Will

I’d heard bad things about Will* from the first 6th grade open house. The teacher in the room next to me had just moved up from teaching 5th grade, and had taught Will the year before. “He’s a tough one. We had to schedule an emergency meeting with his mom because he was scoring in the tenth percentile on all his assessments. And his older brother is in a gang. It’s a bad situation.”

The first few weeks of school I thought this teacher must have been thinking of a different student. Will was sweet and quiet. He didn’t talk much to the other kids. He raised his hand often and always seemed eager to participate. I even gave him a classroom job as a Party Planner. “Will is a great student,” I thought. “Maybe he really likes me. Maybe this year will be different.”

Then I graded his first assessment. And I cried. Not just because of his test, but because of the whole string of tests that I graded that night that showed me how profoundly behind my students were in basic reading and writing. Will completely made up answers to some of the questions. He wrote about someone getting shot and running away, when the story was about a little girl moving from Mexico to a new farm in California.

But the low test grades were just the beginning. After that came the behavior problems. It started small. Will would call out answers in class instead of raising his hand. He began humming and singing repeatedly, even after I asked him to stop. Then he began talking when I was talking, and shouting out things like “This is dumb” when we were reading a story. This behavior continued despite the many times I took him out individually in the hall to discuss his responsibilities as party planner and the fact that I could take his job away. This behavior continued despite my repeated attempts to move his seat so that he was sitting as close to the front as possible. It got to the point (as terrible as it is for me to say this) that when Will was absent, I breathed a small sigh of relief because it meant my 6th block would not give me a sore throat and pounding headache.

Throughout this time, I had learned a little bit more about Will’s home life. He lived with his grandmother and his 18 year old sister and her baby. His two older brothers lived with his mom. I felt like this was a conscious effort on Will’s mom part to keep him out of the trouble his brothers were in. “If you call my house, my brother will get mad because he’s on probation!” Will shouted at his social studies teacher when he threatened to call home.
I talked about Will with the other teachers on my team. They discussed him as if he were a lost cause. “You know who his brother is right? That explains it all. School just isn’t his thing. There’s only so much we can do.”


A couple weeks ago, I taught a lesson on evaluating characters. We talked about how we evaluate characters based on how they look, the effect they have on others, and what they think, say and do. We practiced with a story we’d read in class, and then as a closing activity, I had them evaluate an interesting person that they knew. I told them they could write about any person that they wanted. (My goal was to make it doable for them.) “Just describe the person! Tell me what kinds of things they say. What effect do they have on you? What do they look like? I want to feel like I know this person after reading your paragraph.”
I took the stack of papers home and graded them that night as I was sitting in bed. Will’s was the first one I picked up:

“She says take out your homework. She always picks up our homework. She thinks I might fail grade and stay in the same class. She makes me happy when arurend her and in her room I can smell the pencel shades falling from where we write. She has blue eyes like the sky. She always dresses very nice and her room is butiful.”

I cried hard. I cried big, ugly, exhausted, self-pitying sobs, sitting alone in my bedroom at 9:30pm on a Wednesday night. Then I got up, grabbed a tissue, and thought about why I was crying. It was a lot of different things all mushed together. I cried because:

a.) I had felt relieved when Will was not in my class, now knowing that he felt happy when he was in my room.
b.) Will thought I thought he was going to fail the grade and stay in the same class. (How had I communicated these low expectations to him?? Or is this what he perceived of all his teachers?)
c.) The line “smell the pencil shades falling from where we write” was so strangely beautiful and so far beyond what I would have expected for this rambunctious 11 year old little boy to be able to articulate. How had I missed this side of him?
d.) I still felt sorry for him and his situation and I felt there was nothing I could do to change it.
e.) I felt sorry for myself because I was so overwhelmed and unprepared to be the effective teacher I needed to be to give this child the opportunity to have a better life. If I didn’t help change the meaning of education in for Will, he would probably join a gang like his brother. Education could literally mean life or death for him, in a very real way that I didn’t (and don’t) know how to handle.

I would love to be able to say that things have changed a lot since then, that we have had some kind of miraculous “Freedom Writers” breakthrough and that Will is now on the path to college. Honestly, not a whole lot has changed. Will’s behavior in class is still distracting and, at times, disrespectful. Some of his quiz and test scores have improved, but overall, he is still far behind.

I have started keeping a special folder for Will to document his behavior in class so that we can put him up for intervention team for possible special education services. His assessment scores are so severely below his classmates that we think there may be a learning disability involved. I am working to get materials together to work with him afterschool to figure out what some of his specific reading difficulties are. Perhaps most importantly, I am working to develop a personal relationship with Will, to figure out what motivates him and to let him know that someone cares.

I met with Will privately the day after I read his paragraph and asked him some questions about it. I had to confirm that the person he was describing was, in fact, me. He told me that it was. I assured him that I believed he was smart and capable, and that I did not think he was going to fail. I told him it was up to him to work hard so that he could pass 6th grade, but that I was here to help him.

It is my goal to be able to update the blog with Will’s progress throughout the year. We will see how that goes.

For now, I am running on worry and grit and hope (and the smell of pencil shades falling from where we write.)

*name has been changed.

How I found a church (or how my church found me…)

(Just a warning—this post is REALLY long. There’s a lot that happened with this, so I wanted to do it justice…)

For the past three months, Charlotte has provided pretty much everything I could ever ask for in a city—parks, neighborhoods with big, beautiful trees, a hip artsy area, a clean downtown, and even a little French bakery with the world’s best caramel brownie. There was only one thing Charlotte was missing, but it was big one for me.

A church.

Newman (my church in Chapel Hill) was a huge part of my life the past 4 years. Newman was my place. When I was there I was part of a community. When I was there I felt needed and supported and loved. Leaving Newman was one of the hardest parts of graduating. I knew moving on would be tough, but I could’ve never anticipated the ache I would feel week after week searching for a church, the yearning that would settle in the pit of my stomach on Sunday night, facing another epic long week at school with no real source of peace ahead.

This wasn’t for a lack of trying. I spent the last 3 months hopping from church to church, looking for the right fit.

First I tried St. Gabriel’s. This was the closest church to my apartment, located in a posh area of Charlotte called Myers Park. The congregation is medium sized, mostly families and the elderly. The music is typically Catholic, only a little more bland. I left feeling nothing.

Next I tried St. Matthew’s with my friend Ellen. This church is the farthest away—about 20 minutes from my apartment, way down in South Charlotte, which is wealthy suburbia. St. Matt’s is the closest thing to a Catholic mega church you can find. Ellen and I went to the evening LifeTeen Mass, which is a youth-oriented contemporary service. The music was more like Newman’s, which I liked, but I still struggled with the massive size. I left undecided.

Finally, I tried St Peter’s in uptown Charlotte with my friend Marissa. This church is small and quaint, located in a pretty part of downtown Charlotte. The service is very traditional—complete with organ and hymns from the 1800’s. I really wanted to like this one. It was small, and I felt kind of hip going to church in downtown Charlotte. I still left without feeling fulfilled.

So I rotated between these 3 churches, each Sunday hoping it would click—hoping that one day I would just realize which church I needed to go to. I particularly remember the Sunday two weeks ago. I had made the drive to St. Matt’s. I sat in the pew by myself, looking at the family in front of me. There were two girls, a mother and a father. The girls looked to be in middle school, about the age of my students. Like so many of the people around me, the girls were wearing matching North Face jackets. The mom had on Citizen jeans. Everyone was white. Everyone had plenty of money.

All of a sudden, I felt that being in that church at that moment was wrong. How could I go to school ever y day with my kids—my kids who are all on free and reduced lunch, my kids who are black or Latino, or Vietnamese refugees—and still go to a church like this? My kids like Manuel , who works every weekend at the Flea Market, only to give all the money to his parents so they can “pay the rent and stuff.” My kids like Natalia, who takes care of her 4 year old brother every day while her Mom works the 12 hour night shift. How could I live in their world every day and then come to this one on weekends? (I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being white and having money and living in South Charlotte. St. Matt’s is a vibrant Catholic community, and I’m sure it does a lot of good for a lot of people. It just provided too much of a disconnect between my life as a teacher and my life as a church-goer.)

Anyway, by this point I was feeling confused and a little hopeless. Then I found Mo Tee.

Mo-Tee is in our newcomer ESL class. She moved to the US from Thailand a little less than a year ago. She is tiny, with long dark shiny hair that she wears in a ponytail. Unlike my other refugee students, her clothes are always clean and neatly pressed. She smiles and giggles often. Mo Tee is one of those students that you meet and fall in love with immediately.

Last week, as I was walking around class helping students with an assignment, I asked MoTee about her bracelet. It was a wooden bracelet with pictures of the Saints—several of my kids had them and I was wondering where they were from. “It’s from church” she said.
“What church do you go to?” I asked.
“I’m Catholic.”
“Oh, me too! Where is your church?”
She shrugged.
“It near our school?” (I was desperate at this point, remember.)
She nodded.

I left with a lingering of hope, and a mental note to google churches near our school.

The next day, shortly after walking into class, I noticed Mo Tee and her friend talking over a piece of notebook paper. There were boxes, lines and arrows written on it. I walked over to take a closer look.
“Is this a map?”
Mo Tee and her friend nodded.
“To your church?”
They nodded again.

It was a map of how to get to the church from her apartment. When I pointed to road names, she had no idea what they were called. The only thing she could tell me was take a right here, then straight on this road, then another left.

That night I googled “Vietnamese Catholic Churches Charlotte, NC.” I was surprised to see one pop up that was, in fact, very close to my school. It was called Our Lady of the Assumption. It had never popped up when I searched generally for Catholic Churches in Charlotte, but when I checked the website, I saw it has masses in English, Spanish, and occasionally in Vietnamese. I began to get excited.

The next day I came to Mo Tee with a piece of paper with Our Lady of the Assumption written on it. “Is this what your church is called?” I asked. She looked at the piece of paper, frowned, and shook her head. My excitement bubble burst.
I read the paper aloud, “Our Lady of the Assumption. Is that it?”
“AHH, yes!” She smiled and giggled with her friend. “That’s it.”

So, last Sunday morning, I got dressed and made the drive to Our Lady of the Assumption for the first time.

And I loved it.

It is the most diverse church I have ever been to. The congregation is equally divided between white, black, Latino, and Asian. It has a great choir that manages to sing traditional Catholic songs with some gusto. I found out that many of my students attend the Spanish mass, while at least three of my students (from Thailand, Vietnam, and Haiti) attend the English mass.

I brought Adam to church with me for support, and as we were leaving, I spotted Mo Tee and her long pony tail. I called out her name, probably a little too enthusiastically.

She stopped, turned around, and said hello rather meekly. Then she ran off to board the bus with her family. (The church provides a bus to take refugee families from their apartment complexes to church)

This was not quite what I had expected from her reaction after all that she had done to help me find this church. I felt like I owed this little girl so much, yet I left worried that I had somehow intimidated her.

But, as I’ve learned, shyness is standard for middle schoolers, not to mention the fact that it’s a quite a shock for them to learn that their teachers have lives outside of school. During class on Tuesday, she called me over to her. “Ms. Ryan, you come to my church again?”
“Yes,” I said, “I really liked it.”
“This Sunday, you sit with me at church?”


Yesterday, I went to Our Lady of the Assumption by myself. I walked to the left side of the church (where Mo Tee had told me she sat) and spotted Mo Tee’s family all lined up on a pew—Mom, dad, two brothers, two sisters, all small and dark and serious looking. I smiled at them and sat down a few rows over. There was clearly no room on their pew. I knew her parents didn’t speak any English, and I didn’t want to make things too awkward.

A minute later, Mo Tee, in her pink striped turtle neck and matching tennis shoes, came and sat down next to me. She looked up at me and smiled, rocking her legs back on forth across the pew. And in that moment, amidst all the uncertainty that I’ve ever felt about what I’m doing and where I’m going, I knew I was right where I needed to be.

Brave Beginning

I have decided that the whole post college graduation phase is like the first awkward months of middle school. You feel confused and unsure about nearly everything--uncertain about plans and jobs, and even if you have a plan or a job, you feel uncertain about how you’ll do, if you’re prepared. If you’re moving to a new city by yourself, there are a whole different slew of worries and anxieties—where do I live? How do I find a new social group? What do I do when I get home from work? It’s scary, and if I’m being completely honest, a bit lonely.

For those of you that don’t know, I’m teaching middle school Language Arts in Charlotte for the next two years. Right now, I’m trying to capitalize on this connection between awkward middle school angst and wandering, confused college graduate. Maybe it will provide me with some extra insight into my students. We’ll see.

During my last few months and weeks at Carolina, I felt a lot like I was grasping up moments and people, hoarding them as if they were jewels I could keep. I felt as if my friends were these beautiful shining feathers being blown away from me, and as much as I tried to grab them and hold them in my hands, close to me, they were flittering through my fingers, flying out of my reach and away. But life is change. So we sometimes have to leave the people and places that we love.

Prior to this time in my life, I have been a little critical of blogs. Nothing against bloggers, but to me they seemed a bit self-indulgent. Why would anyone want to read about the little trivialities of my life, or my musings on any particular subject?

But now, for the first time—and perhaps in my own unique an act of self-indulgence—I have decided to write one. I’m writing because I want to keep up with all of you. By the same token, I hope you’ll email or call me and update me on your much more interesting lives. I may not be able to hold onto the feathers anymore, but I still want to know where they’ve flown, how they’ve changed shape.

I’m also writing for an openly selfish reason. I’m writing because I don’t want to lose myself. Over the summer, in the beastly Teach For America training known as Institute, which I can only briefly describe as the most insanely difficult 5 weeks of my life, I felt like a robot going through the motions of life. In the constant bustle of teaching, sitting in sessions, writing lesson plans and attempting to absorb as much information as humanly possible, I started to lose who I was. I forgot what I was passionate about, what I liked to do, what was good and unique about me. As I said to my friend Amy, (who is a shining example of the fact that even when you think you’ve already been blessed with the kindest, most loving friends anyone could ever have, you can meet another one.) I feared that once I started teaching I would forget to be a real person and instead only be a harried, stressed out, struggling, crazy person who happened to teach middle school.

With 5 weeks of teaching behind me, I can say that this is partially true already. I do little outside the realm of teaching. It’s a really good day if I have time to cook dinner and go for a run. With dwindling personal time and general busyness, I thought writing a little would help me stay sane. I plan to reflect on the struggles and failures—and maybe with some luck, small triumphs—of my first year teaching. I also may reflect on this rather confusing phase of being a real grown up.

I have posters in my classroom with photographs and quotes from some famous African American and Latino Writers. I made the posters because I wanted my students to have role models that look like them, but also because I need inspiration myself. Lately, the quote that keeps sticking with me is one by Sandra Cisernos. Her writing is real and funny and—importantly to me—relevant to my 6th graders. In The House on Mango Street, she speaks through the gnarled bed-bound character Aunt Lupe, who says to the young narrator Esperanza, “You must keep writing. It will keep you free.”

So I am going to attempt to keep a blog this year. I apologize in advance it’s bad writing, or overly self-indulgent and whiny writing. And, in the spirit of doing brave things, (Writing like this can be scary, you know? Scary in a vulnerable kind of way.) and doing things that help us remind ourselves that we are in fact real people with real joys and passions and thoughts beyond what we do during the day to pay our bills or make the grades, I challenge you, dear friends, to do something this year that makes you feel that you, yes you, are worth it.