Things will get better

🥲

Last Wednesday, I had a teaching day that made me want to hang it all up.

The kids in fourth period would not shut up. I was in front of the room, trying to introduce persuasive language, and there were like three different conversations , one of which was happening across the room. After my who-knows-how-many attempt to bring attention back, I gave up. “I’m done,” I said, and sat down. It was one of those moments that you probably remember from school, when the teacher freaks out and the whole vibe of the class becomes a coiled snake, tense and quiet. “You can get your phones, you can talk,” I said. “I’m just done teaching.” Nobody moved, nobody got their phones. They just watched as I configured a new seating chart for them.

My fourth period is not a hard class. There are fewer than 20 students, a theoretical cakewalk in terms of classroom management. This makes my inability to manage it even more confounding and embarrassing.

That night, I did what I do best: spiral!

They don’t respect me. I’m too easy. I’m too nice. I can’t teach. I can’t lead. What am I even doing?

I was still having these thoughts the next day when Alex came into my room during lunch.

Alex (not his real name) was a student I had last year. That was an especially hard semester for me, since it was the first time I taught 11th grade English and AVID—two topics I had no experience in. Additionally, this was my first time teaching English-speaking students as opposed to immigrants and refugees, which was a hard lesson in American student apathy and entitlement.

Alex was not a good student. He barely turned work in, and often cut class. He slept in class, which—paired with his gaunt appearance—pointed to a drug problem that seems obvious in retrospect, but I was too naive and clueless to recognize at the time.

But Alex was a sweet kid. He always smiled when I asked how he was doing, as if the sheer acknowledgement was a pleasant surprise. “Can’t complain, Mr. Bradford. How you doin?”

The only academic success I had with Alex was getting him to write in a journal. When I teach ELA I use a system of journaling taken from Rain, Steam, and Speed: Building Fluency in Adolescent Writers, which does a good job of presenting journaling not as bell-work or quick writes, but something profound and to be executed with decorum. For twenty minutes twice a week, students wrote on a robust, multi-layered prompt (some of which the book provided; some of which I made up). The students took it seriously, and I always gave the option to mark their paper with “Private” in case they wrote something they didn’t want me to read. Very few students marked “Private”—they wanted me to see what they were writing.

This is how I knew so much about Alex.

At the end of the year, I had students combine all their journals into a binder to submit as an end-of-year project, wherein I would take them home and spend the weekend reading them.

Alex’s journal was like a roadmap of heartbreak: loneliness, incarcerated family members, gang shit, substances. Hardship writ large.

I gave him an A for the assignment and wrote something like “Thank you for sharing your writing. This is very good. It seems like you have a lot on your plate right now, but I hope you know that things get better.” Kinda cliche. Maybe even a little dismissive. Platitudes are good avoidance mechanisms.

“Oh, thank you Mr. Bradford,” he said when I handed the journal back to him. But he didn’t open it to see his grade, just left it on the desk like many students do when you hand back a graded assignment. Then he walked out of my room and it was the end of the semester and he was no longer my student.

I picked up the journal and put it in a box next to my desk. Since then, more things have ended up in that box, a trove of abandoned student artifacts: water bottles, broken phones, a discarded sweatshirt. Alex’s journal sat at the bottom.

Alex didn’t graduate. He dropped out halfway through the next semester. But that’s not rare. Sometimes you just realize that you haven’t seen a certain student in a long time and you figure that they either moved schools or dropped out.

When Alex walked into my class last Thursday, I immediately knew he was a different person. Not only was the gauntness filled out, but he—and here I have to resort to another cliche—glowed.

“I see you got new ink,” he said, commenting on my new tattoo. In return, he showed off the new gold across his knuckles and in his ears. “So check this out,” and flipped his phone around to display a screen that read: “295 days.”

“That’s how long I’ve been sober.”

“Holy shit,” I said, involuntarily.

“I’ve been going to a program,” he said, and then told me about his new lease on life. He’d been going to adult school and had since won a handful of academic rewards. He had a construction job, and showed me videos of the project, an event space, his team was currently building. He’s also getting his driver’s permit.

“Let me know when you have it so I can stay off the road,” I said.

“For sure, Mr. Bradford. For sure,” he said, laughing. We then sat quiet for a beat before Alex stood up. “I still need to see some other teachers, but it’s real good to be here,” he said. “I miss this place.”

“It’s so good to see you, too—” I said, the last thought cut off by an epiphany. “Alex! Wait, I think I have something for you.” I rummaged through the box beneath my desk and pulled out—even to my surprise—Alex’s bright yellow journal from the previous year. I held it out to him, nearly speechless by the uncut and complete serendipity of this moment.

“This is yours. It’s going to be wild to see where you were when you wrote this and comparing it to how you’re doing now.”

Alex flipped through before stopping at my note at the end. “Things will get better,” he whispered.

He took a breath and looked out at the other students eating their lunch in my classroom. “You know, Mr. Bradford. If there weren’t so many people here, I’d drop a tear.”

Only later, when I was texting with another teacher who’d had Alex and knew him better, that I learned that he’d nearly died in Tijuana from an overdose after dropping out of high school. “He was literally dead.”

We both stood up. Alex went for the fist-bump but I gave him a hug.

People hate cliches because they lack original thought, but if something’s so widely accepted that it shuns originality, isn’t that a component of truth?

Here’s another: It’ll all work out in the end, and if it doesn’t, it’s not the end.

Things will get better.

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ICE-OUT LOVE IN

Author/musician/poet ADAM GNADE DAILY recently asked if I wanted to contribute to his anti-ICE literary mixtape, I.C.E. OUT, LOVE IN - an audio literary mixtape of stories, poems, and essays on the topic of I.C.E. Resistance. And of course I did.

It came out this weekend and it’s full of beautiful, heart-wrenching writing. And then there’s mine.

I wrote a short radio play called “Ice Store” about an ICE agent shopping for a facemask. It’s performed by me and Ryen Schlegel.

I knew it would probably be an outlier in the compilation, but now having listened to everyone else’s, it feels a little jarring. But I’m still proud of it, so thank you Adam for keeping it on the comp, and just know that beneath the jokes and fart sounds, there’s a deep-seated rage.

Support it if you have the means. One hundred percent of proceeds will go to the Immigrant Defense Project.