By Evan Manual,
2007-08 BSSD Teacher of the Year
He opened my eyes. He helped me see, for the first time, that wall of hopelessness and despair that surrounds so many students that pass through our system of education. His name was Lee.
For the first two weeks of school, he was nothing but a faceless name on my class roster. Then, just when all the teachers were notified that the "no shows" would be dropped from our attendance records, Lee came to class for the first time. As a teacher, first impressions of students are sometimes hard to set aside, and unfortunately my first impression of Lee was vividly etched into my mind the instant he walked through the door. Lee sauntered in about five minutes late and as I let him know where his seat was, he gave me a brief glance of contempt. Then he slowly made his way to his desk in a way that made it very clear he was only doing this because he had nothing better to do right then. He had nothing to write with, nothing to write on and he looked so detached from his surroundings that I wondered why he was even there.
Lee was a "repeater" in this course, and I had speculated about what he would be like when I had first looked over my class roster and noticed that he was a sophomore in a required freshman class. "It’s no wonder!" I remember thinking as that first impression now joined forces with some stereotypes and slipped into that empty spot on the seating chart I was maintaining in my mind as well as in my grade book.
The semester passed by and Lee was sometimes there and sometimes not. Sometimes he had his book and paper and pencil and sometimes not. I tried to be friendly to this street-wise, stand-offish youth and sometimes he acknowledged me with a few words and sometimes not. As we prepared to leave for Christmas break, I asked Lee what his plans were for the holiday. Just for a fleeting moment I think I saw a hint of sadness, but his tough demeanor quickly returned and he said he had nothing special planned. In this longest conversation we ever had, Lee said that he had no family and was just going to "be hanging around".
I had an outstanding Christmas that year. There were lots of family, lots of fun, and lots of joy during the holiday season. Lee’s words and that brief look in his eyes would occasionally pop into my mind but were quickly pushed into the background by my own happiness and by my own preoccupations.
When I returned to school, Lee’s seat was empty and remained that way for about a week. Then one day after the bell rang, the door creaked opened and Lee rolled in. I mean Lee literally rolled in. He was uncomfortably sitting in a wheel chair and was being pushed by an equally tough-looking, attitude-enriched student. Lee sported a white gauze bandage on his neck and looked like his energy had ebbed so very low. I helped him get situated and went on with what we were going to do that day. Towards the end of the hour, as everyone was working on their assignment, I went over to Lee and asked him how he was and asked what had happened. He looked up at me and replied quite matter-of-factly and devoid of any emotion, "I got shot." He looked quickly away letting me know that the conversation was over.
Over the next couple of weeks, Lee progressed from the wheelchair to a cane and then to a halting shuffle on his own again. I never did know the full extent of his injuries and if there had been additional wounds that had been the reason for his confinement to the wheelchair. Lee never responded to any of my attempts to start a conversation. Then one day he was gone. He didn’t show up for a week straight and when I checked with the office, they said they weren’t sure where he was. They said he might have moved out of town or might have transferred to another school. They hadn’t heard anything and they didn’t know. That was it. That was the last I ever heard about Lee.
Lee was among the first group of students to enter my classroom over 17 years ago when I began teaching in another school district; but after 2,500 faces have come and gone, I still remember the one worn each day by this troubled student. In Lee’s case, plain and simple, I failed as a teacher. But I didn’t need anyone to tell me that or measure it with a standardized test. I failed and I knew it. Even though I knew I had failed as a teacher to provide Lee with any meaningful education, I felt much worse over my failure as a human being to find a connection with this particular student and to somehow provide even a tiny glimmer of hope in a very dark, young life.
Students like Lee have so many needs that go way beyond what most of us can possibly meet in a classroom setting. Yet somehow, those needs have to be addressed before we can even hope to provide an education to a student like Lee. Any classroom teacher in our country will tell you that. And because every teacher recognizes this grim reality, we all invest much of our time and expend much of our energy trying to find those carefully guarded touch points that will allow us to succeed as we reach out to the distracted and struggling students that come into our classrooms each day.
Lee had gifts and talents just like my best students. However, because of the random harshness of life’s circumstances, Lee probably never had an opportunity to learn what they were. Lee may have never even caught a tiny glimpse of the positive things he could have accomplished with his life. To me, the goal of any system of education is exactly that: to provide our students with a hopeful look into their future. By helping our students learn about themselves and about how they should relate to the world they live in, we help them discover the point of intersection where their abilities and their passions meet; and then we help them learn how to cultivate and nurture those abilities and passions to ultimately become their life’s ambition. We prepare them to follow their dreams and hopefully we prepare them to have a positive influence on the lives around them in that pursuit. We provide them with the opportunity to learn fundamental and even advanced academic skills. We also teach them about respect, honor, values and personal integrity at every stage along the way. These should be the goals of any great education system.
As teachers in this system of public education, sometimes we will succeed in teaching our lessons to our students and sometimes not. We all realize there is a lot at stake and we all know we are being measured and held accountable for the performance of our students on the high-profile standardized tests they now take every year. That is how we are measuring success and accomplishment in our educational system the way it is being defined today.
However, all of us in the teaching profession hope this testing-based system of education will swing another direction one day before too long; because students like Lee do not need to be taught how to take a standardized test so they can perform at a level that helps their school meet the highly sought after targets for Adequate Yearly Progress. Students like Lee do not even need more money to be spent on more programs to help teachers be better teachers. More than anything else, students like Lee need the experience of being a member of a caring and nurturing family.
This is something we all need to keep in mind when we look at and analyze the results of every new round of standardized tests. We should never rush to pass judgment on what test scores tell us about the skills and abilities of the classroom teacher or about the effectiveness of our system of education. We need to be just as careful about what we think those results may be telling us about the skills and abilities of our students. As educators and as professionals we will always be searching for ways to reach out to students like Lee. In the Blue Springs School District we have our Student Assistance Program that we use to try and help make a difference for our students that face struggles and challenges outside the academic realm. Unfortunately, the academic impacts of these anecdotal but very real success stories from programs like this are difficult if not impossible to measure and report.
When we look at the scores from every new round of testing, we need to dig beyond the numbers and take a look from several different points of view. Perhaps at least some of the many problems we are facing in education right now have substantial roots that are found outside of our classrooms.
