Day One: A Picture of Me

The best way to describe LHS is this: it is a cavern.

I walk in, and I feel small immediately. The welcome area is gigantic. There is a reception desk with security guards there to greet me. The ceiling is tall. The cafeteria feels like a football field away. A security guard offers to take me to my room assignment in International High School, one of the six schools that make up Lawrence High School. We walk. And walk. And walk. We walk past four other high schools: Humanities and Leadership; Health and Human Services; Math, Science and Technology; Performing Arts. International is the second-to-last stop on the hall. Business, Management, and Finance is last.

I get to my room, and it’s barren. Desks are set up in rows, calculators are left out. A few protractors lie around. The wireless is totally locked, and I can’t get into it; there's a computer in the room I can't use either, which kills me because it has a document camera and a projector. I have to call an IT worker to have them give me the username and password to the guest network. The assistant principal, a woman named Enid, comes by to let me know that we’ll be getting supplies later. When the supplies come around, they are delivered on a big cart. We get big markers and chart paper, dry erase markers, pencils, sticky notes. I immediately ask for pens instead of pencils. The people giving out the supplies seem a little shocked.

I can’t remember the students’ names right now, because it’s difficult for me to remember names at first. I also can’t make a connection with them to save my life because I don’t speak Spanish, and they do. Lots of it. It’s the only language they really speak. I mean, they try to speak English, but it’s broken and short. They don’t know many words. This makes the students reticent and reluctant to speak. I can’t say I blame them.

When the students get the chance to ask me questions, one of them asks how old I am. I'm not about to lose this opportunity for some improvising, although I admit I was a little scared of how it would go. I instruct them to guess and write an answer on the board. They all write their guesses, and their guesses are far over my age: 36, 38, 39, 40, 40, 44, 45, 46, 61. I make them a deal: I’ll tell them my age if they can make a stem-and-leaf plot, a box-and-whisker plot, and a histogram out of the data. They do so, although hesitantly. Many of them have trouble following instructions, but they do not do badly. I put my age on the box-and-whisker plot once it's done. Thirty-one, far below the minimum. One of the students tells me, “you look older.” I ask why she says that, and another male student says, “you need a haircut.”

He’s right. I do.

We do other things during the course of the day that no one else seems to do. All of the other students are sitting in columns of desks, drilling on MCAS problems. Our class is immediately doing different things. We walk around. We measure the height of the building by looking at the stairwell, and by going outside and counting the bricks up the facade of IHS. One of the students complains that it is cold, and others follow. I then insist that they get the work done quickly, so that we can all go inside and get warm. That seems to move them along, although they complain the whole time. 

-------------------------------------------

My reflections from Day One are simple. I was expecting this, but I wasn’t expecting this: students with true ELL struggles and true learning gaps. Students that I can’t communicate with or relate to…and I feel like I can relate to every student. What will be hard tomorrow is maintaining and building the good momentum I had going out of the end of today, where students were talking, writing problems on chart paper, and asking for my help. One of my students drew an interesting caricature of me. I have balloon limbs and a tie and a belt, like a police officer, screaming at my students to “Do your work.” Apparently, this is a past time that never gets old: drawing pictures of Dudley. I have boxes of these pictures of me: doodles done in class for no reason at all, or for a specific reason, and now I have one more to add to the pile. Never gets old.