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.