Dear Loved Ones,
While my blogging has become more and more sparse throughout my experience as a Teach For America corps member, I find it necessary to put a proper ending to this 2-year journey in the form of a reflective blog. One thing I’m sure most of you aren’t aware of is that I instituted blogging in my 9th grade ESL classes this year, where I had my students use sentence starters to reflect on their learning and triumphs from throughout the week every Friday. We capped off the year with an “End of the Year” blog, so I figured: Why not do one of my own?
Now, I know that I have discussed with some of you my plans for the near future, but as most of you are probably unaware, let me update you before I move on: Next year I will be staying with my school for a third year again as the 9th grade ESL teacher. As I teach next year, I will be applying to three different opportunities, all within education: Teach overseas (preferably in Spain); Fulbright scholarship for teaching abroad, and; Harvard Doctorate in Educational Leadership. So, as I am not halting my teaching experience just yet, I think it proper to not end on a note of conclusiveness, but rather one of reflection.
What I have come up with in my reflections are five major take-aways…things I have come away with and learned throughout my time as a New York City public school teacher living in one of the culture capitals of the world. Here we go!
1) The Education System in our Country is Ugly
I know that many of you would agree, before you’ve even seen any statistics. To those of you who are parents, you’ve most likely seen your student’s education both rise in cost and decline in quality. While I do submit that part of this is due to politics and government, I hope you don’t see the problem as being there and only there. Teach For America likes to talk about “Locus of Control”: this idea that, as a teacher, you really don’t have complete control over all aspects of your students’ lives: where they go home, who they go home to, how they eat, etc. We need to instead focus on the things we are able to change. With this, I believe a large part of the problem with our education system is that we as citizens just don’t really give a crap. We spend all of our time arguing political issues like gay marriage, going to war, health care, abortion, etc. and while these are important issues to many, I don’t understand how we have neglected the decline of quality education for our youth without so much as a silent raising of the hand in the back of the room of the national discussion. I’m going to take things a bit farther too: While education in general has gotten worse, how do you think the education for our low-income students has become?
I’m going to try to shorten this up a bit and give some scary statistics:
a. The national graduation rate is about 68% (1/3 of our students don’t graduate high school!)
b. The graduation rate for Whites and Asians are 75% to 77%
c. The graduation rates for students who attend school in high poverty, racially segregated, and urban school districts lag from 15% to 18% percent behind their peers (which is referred to as the “achievement gap”)
d. In New York City, about 30% of Hispanic males graduate high school in four years.
Some offer that the problem of the achievement gap is the parents: The absent father. The 16-year old mother. The abuse. The neglect. But blaming this on the parents is too easy and largely uniformed for us from privileged backgrounds to do. It’s a cycle. Listen to my stories, read my past blogs, and then I think you’ll see what I’m talking about.
2) Change is Possible
This summer I’ll be working at one of the most amazing and incredibly successful experiments in urban education: The Harlem Children’s Zone. (Watch the commercial American Express put together about them). Basically, this revolutionary idea was realized by Geoffrey Canada, who saw a cycle in Harlem that needed to be broken. What he did was set up a network of programs and schools that aimed to solve the problem near the beginning: He would see young pregnant girls walking around the streets of Harlem and bring them in, offering them classes on how to parent while promising them that if their child was raised in the network, attended a HCZ school from pre-kindergarten through high school, that their child would not only graduate and go to college, but graduate college as well. My job this summer will be to see this through as I prepare 17-21 year olds to pass the entrance exams to community colleges, which will allow them to bypass the remedial courses which cost money and provide no credits: a dropout point for many low-income students who can’t afford to do this.
In addition to this network and many incredible charter schools, there is a new film that was just released called The Lottery. The trailer can be found here, and the reason I am so optimistic about this film is the potential it has to finally start the national discussion on the achievement gap. The film might be able to do for education what An Inconvenient Truth did for Global Warming, and let’s hope and pray that is does because we need a sense of urgency; the time for true change needs to be now.
3) A Glass Can Only Spill What it Contains
These are lyrics that come from a mewithoutYou song that is about the need to fill yourself up with everything that you want to give out. If I want to love, I need to first have love to give. If I want to mentor others, I need to have good advice to give, coming from experience and perspective. If I want to show others what it means to live a Godly life, I need to first know the Bible and know what it means to live a Godly life. If you want to set the example of how to have a long lasting marriage, you need to have a long lasting and successful marriage. Etc.
I have seen such a great need for a spiritually absent and selfish city like New York City to experience the love of God on a daily basis, yet I have found it such a struggle to do my part every single day. I’ve wanted to badly to just be a channel of God’s love, but I don’t always have anything in my cup to spill. Whether it was because I fostered malicious thoughts in my heart, neglected to read the Word during the week, or forgot to pray that God would use me as a channel to pour out his love, I often failed in my attempts to love and to care as I was just as empty as the person I was trying to help. I recently heard a quote: “If someone asks you if the glass is half empty or half full, respond by asking them ‘Who said it’s not filled to the brim?’”
If I were to get a tattoo, it surely would be a wine glass filled to the brim spilling over with the text, “A glass can only spill what it contains.”
4) Humans Are Meant to Live in Community
My biggest struggle in living as a Christian in New York City: lack of a Christian community. My roommate is “straight edge.” This mean that he doesn’t drink, smoke, or do any drugs of any kind. He listens to hardcore music and has so many tattoos that he will have to wear long sleeve shirts to work for the rest of his life, or at least until this generation has completely taken over the work force. He has a community, and he hasn’t “broken edge” at all because he has a support system of friends who go to the same concerts, eat the same veggie food, and drink the same Coca-colas at bars with him.
When I was back home in San Diego, or at school at Pepperdine, this is exactly what I had: community; Friends who had the same radical ideas of changing the world as me. People I could see Lupe Fiasco with one night and Radiohead with the next. Movie lovers who would see the latest indie flick with me on any given night. Fellow abstinents (yes I made the adjective into a noun) who understood that dating a girl with the same values was a requirement, not something to be compromised not matter how attractive a girl might be. These are absent here, and let me tell you that this is my biggest single critique on living in New York City. Life is meant to be lived in community, and NYC is a community of secular living that is largely absent of true community and fellowship.
5) The Rat Race is an Unfair and Stupid Competition
The above comes from that Bansky quote that has guided this blog and gave it it’s name, but I use this part of the larger quote here to discuss the way in which ambition and selfishness blind those who succumb to them from true happiness. What I have witnessed as a professional has been disappointing and appalling. What I have witnessed this year many of you who have been in the work force have known for years: That politics, jealousy, cattiness, hunger for power, etc. are a pervasive force in this world that prevents us from simply loving others and being productive.
When I was first looking around for a home church two years ago, I had listened to a sermon from a pastor who was addressing a congregation I thought would be my community for a couple years. They were creative, loving, and young. His sermon was a personalized message to this specific community that revealed something I really didn’t feel I wanted to be a part of: He said, “I know that none of you sitting in this church right now moved out to Manhattan to take a pay decrease, and, say, become a teacher.” My reaction: “That’s EXACTLY why I came out here!” And I was proud of that. But upon reflection and prayer, I realized that I didn’t want to become a part of a community where I was the outlier; where people followed their ambition to the point that their end goal was a raise and a promotion and their name in a publication rather than changing a life or being changed by the resilience and pure joy from the marginalized and less fortunate. While I’m not offering that I live a better, less sinful life by any means, or that you must be a teacher or missionary or full-time philanthropist to help others, what I realized is that you must first question why you live for your life, and whom you live your life for. The pastor of my now home church, Dr. Tim Keller, recently put it this way (not verbatim):
“Think about where you root your life: A person who roots their life in their job will be crushed when they lose their job, or don’t get a promotion. A person who roots their life in their status and possessions and money will have a similar reaction when they lose these temporary things. A person who roots themselves in Christ will not be crushed by these things or look at others in jealousy.”
What do you root yourself in?
This was shoved into my face when the guy next to me at Starbucks spilled his coffee on my expensive shoes. Too embarrassed by how much I paid I won’t document the price here, but let’s just say that I was pretty upset initially. I wanted to say something in anger towards him, but then I thought about how stupid it is that I invest my money and “root myself” in things that can get ruined just like that, and cause me to emotionally harm another human being rather than show kindness and love, which is fortunately what my “glass” had just enough of.When I was in the Dominican Republic, I saw a similar dual reaction in one of the volunteers who was playing basketball with one of the orphans when he dropped his expensive Ray-Ban sunglasses. The kid accidentally stepped on them, causing the volunteer to react with a loud curse word. Realizing how stupid his reaction was and that here he is getting upset at an orphan with nothing, not even parents, for stepping on a pair of sunglasses that he could afford from a weeks worth of work he quickly stepped in to apologize and put a smile back on the kids face.
These examples are admittedly on a very small scale in the grand scheme of things, but people often don’t live their lives thinking this way. They root their lives in their jobs, status, wealth, etc. and the only way that I can be of any use to God’s kingdom is to show others that life isn’t meant to be lived like this. It needs to start with me, and it’s another cup that I need to fill. My interactions with colleagues have often left me disappointed and frustrated. They have shown me that the rate race is an unfair and STUPID competition, and I want to streak!
Take these reflections for what you will, I thank you so much for your support over the last two years, five years, twenty-four years even because if it weren’t for you I wouldn’t have had these lessons to learn and be the person that I am today.
for the wild,
