breaking it down

Tonight marked the first time I have been outright unimpressed with any of my corps. A ’92 corps member, still at his original placement school, gave our evening presentation, a historical, political, and cultural overview of Los Angeles. It was lively and real and completely biased, but biased in favor of our communities and our kids, in a way that the program isn’t really allowed to be, and it was passionate, in a way that the program tries to capture with its collections of inspirational anecdotes, but it just never quite can.

For ninety minutes this man does not pause for breath. He tells us where to go hiking and cycling and when to go to Joshua tree, how there’s a free Ozomatli show tomorrow night, and about the marine layer and Thai Elvis and how the roads get slick after the first rain, and why it’s important to keep extra underoos in your earthquake kit. But more importantly, he tells us about what services can legally be denied to illegal immigrants. He gives a brief bio of the new Hispanic mayor-elect, and describes the power and policies of the chief of police, and explains where the sheriff’s department has jurisdiction and what the respective relationships are with INS. For those who’ve been asleep the last few decades, he reminds us that “there’s nothing better than a good cop and nothing worse than a bad cop,” and that no matter what kind you run into here, LAPD is not like other urban police forces: it is designed and run as a paramilitary organization. He gives us a rundown of the major representatives, community figures, organizations and propositions affecting our neighborhoods. He tells us about institutionalized racism, and the reality of the “race riots” that have been in the news these last few months. Through all of this, these girls are talking behind me, and though I am straining to hear over them, I keep catching snippets, like “This guy is way too into LA. He’s like obsessed.” And, “This is kinda boring. I’m never going to remember all these names anyway.”

It’s not just the incredible rudeness to the speaker, or the lack of consideration for those who might want to listen, that bothers me. We had a long, hard day of sessions with The District that left many of us none too happy, and I’m willing to excuse some bad behavior, especially considering that none of us has been a completely perfect corps member. The problem, for me, is the disregard for the really valuable information this man was imparting about our larger community. Some people seem to think that their job exists only inside the classroom, but that isn’t how life is for these kids or their families, and that’s not how it will be for the best teachers, the kind of teachers we all want to be. Almost everything that speaker said had overwhelming implications, and their boredom struck me as willful blindness. As I am sitting in my room writing this, I am crying. I don’t know if it’s frustration or exhaustion or the feeling that no matter what I do, how many students I touch, it will never be enough. This is so much. It’s so big, so much bigger than anything I thought I would ever do.

This man, tonight, shared his reality with us, and it is a reality that many other ex-corps members – all brilliant and effective but short-term teachers – have tried to tell us doesn’t exist. He has been here for thirteen years, he says, and he feels truly blessed to have attended thirteen high school graduations. In those years, though, he has attended nineteen funerals. He tells us that he came in with a lot of ideals, and that hopefully he has retained a lot of them. But his great wish is that he will stay at his original placement school until the end of his teaching career, and that at that time, he will have attended more graduations than funerals.