First things first: Mr. Cheeseburger was my beloved piggie placemat, bought at the $3.99 store and named by my morning ESL class after I vetoed "Bacon" as too insensitive. Mr. Cheeseburger was taped to the door beneath a laminated speech bubble on which I wrote the day's most important announcements, which students faithfully read until the day the tape came loose and the maintenance staff saw fit to THROW HIM AWAY. I have done my mourning, and some day I hope to welcome Mr. Junior (Bacon?) Cheeseburger into my classroom. Until then, announcements the old-fashioned and oft-ignored way.
This is the logo of the restaurant where we had pretty decent Mexican food while I was visiting folk in New York a month or two ago:
Unfortunately, F13 is not just a brand of tasty Southern California Mexican cuisine, but also a brand of violent Southern Californian Mexican gang. I should be both broader and more specific: it's an extremely violent Latino gang in South Central Los Angeles, with ground zero being my high school. Two weeks ago, my SLC lost a former student - a close friend of many of my students - to eight shots to the chest, resulting from his involvement in Florencia. Since then, I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to ascertain how my students feel about it. At first they seemed callous, inured to violent death; they wore RIP gear (buttons, t-shirts) screened with the student's photos and told each other "if you get shot, I'll wear your t-shirt." Then they started showing me cell-phone footage of candlelight vigils and dropping off asleep in class, explaining that they'd washed cars all weekend to help the mother pay for the funeral. They felt something; I felt relief, knowing that at least we could start to have a conversation. Then, abruptly, I started finding tagging everywhere - out on the quad, in my pristine classroom - saying RIP "SHADOW" and, disturbingly, F13. The conversation is a gentle "maybe you should clean that off," with a rag and a bottle of mandarin orange spray cleaner extended, and while the wiping-down is happening, a suggestion that his name was not in fact "Shadow" but instead E., and that we should remember him for who he was, not where he was from, and that perhaps Sharpie on my tables was not the best way to memorialize him - perhaps this week's biography assignment would provide a better outlet? So far no takers on the biography, but a slowing in the F13 grafitti. If I prayed, it would be that none of my boys - my beloved softies who hang at the donut shop after school - will follow E.'s path in some kind of sick martyr fantasty. It happens all the time, but I hope that I never have to see it. I have been keeping my door open even when I usually close it, but I am resisiting the urge to run out and hug them whenever I see them. We get along because I humor their mistaken notion that they are tough, and I do not want to undermine this relationship.
The nines are starting literature circles, and they are also on my last nerve. They have done some really good writing lately, and they seem really interested in learning the hows and whys of writing, but reading is a whole other animal, one they eye with suspicion and fear. Picture, if you will, the classroom as a cave painting, with crude spears pointed at the object we call Book. It is going to be a long three months of identity and mythology.
My credential is finished tomorrow, HEY HEY HEY, provided I sign over $4000. I went shopping today so I might have a recent memory of what that feels like.
Attended - and presented at! - a Program conference in Las Vegas the other weekend, wearing handmade snarky anti-Program t-shirts, and was confronted about this on camera by The Program's Los Angeles Executive Director. Fortunately the snarkiness is of the direct-quote-that-is-so-insanely-stupid-it-needs-no-further-commentary variety, and I had little to explain. Executive Director Man pretended he thought this was "Great! Really.....just Great!" and that was that, and all of the t-shirt posse was semi-famous thereafter. Vegas sucks but we went to Cirque du Soleil, where you can enjoy a martini and a bucket of popcorn while watching the acrobatics. The only drawback of this is you have to go to Vegas to partake.
2 comments:
stupid internet.
i left comments but your page expired.
you must be so worried about your guys. i'm worried and i don't even know them. glad to hear they were helping E.'s mom raise money. i hope as time goes on they think about that and not the "glamour" of the gangster lifestyle.
congrats on your credential. you are the BOMB.
and, i have (had?) emotional ties to mr. cheeseburger. so sad to hear of his dimise.
I have a vivid memory of walking home from Rio Hondo with a kid named David, he was a small guy but gang related so he was never messed with, his brothers were big time 18th Street. His house was first on the way, so I said bye and watched him walk past his brother who was trying to change the oil on his car and fight with his girlfriend at the same time. I remember him calmly getting out from underneath the car, taking his tattooed and oil slick hand to his girlfriend's face to forcefully point it at the door of the house. Her and the crying baby went back inside to clean off, he looked at me and went back under the car. I wonder if David ever made it out of there.
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