Teachers naturally enjoy recalling students who supply fairly spectacular memories, who help remind us why we chose this strange profession. Some may leap to social media to post a rare artifact of appreciation, or share a moment of unexpected hilarity.
Who can blame us?
Inventories
Every September marks an inaugural class procedure known as the Personal Student Inventory. The annual ritual asks teenagers to respond to a series of questions in one of many variable attempts at getting to know them. Such an essential assignment seems more vital in social studies, particularly in any half-year semester course.
More traditional (Aristotelian?) teachers may mistakenly believe they teach only a subject, not a student. Fumbling opportunities to learn more about our young strangers, they may require info for just a small index card, then rush onward to more academic assignments. In the Testing Incorporated1 drive to cram maximum quantities of information, some may still believe they shouldn’t be sidetracked with finding more about their students.
While most of us soon tire of ponderous questionnaires, a good two-page survey introduces the student’s reading and writing abilities, as well as their willingness to express themselves on paper. Recently, such added educational efforts have fallen under the Socio-Emotional Learning (SEL) umbrella pulled open since the stressors of Covid-19.
Returning to one of my classroom bulletin boards a year after the state-wide Friday, March 13, 2020 Covid-19 lockdown. In 2021, we all seemed tattered but not broken. In 2023, we still do.
The audit emphasizes confidentiality before my selective questions, which include, “What do you like the least and the most about your family/neighborhood/school?”
The responses offer clues from a world of colliding interests and demands. Each hour, at least a few non-committal “Nothin” replies will dilute the 20 questions. A couple students will try to avoid the exercise with false and forgotten promises to turn it in tomorrow.
Education trades in different variants of procrastination.
Yet inquiries about favorite music, movies, sports, role models — and ever-changing social media preferences — can offer key cultural teen reference points. A desire “to be famous” may pop up without mentioning what for — or why.
It’s also revealing how many of our students seldom travel much at all beyond Detroit, perhaps only visiting relatives in Toledo, Cleveland, maybe Chicago or Atlanta. This type of sheltered existence surfaces quickly in basic social studies pre-test questions about demographics. When asked the African American percentage in the city, our 98% Black enrollment usually gets close to the correct answer (82% until 2020, now at 78%) — yet grossly overestimates the percentage for the entire United States population. 75%-80% are the most common guesses for the actual 12.5%.
The seemingly stock questions may reveal deeper snapshots.
Do you have any special needs or disabilities you think the teacher should know?
Obsessive compulsive disorder, PMS, homophobia and pathological lying.
What do you like most about your neighborhood?
Nothing. I especially don’t like having to listen all night every night to the intercom of the Burger King drive-thru behind our house.
What do you like least about your home life?
I hate all my four brothers.
Sometimes a student may open up encountering questions about money and how to spend it.
What you would do with $20,000?
Few will express any concepts of investment. Unlike upper middle class settings, there are no references to stocks, bonds, mutual funds or real estate. This missing abstraction loosely echoes initial research of Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro in Black Wealth/White Wealth (2006), which contends why African Americans keep experiencing an increased disparity in wealth due to severely limited generational financial assets, rather than any continued major differences in income.
Clothes and cars predictably remain the most desired perennial outlay. Interestingly, a large number will claim they would share a large portion of their money with their mother or grandmother, contrasting materialistic stereotypes of self-indulgence.
A favorite probe, Question #20 oddly concludes the inquisition:
Describe one of the craziest things you have ever witnessed or done.
Most defer to observational replies. Many snap off a joke just for laughs, sometimes some mild form of public indecency. A few reveal something more serious, usually in just one sentence. A few leave just a cryptic note, such as:
“I can’t say cuz u wouldn’t want to know.”
Tragically, every semester, on the average, two or three students per class tersely reply, “I’ve seen someone shot.”
Diversity and Adversity
Less than a decade ago, there was only one social worker for the entire district. Thankfully, there are now three plus a school psychologist at the high school, to assist school counselors, administrators, special services and general education in these most difficult cases.
At home, one of my basement bookcases swells with ring binders. Somewhat organized chronologically, the packed shelves house relevant articles, research papers, lesson plans, annual teacher records and years of sample student works, with the most trees killed during the turbulent 9/11 school year of 2001-02.
An incomplete poem of mine, loosely tucked into a binder pocket, falls to the floor. It documents a student from roughly 20 years ago, Dexter Jones2, who probably would have slipped into clerical oblivion except for his brief inventory confession.
“Seen somebody killed.”
Dexter mostly kept to himself. A slight grin would sometimes flicker through his reticence. I remember finally being able to pull him aside, a couple of weeks later, in the now-defunct computer lab (portable laptop carts currently tend to dominate our electronic landscape) to privately ask about his admission.
My follow-up inquiry didn’t seem to offend him. He quietly offered a few more details; how in the middle of a house party, he and the victim were seated on a sofa, drinking and smoking weed, enjoying loud hip hop when the gunman casually strolled up.
Dexter smiles strangely when recounting how the killer fired one shot between the victim’s eyes, how only a little blood splattered on Dexter, how he and everybody ran out the house, how he returned after most of the police were outside, to see the blood stains and to talk to a few others who had returned to the crime scene.
Although he continued to smile occasionally, Dexter never wrote or said much. He always seemed lost in some distant fog, as another kid quietly showing obvious disinterest in his classes. He barely passed American Government with minimal effort, as if we both suspected Dexter would not be staying in school much longer.
Towards the end of the school year, Dexter grinned slightly longer than usual, after granting me approval to read to his class an anonymous poem about our secret exchange. My informal poetry read admittedly revealed why it remains unfinished two decades later, as if such words somehow still matter.
Coda
Despite my transient involvement and formal recommendations, Dexter’s trauma never made it to any secondary referral, he never received even the common categorical designation of, say, Emotional Impairment (EI) and a corresponding treatment report of any Individualized Educational Program (IEP).
The following September, I wanted to see how he was doing, to check up on his NFL and rapper aspirations, and if he had to testify in any upcoming hearings related to the murder. I asked for his schedule in the main office, but Dexter would never be marked present again. His departure, like so many other unknown drop-outs or transfers, would be a few steps ahead of the overloaded school bureaucracy.
By the October state-wide Count Day, a familiar four-word designation would close his computer file: moved, no forwarding address.
Ed School Never Prepares Us
for misfortune's brutalities
for American Government Applied
for incomplete assignments
to murders or suicides
Ultimately Unsolved
for students like Dexter, missing too many classes
after seeing a couched companion killed
with too many opportunities to rejoin
the freedom outside, needing no passes,
who will exit hiding in a large ring binder
with no forwarding address,
and possibly no dear friend,
who once added a response
to another question, second to last,
about his biggest fear;
to see somebody git killed again.
The high-stakes standardized testing industry and the overlapping textbook monopolies will be examined in future columns.
Not real name.
William you are an excellent writer and teacher that cares, Thankyou for these stories.
I should have known not to read this in a public place. 😢
I don't know how you've managed to maneuver through the bureaucratic system for all these years without losing your mind.
I know you are able to reach some students, some of the time. I've no doubt that stays with them for a lifetime as I've had similar experiences with teachers myself. I felt that some of the teachers I've had - and one in particular - have saved my life with the extra attention they gave me.
I am grateful for your contributions and I truly thank you! ❤️