Books > Hold Love Strong

In 2001, I worked in an alternative school in Jamaica, Queens for young men and women who had not passed the eighth grade, a fact that, because of social promotion, indicates that the students' skills were far below those related to eighth grade standards. When the academic year began, the school was without the most rudimentary supplies. There were thirty desks and chairs for two hundred students. There was no paper or pens or curriculum and academic goals for any of the classes. In fact, there was not a computer nor a phone in the school office with which we could communicate with the Department of Education about the things the students deserved and the things we needed to provide then not an adequate but a just education. To make matters worse, four of the five teachers in the school were new to teaching and the Department of Education had hired three of us to teach Language Arts and no one to teach Science, Math, or History. I was a new teacher and I volunteered to teach World History. Then, in the first weeks of school, those planes took down the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon, and America and, to some degree, the world fell into a state of shock and mourning and war. When a representative from the Department of Education visited us the following week, I asked all manners of questions--a habit of mine since I was a child. I wanted to know what subjects in history I should teach. And if and when we were going to receive supplies and books. And what tests the students had to pass in order to progress and move back into a mainstream school. The representative's answer, a refrain she repeated after each of my questions was: "When there is nothing, the teacher is everything." Of course, this is not true. When there is nothing, the teacher becomes a student. So I listened a lot. And I thought critically. And for seven years, I wrote.