. The novel is 70% true, but the section published here is probably 98%.

Very stoked that some of it’s seeing the light of day. I finished it at exactly the same time my agent dumped me, which caused me to think “maybe I’m just not cut out for this writing thing.” It’s wild how easy it is for your writing career to be reset back to zero, or at least feel like that.

I’ve gotten some very good feedback on this piece, and that’s been very nice.

The other piece is a review I did of Mark Z. Danielewski’s epic 1,200-page novel Tom’s Crossing, which Zona Motel published. I loved this book. For the first time, it returned me to that childlike sense of getting lost in a narrative—I would look forward to work ending so I could go home and read it—but it also forced me to consider the whole purpose of books and art in general. It was a strangely earnest and life-affirming read, especially in our age of cynicism, irony, and edgelording.

I hope you check out those pieces, and especially hope you enjoy them.

Only a few days left of school. I’m tired.