2001-10-11 ± 4:47 p.m.
si se puede!

attitude my dear,attitude.

as I sit at this shitty little compaq in this shitty little classroom on the top floor of this big leaky high school...I realize that the only things that aren't shitty here are myself and my students.

unfortunately they don't seem to realize that. every day is another opportunity (wasted?) to invest them, to engage them, to inspire them. Yet each day I feel as though I'm only trying to tame them, to train them, to get their attention for one fucking second so that I can try my hardest to plant some seed in their preoccupied minds.

And I try to put myself in their shoes...try to imagine being a sixteen or seventeen year old kid...moving from a rural spanish speaking village to a huge bustling, confusing american city. I try to imagine being put into a strange classroom with an even stranger teacher, who barely looks a year older than me (she certainly wears less make-up and brushes her hair less often) and who cannot speak my language. I imagine this strange young woman standing before me and spouting off gibberish and getting upset when I don't respond appropriately (because I don't understand a damn word coming from her mouth). I imagine turning off, tuning her out, resenting her presence.

And I wonder why some of them haven't tuned me out. why some of them still greet me with smiles and hugs and attempts at english. I think that perhaps those students are more forgiving than I'd be in their place. More flexible, less intimidated, much more driven.

Each morning I stand before a room filled with thirty teenagers who don't speak my language...and each afternoon, at 4pm, I sit down and wonder: have they learned anything? anything at all in these past eight weeks?

And sometimes I feel as though the only things I've learned are that I'm in over my head and that I've been set up to fail.

It was so much easier to be an activist when the activism consisted of sending e-mails, speaking up in class, and pissing people off.

what's love got to do with it? - 2004-09-29
noquierosoyabogada - 2004-09-21
I do not aspire to be cast in a lawyer joke - 2004-02-10
update - 2003-11-04
girl...you'll be a woman...soon. - 2003-08-12