Being with

I had a hard night last night, and with very little sleep it carried over into an equally-hard morning.

I stumbled onto campus with eyes blurred from lack of sleep and too many tears. After I'd silently taken care of business for a half hour, the Honors Program assistant, Queshia, asked in a very clipped but still-kind tone, "how are you?"

"Not good."

"I can tell."

I pulled it together, and managed to craft what I think is a solid reading response prompt for my 479ers, who are currently reading Robert Moses's Radical equations. I even ended up having a great meeting with the first of my undergraduate research students (progress! Anyone know about the distribution of differences k - l, where kl = a²?). Then I headed off to 479, feeling totally unprepared, a naked charlatan.

I asked the students for updates on their I Have A Dream experiences and visits to HON 179 classes. Oksana spoke to the latter request, talking about her Wednesday visit to my colleague Samuel's 'Sabbath World" class. Samuel is a practitioner (and a very able one) of contemplative practices in pedagogy, and he began the class Oksana attended with a moment of silent meditation, later asking students to reflect on the saying "Remember to stop, to stop remembering." Some students took this as a reminder to pause now and then and reflect on what's going on in our lives, and others as a reminder that we are continually surrounded with our own and others' pasts.

I then took a moment to confess to the students how underprepared I felt, how I had given serious thought to cancelling class, how I didn't feel up to the task of leading discussion. But, I told them, I then told myself that instead of obscuring where I am and what I bring with me, I should come to them unafraid of being who I was in that place and time. "I need to trust in the community that we've built together here," I said, reflecting on hooks. "I need to recognize that being an authentic member of a healthy community often involves, among other things, being honest about who we are and what we bring to each other. I need to let myself be with you all. I need to trust that this is okay."

I was quietly crying by the end, and I thanked my students for giving me a chance to be with them.

I asked if anyone wanted to follow up on this. One student thanked me for my honesty; a second gave me props: "if I were having the day it sounds like you're having, I would have stayed at home and played with my dog for several hours." At this joke the mood grew cheerier, and we talked a bit more about community in general, and the community of the classroom in particular.

At the end, Sallie, whom I've come to know as one of the class's boldest students (despite her calm and quiet voice), got in the last word. "I feel like you're always here for us," she said, "is there anything we can do for you?"

"Besides not make me start crying again?" I joked, fresh tears welling up. "I don't think so," I said, "other than to just be with me today."

We then took a turn toward normalcy, discussing mass-media portrayals of non-white-male figures and challenges to hooks's idea of "radical openness." I settled in. I felt safe. By the end of class, as we concluded our opening discussion of Radical equations, the first minutes of class had been left behind.

My thanks go to my HON 479 students, a community of some of the kindest, smartest, more courageous students I've ever had a chance to work with. I feel blessed to get to learn with you.

P.S. -- it's turned out to be a pretty good day in the end!

Fare thee well

Today my HON 479 students had our group meeting over at the I Have a Dream Foundation's headquarters in Asheville, one end of a long brick building at the east end of Pisgah View Apartments. Kieran, the IHAD program's local coordinator, was effusive and outgoing as ever, quizzing the students on their long-term "dreams," discovering passions for dog training, foreign service, and trapeze artistry.

After a brief run-down on daily operations Kieran led the kids on a tour of the center while I hung back and chatted with Eugenia, Kieran's assistant director. I asked after a few of the students I'd remembered working with back in Fall 2012, and was pleased to find some of them doing well. Stephen, one of the most precocious readers of the bunch, is one of a handful now excepted from reading requirements owing to his accomplished skill. Elaine is as stylish as ever, always opting out of kickball for fear of messing up her outfits. And Ulysses is still Ulysses, still heavyweight rock-paper-scissors champion of the world.

I was chagrined to learn, though, that one of my favorite students, an athletic young man who had a legitimate curiosity about math and who often thought about math problems from completely outside of the box, has since fallen out of the program. After choosing to withdraw himself, he fell in with a questionable clique of friends and ran afoul of the law. An investigation into his home life eventually led him into foster care in a nearby town, too far away for IHAD to be able to transport him to and from the program should he wish to rejoin (and wish he does, apparently). They're working out the details now, but it looks as though his days at IHAD may be over.

This makes me sad.

IHAD it!

This term I'm sitting in on my colleague Sigmund's honors section of HON 479: Cultivating Global Citizenship, our school's interdisciplinary senior capstone course. (As Director of the Honors Program it will often fall to me to teach this class, and I'd like to see how someone else puts the course together before I do it myself.) The course addresses modern ethical systems, exposing students to these systems and helping them to understand how to apply those systems of ethics as they take part in an incredibly diverse and dynamic society.

The honors section of the course features a service learning component, in which the students tutor for an hour and a half each week at the I Have a Dream (IHAD) Foundation, a privately-funded program which gives academic support to at-risk youth, helping them to build the skills they need to succeed in middle and high school and to continue on to college. Last Thursday the class met at the IHAD's center, located in the Pisgah View Apartments (public housing development) in West Asheville, about five blocks from one of my usual running routes. Kieran, IHAD's on-site director, led the tour and Eugenia, his assistant, helped out. On that day the students were asked to complete their volunteer forms. I filled one out, too, deciding that the best way to become fully acquainted with the class would be to get in on the after-hours activities, too.

Yesterday was my first day at the center, working alongside five students in the class. It's been a long time since I've tutored, and a long time since I've worked with at-risk youth. The experience was a wonderful one, and eye-opening.

Each kid has to complete whatever homework she has for the day and then read a specific number of pages. The amount each kid reads depends on her grade level: sixth graders read six pages, seventh graders seven, and so on. Once done with each task the kids receive special marks on the cards they wear around their necks on lanyards, and they can receive "dots" (made with a Sharpie) for exceptional effort; dots can later be traded in for various treats and honors.

I worked with four kids, one at a time. The first student, Efrem, had no homework, so we went right on to the reading. He was an eighth grader, but after glancing at the print size in the book Efrem had chosen (a digested version of Dickens' Great Expectations) Eugenia asked him to read ten pages. This he did, and quite well, actually showing excitement at several points in the story. (He loved the word "idiot." Who doesn't?)

The next student struggled far more mightily: Umberto, another eighth grader, was clearly behind his grade level in reading and writing. He'd had to write a story for his language arts class, and the paragraph he'd produced was rife with errors, mostly in spelling and orthography. "It doesn't have to be perfect," Eugenia had told me as she'd paired me off with Umberto. Nonetheless, I hoped I could hit on some of the major problems. We went through the paragraph carefully, and each time a word didn't read the way he read it aloud to me, I stopped him.

"Are you sure that's what you said?" I'd ask. And we'd work it out. It took a while. The reading took some time, too. He was clearly not confident in his reading ability, stumbling over every fourth or fifth word, simply omitting words he didn't have any idea how to pronounce. We stopped several times per page as I asked him to say a word over again or puzzle a word out. He was very patient about this, and I rewarded him with a dot for his efforts.

The next two students were the most fun ones to work with. Ulysses is one of the IHAD program's most popular students. He's a precocious and bright seventh grader who had to work with me on his math homework and his reading. His math he flew through, reducing fractions like nobody's business. He clearly knew what he was doing, and he even caught his own errors. When it came to reading, too, he was a pro, but it was like pulling teeth to get him to read his allotment. He slogged through six pages before trying to cut a deal with me at the end of every sentence on the seventh page. "Can I stop here?" "No, you need to read another paragraph." "Can I stop here?" Nope, one more..."

The last student, Bertrand, was a great kid. A tall and slender eighth grader, he was struggling with problems none of the other tutors there that day knew how to handle: reducing cube roots. The center was clearing out: nearly every other kid was done with his or her work, and no one had dared help poor Bertrand. Eugenia turned to me; she knew that I teach at UNCA, but she didn't know what subject. "Do you know anything about this?" she implored.

"Um...you do know what I teach?" I told her, and it was as if the clouds parted. I sat down and started to work with Bertrand. The first couple were slow going as he got the hang of what was going on. I tried to explain it intuitively as well as algorithmically, but I didn't know what sort of conceptual basis he had to build on. We worked out four problems of the five he'd been assigned, leaving the last for him to finish later. "Thank you for working with me," he told me. I think it might be one of the slogans they teach the students to use ("I'm sorry for running into you; it was an accident" is another, for instance), but he said it with earnestness and sincerity. I was touched. I shook his hand.

"You're very welcome, Bertrand. It was a pleasure meeting you." I hope I get to work with him again.

I look forward to working with these kids. It was a pleasant an escape from the craziness of campus. It's good to be reminded that education is more than measurable outcomes, curricular reform, and recruitment and retention benchmarks. It can be simple, as simple as helping a student struggle with the word "sputtering" or with reducing 6/8 to lowest terms.

We can all stand a good dose of such simplicity.