Another Student Who Puzzles Me

Finding the piece of student work that I shared in class on Tuesday brought back a flood of memories, frustrations and feelings of inadequacy as a teacher. It's startling how a student whom I haven't seen or taught in months can still have such power over my psyche and my sense of myself as a teacher.

Before I read the personal narrative that Ellen (not her real name, of course) wrote, most of what I knew about her came from her disruptive behavior or her almost total lack of engagement in class. I knew that she used to live with her mother in Northern California and then left the area to spend time with relatives in 2005-2006, but I certainly didn't know the circumstances that lead to her being separated from her mother. To be fair to myself, when she joined my class late in the first quarter, I asked her (as I did all my students) to write me a letter of introduction. The letter, one of the few assignments she completed, contained none of this personal detail. To be hard on myself, I never read between the lines.

In her letter, she told me that she had already completed 10th grade but that her coursework hadn't transferred. When I spoke to the dean about this, she said that Ellen's grades were in fact, quite poor. Although Ellen was clearly bright, she and her mother had had to convince the dean that Ellen would take her second sophomore year seriously. Instead, she appeared frustrated, angry, and motivated by few class activities, assignments and projects. In several cases, I offered her alternate (but equally challenging) assessments in the hopes that something would engage her . Variations on "I don't want to be here.This is boring," is what I got in response. The few assignments that she began with promise were turned in late or incomplete. Over the course of the four months she was at school, her teachers and the dean has several meetings with Ellen and her mother. Sometimes, Ellen wouldn't answer our questions; sometimes, her answers were dripping with contempt.

In truth, I took her in your face lack of effort entirely as a reflection of myself as a teacher. "Surely another teacher (more sensitive, more creative, stricter, cooler...) would be able to reach her, find a way of getting her do to the work of which she was clearly capable." Maybe. But can we as teachers compensate for and erase a student's poor home life, the fact that their parents lose a job, the fact that their family is evicted from their apartment? Maybe not. But in retrospect I still feel I could have done more. If I had been able to step back from the relief I felt on the days she was absent I may have found a way to help her: a learning contract, a recommendation for counseling?

I saw little of Ellen's gifts until she wrote her personal narrative (a perceptive remark here and there, creative sketches and doodles in her binder) and then, after she had offered me some precious insights, she was gone, expelled for unleashing a string of foul language directed toward a teacher in another class. As my classmates know, her writing was fiercely honest, poetic and original. Not perfect, but clearly the work of a writer. I don't want to overstate the value of the story she shared with me, because knowing her background may still not have been all that was necessary for me to connect with her. But it would have given me a chance to. And I feel robbed of that.

So, Ellen, I'll be returning your story with my comments. As NG said, maybe knowing that your last assignment blew me away and could have been the beginning of something will mean something to you.