The Living Rockumentary

We need people to defend our country, right? Even if one doesn't agree with the way our leaders are running things, we still need soldiers.

I found out this morning that a former student of mine has decided to join the Air Force, and partially credits me for helping her make the decision.

Let me give you some background first. I was raised a pacifist. My parents didn't let me play with guns. Despite many of my close male relatives serving in the Armed Forces (both grandfathers in WWII, Dad was a sergeant in the Army and served in Korea in the 60s- we still had troops there and obviously it was better than going to Vietnam at the time), I wasn't encouraged to enlist. And although I'm not dogmatic about it, my students clearly get the impression that politically, I'm anti-war. In our classes, I'm respectful of all viewpoints, as long as intolerance and/or hate isn't a component. Besides, high school seniors, even if they have extreme views, are unlikely to spout off in classes- they just wanna graduate.

Anyway, with 90 students, it's hard to get to know all of them equally well. And this student in particular didn't stick out much in the F period class until late in the year. She was well-behaved in my most difficult class (the one with all three of my students with learning disabilities, the one with three other kids who dropped out, the one with kids who had been incarcerated, the one with two girls who other teachers are convinced are sociopaths- I'd only go so far as to say one of them is)- the point is-a kid who isn't exceptional and doesn't require lots of disciplinary attention is one of the ones that it takes a while for a teacher to get to know, if you do at all. Towards the end of the third quarter, I started to get to know her better. One could see that she was involved in ROTC because they dress up in uniform once a week- and she also was a baseball fan (and played on the varsity team in the spring) but that's about all I really knew about her by that point. During that third quarter, the class worked on the research paper and then a difficult poetry unit (that was a success nonetheless, but it took some work). And I could tell she was getting frustrated with the poems. Rather than getting the hang of it like many of her classmates, she seemed flustered with each new poem we worked on. From the work she was handing in, it seemed that her analysis skills were below average. At one point, when handing back a C- grade paper, I heard her sigh and mutter as I was walking away, "What's the point? I can't do this stuff."

From that point on, I was careful to involve her more as we were going through the poems, eliciting questions from her. Kids who struggle often just keep quiet and wait things out. As I was getting better at teaching the poems, the class was getting better at explicating them but this student struggled until the end. Nonetheless, I decided that as long as she kept up with the work and kept trying, I was going to give her an A for the last assignment. Partly due to my increased attention, she was contributing more in class and even if she was way off a lot of the time, the effort was there and she kept trying, fighting the frustration. She was happy but also incredulous when she got that A. We didn't talk about it but maybe she figured it out.

At the end of the year, she had to take a portion of the English final as a makeup. With time left after she had finished, she just started telling me about how she was afraid to leave high school because she didn't know what to do. She hadn't applied to any colleges, was considering joining the Air Force (in ROTC, she was a Wing Commander, which meant she had the second highest rank a student could have in that program) or maybe getting a job at a restaurant her cousin worked in. I listened to her and asked her questions but I stopped short of suggesting one direction over another. Basically, I just tried to help her analyze each potential course, considering pros and cons. It's her decision and her life- I'd help her look at the decision carefully but offer no opinion of my own. In other words, analyze it like a poem and help her arrive at the answers without just giving her my interpretation. A cheesy analogy, I know, but it seems apt.

On the last day of school for the seniors, I noticed that when she signed my yearbook, she wrote "You've inspired me in a way no other teacher has before." It threw me, in that the only significant individual interactions are the ones I mentioned. And I felt I was much less effective overall in being inspiring with her particular class than I was with the other two I taught. It's harder to be inspiring and entertaining and Robin Williams-esque when students are just resisting paying attention to anything the teacher is doing. Later in the day, after reading what she had written in the yearbook, she told me she still didn't know for sure what she was going to do next in her life and that she felt scared to leave high school and felt like a dumb kid as a result. I said something to the effect of she knew deep down what was best for her and that I believed in her, even if she was finding it hard to believe in herself.

Now I know that she's heading to the Air Force. I wonder if yesterday's events in London might have had something to do with it. I know that she took her role in ROTC seriously and that she was one of the tiny minority of my students that believes that Bush is a good President. Nonetheless, she also says now that she took what I said seriously and it helped her feel assured that the decision she'd make was the right one. The pacifist in me is a little sad but I do admire her for making this decision and it is an admirable one. The thing that gets me is realizing how inspiring teachers really can be, for good or bad, how careful you really have to be. I think I did the right thing- I didn't tell her what I think she should do but only that I believed in her. And I did and I meant it. Based on her troubles in the poetry unit, and the way she responded- by making the effort and trying her best, I do believe in her. But from my perspective, this idea that what you say can be taken to heart is frightening.