I have found my new little coffee shop on the way to work. They brew it fresh when they see me coming, they put just the right amount of Splenda in for me, and they make a great, strong blend of Jamaica Me Crazy that doesn’t hurt my pocketbook. K.I.S.S. Coffee is appropriately named because I want to kiss the baristas. And the building. And my pocketbook.

I just wanted to leave a quick voice mail to you regarding what all 27 of you called for today while I was registering students ON THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL BECAUSE YOU DECIDED YOU DIDN’T WANT TO COME IN BEFORE THAT.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t go to the A lunch shift when I’m supervising on the B lunch shift because you want me to find your 9th grader and tell him to come brush his teeth because he just got braces. How many kids do you have again, two? Well, I now have 375 students to deal with so I’m sorry. Just can’t do it. Also? HE’S IN THE NINTH GRADE. How about teaching him to be responsible? For his teeth.

I’m sorry, but your child canNOT be in those honors classes because their grades and test scores do not warrant him being there. I don’t care that he’s decided that this is The Year they are going to try harder. He can try harder in the classes that best suit him. He will be frustrated and embarrassed when he can’t keep up with the work everyone is required to do.

I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to call you every day when your child is being “good”. Again with the 375 students thing. How about you just ask them how their day was and if they made good choices and reward them at home if you feel they need that? I will probably only call when I feel like there is some sort of problem. Their teachers will also call when they’ve been doing well, but I wouldn’t count on it. Again with the whole “high school” thing, ya know?

I’m sorry, but when you get all creative with the spelling of your child’s name I can’t be expected to know how to pronounce it. Wait. Was this the first time anyone has ever said it wrong? In 14 years of their life? Those are interesting odds.

I’m sorry, but if you spell the name of your child wrong on the registration form I have to wonder if I should schedule you for a class.

I’m sorry, but your child cannot leave and hour and a half early from school so that you can make it to work out of town. She wouldn’t be able to get enough credits for high school. “Changing diapers” and “playing blocks” with the kids at the day care where you work can’t count for anything.

I’m sorry, but I can’t change the schedule so your daughter can be in a class with all the “nice girls”. There aren’t enough “nice girls” in this school that fit your standards. Hell, there aren’t enough “nice girls” on this faculty. There aren’t enough “nice girls” in the world. Really, there just aren’t. How will you protect her after high school? Oh, you want to keep her in the basement where she can turn pale while listening to emo music while she draws all the figures from Hello Kitty? Ok then.

I’m sorry, but you can’t have me wait for you tomorrow while you get off work at 4:30 so you can register your son. On a Friday. I like to be accommodating, but I’ll be trying to get my daughter back to college for her senior year and I’m not going to miss that. Even if I am one of the “nice girls”.

Thanks for leaving me that voicemail. Don’t bother calling me back after you hear this because I simply won’t give in to some of your ridiculous demands.

Bye-biteme.

One of the things I detest about being so busy is that my brain doesn’t work how I want it to work which leaves my writing a puddle of gunk. Quite embarrassing for a former English teacher.

School starts tomorrow and yesterday was a day full of meetings with all the teachers and I have about 65 new teachers names and faces to learn. Add that to the 373 Freshmen who are coming to me to be their Freshman Dean. The best possible thing about that is that the middle school I’ve just come from is the feeder school for this high school so I already know 3/4 of the incoming students in my class. When they are Sophomores, I become the Sophomore Dean and so on and so forth. I will do this and follow them until they are graduated and I love having that connection to the kids.

There is a certain amount of power that comes with this position because I schedule classes and put students in appropriate courses, but I also get to look at their past performance to see how they do on standardized tests. This only becomes a problem when I look at the courses they have been previously taking and the courses they have been placed into (which, of course, I can change if I deem it necessary) and realize such a discrepancy.

As I have come to learn the sheer number of students we do this to it has become clear that it is the marginalized group (surprised? no, me either) once again. The poor, the Black, the Hispanic and yet I am not in any way bashing my district. These are human teachers and they make human mistakes and most of them are extremely good instructors. I feel so lucky to be in a high school right now where everyone wants to do what is best for children because my philosophy holds to that.

That hasn’t stopped me from making a list.

You know what happens when an impassioned woman makes a list? Things get shaken up.

My list is those students who have skated by without high expectations set for them from educators. They are the ones who have been getting C’s and D’s in honors classes but who test well on norm-referenced tests. Basically, I am going to sit down with each of these kids and have a Come To Jesus meeting with them one-on-one to tell that that I expect better from them and that we will find a way to support their learning needs to get them where they want to be in life after high school.

And if they hate me and that Come To Jesus meeting? Too bad. They have another three years with me after this anyway.

Lately my time, when it hasn’t included working at my new position, has been at small outdoor cafes on days when the heat isn’t entirely stifling. Some of it came after this whole “ghetto coffee” discussion and the fact that I started using the Delocator for fun. In my “fun” I found two new coffee places in town where I’ve frequented because it’s on the way to work! This week, it was Cafe Moxo with it’s excellent egg dishes to accompany their Black And White coffee which is fantastically full bodied.

It is entirely in my nature to respond as an educator on almost any topic, but the issues of race, ethnicity and culture continue to come up and I swear, I’m not doing all that much to further the issue due to force. These humble writings and thoughts are mine and this little website attracts only the intellectual and compassionate. [Insert big ass-kissing sound right here] Comments from my previous post were some of the most thoughtful I’ve ever read and there tended to be a confession of “I’m rambling now” when, in actuality, it helped give context to whatever comment or opinion was being made.

Huzzah to the ramblers!

Mostly what I learned from readers is that there is a sense of safety and respect for one another here and I have to say that I truly do try to cultivate that in my life. There was a time when a class came to me for English after getting reamed by their history teacher and I could tell there was no way any learning was going to take place unless we dealt with it. After they shuffled to their seats and sat looking at their feet I put down my book and asked, “What’s wrong with all of you? You look totally defeated.” It didn’t take long for them to tell me that they were yelled at and that they felt disgust at how they were treated. One boy, Adam, raised his hand and said, “Why is it that she keeps telling us that we WILL respect her and we don’t want to but we do respect you? What’s the difference? Why does she keep saying that she demands respect?”

This question, this true delving into knowledge was going to be my new objective for learning and I realized I probably would never get to that chapter of Corrie Ten Boom’s book The Hiding Place. Perhaps I could tie the two together in this lesson, I thought. Something about having respect for humanity and love and acceptance. I would give it my best shot because at this point I was teaching by feel.

“The difference, I believe, is that I don’t demand respect. I command it. Big difference.”

“What’s the difference? Demand? Command?”

Time to get out the dictionaries, kids. I never lose a teaching opportunity.

That’s what we did for that hour that one day. We looked up the difference between those two words and talked about how she made a peremptory request as if she had the right to be respected because she was older, more learned, or whatever reason she was attributing to her ‘respect’. I, on the other hand, knew that respect was a two-way street, an authority that comes after trusting them and getting them to trust me. If there is one thing I will say to new teachers getting ready to have their first set of fresh minds, it’s this: Don’t take respect for granted. You earn it, it is not afforded to you because of your position.

If for no other reason then do this: treat students like humans.

It is with this in mind that I’m writing something for BlogRhet this week. Heather reminded me of it today with a spirited exchange between a person who continued to question her in the comments section until I had no choice but to go there and make a comment myself. When people want understanding for matters of race, we have to leave behind our pre-existing notions. Matters of race can’t be left to the politics of just hair and skin. To be fair, it’s not even fair to use the “tacos and sombreros” approach to learning about another culture.

That reminds me: culture. (noun) - the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.

When I tend to think of myself as a cultural person it’s probably due to a varied background that I was afforded and one that I feel truly lucky to have had. I grew up near the University of Chicago (in Hyde Park) where everywhere I turned there were people of different skin shades. My sisters and I attended a bi-lingual preschool and had an afternoon babysitter who was Hispanic who taught me how to speak Spanish. We went to a Catholic school when we got older and then did an after school program at the Jewish Community Center (which is where I learned the word schvartze so that later in life when I dated a Jewish guy and his grandmother called me that I knew it was a bad thing). It’s safe to say that my parents introduced us to a lot of culture.

Even still, I didn’t think we were all that different. If we went to dinner at a restaurant as a family there were always stares at my black and white parents and their black and white children. It wasn’t, as I look back on it, respectful at all. Perhaps it gave me a bit of a complex about people looking at me. Combine this with the times kids called me “oreo” or “zebra” or even “white nigger” but I can say with certainty that it never left a good taste in my mouth. Finally, I asked my mother why people always stared at us. She could have given me a lecture on Society and What People Think of Mixed Marriages and Miscegenation. Instead, she offered what a mother is supposed to offer:

“It’s because you and your sisters are so beautiful.”

What my mother did was introduce me to culture by allowing me the possibility that I could find beauty in differences, see similarities in one another that had nothing to do with our mere exterior casings, and gave me a sense of healthy respect for ethnicity and culture that wasn’t limited to that ‘tacos and sombrero’ approach.

She gave me something much meatier to chew on and digest. Thank you for that, Mom.