Not being the teacher

For 21 years I was the teacher who had to teach, prep, and evaluate student presentations. Today I got to just sit and enjoy. For two hours I listened to young people at YearUp in San Francisco make PowerPoint presentations on a variety of tech companies. They did an admirable job and I learned something too.

I have been tutoring on Thursday afternoons at YearUp for a few weeks now and today the students invited me to sit in on their presentations as there would be no tutoring session. I was delighted to go and see what they had learned and see all of them in action. Well, one half of the class. The other half was upstairs, presenting there.

They were poised, well dressed, articulate, and in all cases, but one, shared the platform with a partner. I could tell they had practiced the give and take of doing a joint presentation. A few of the teams even threw in some light-hearted banter. Probably to relieve the stress on their end. Many of the students stopped to introduce themselves to me and to chat for a few moments. It was a nice effort on their part and one I thoroughly appreciated, knowing how hard it is to train young people to make that effort.

Tutoring at YearUp has been a joyful experience for this former teacher. These are young people, 18-24, who have graduated from high school but want an advantage so have applied to YearUp for an extra year of training, much like what the students in the Marketing Academy received while in high school. They will get a 5-month internship at local companies, giving them experience to put on a resume. All good preparation for continuing with college and/or going to work. From today’s presentations, I would say they are on their way to successful futures.

Where did the future go?

Last night my past collided with my present, and I felt the bump.  It came in the form of a lump in my throat when I realized how time had passed and there is no going back.

The Class of 2000, for which I was the faculty adviser, had their 10 year reunion last night.  The party was held downtown, on the top floor of a hotel that was built when I was in college.  The room has a 180-degree view of the city and had been heralded as breath-taking all the way back in the 70s.  I remember being there, as I was graduating in 1974, for an awards dinner.  The view, after dark, especially, was stunning.  Sunday brunches were served there, and for awhile the space was used as a supper-club.  Then it closed down.  The hotel was sold and went into a period of decline. Serious decline.  For a few years the whole building was shuttered.  Then a come-back, and now the room was again being used for banquets.  I stood at the window, transfixed. Downtown’s skyline had changed, dramatically, since I had last stood there.

But, so had the young people in the room since I had last seen them, at graduation, 10 years ago. They had marched into the future, going to college, starting careers, having babies, moving away.  And now they were gathering in this room, also unseen by me for so many years. Everything had changed. Except me.

I was still the new college graduate with great plans for my own future. I was still the adviser they all remembered who had helped them with dances and homecoming parades. Some remembered me as the teacher who had made them do sales presentations, or present business plans in class, and now they were doing work that called on those skills.  They remembered me as the one who said they should give back to their community and now they were volunteering at their children’s schools or giving swim lessons or helping the retired school teacher next door.

How had this happened?  How had these “kids,” whom I had shepherded through four years of high school, gone out for the past 10 years and made such great lives on their own?  I felt like I was the same person who had stood there long ago, looking down the long hall of my future, looking ahead. Now, I stood there, looking back down the long hall of my past. The past and present collided, right there.

Here are a couple of photos from last night with these great “kids.”

More visitors

Shoua, Yer, and me

Over the 21 year history of the Marketing Academy, we have had many of what we call legacies, the siblings of previous graduates.  The Lor girls count as a triple legacy.  Their older sister took classes in the business department and was our department aide in her senior year.  The younger sisters came along, went through the marketing program and took off for college in the Sacramento area.  Shoua went to Sac State and Yer is finishing at UC Davis this year.  I adore these girls.  They are smart, funny, and kind.  And today they came to lunch at the tiny apartment.

We went for a walk around the neighborhood:

The Peter Pan tent

At the Levi Headquarters

And then we came back to the tiny apartment for lunch, overlooking the bay:

You can see Yer’s work at her design blog.  Shoua works for the State of California.

Visitors

Although we have had family come to visit us at the tiny apartment, today was the first time friends from Fresno came by while sightseeing in San Francisco.  I served them my Red Wagon Pies (blueberry) and coffee while they watched the world go by outside our window.

We have laughed about people coming to visit; they just can’t stay, because we don’t have much room.  But, there is always room to have a bite to eat.  Today’s visitors were a mother-daughter team.  Alyce is a former student whose mother, Delores, was just the best parent volunteer.  Delores took hundreds of yearbook photos for me.   She loved to attend the sporting events and get right down on the field, right in line of the players, to get good action photos. I couldn’t have done the job for 9 years without her because I didn’t like to go to sports events, and my students would never get close enough to the action.  They liked to take pictures in the stands. The students even knew that Delores photos would be the best, and they waited to get them before finishing their pages.

Later this week we will again be entertaining two of my former students.

Craft your life

My good friend, Dr. Jay, paid me a nice compliment in her blog the other day.  I was very touched to read her take on what I’ve been up to the past few years and the outcome.  She goes on to talk about how she was not raised to ask for what she wanted.  One of her sentences really hit me:

Life was something that happened to me, not something I crafted.

This is what I have tried, for 21 years, to teach against.  Don’t let life just happen to you.  I saw how that worked for my students and their families, and it was recipe for disaster.  Struggling against that status quo, and realizing my students only knew what they saw, I rose up every day in my classroom and showed them what life COULD be if they took a different path, if they worked a different agenda, if they made other plans.  Many of them saw this as an invitation they could accept and went out and did things differently.  Some, however, did not believe they could change the status quo.  They could not leave the old way behind.  The comfort of what they knew outweighed the discomfort of crafting what they wanted.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.  This is all you get.  Craft the life YOU want to live. And, yes, it is hard work.

abandoned creatures

This was the year of the abandoned children.  Each of my classes had at least one abandoned child.  Marketing had the orphan whose parents were killed when young and he lives with an aunt and uncle who adore him.  Another student was raised in a foster home since a baby.  Others lived with grandparents or other family members because the birth parents were unable to raise them.

Yearbook class had one foster child and a whole bunch raised by single mothers.

Computer skills had the student who spent most of the year in juvenile hall.  Another arrived at the beginning of the semester without ever having been in school (and he’s 16).  One boy lives in a motel with a cousin of a parent.  For a few weeks I had a girl who lived in a group home but who also had never been in school (and she was pregnant).

Then there is 6th period.  I have a kid whose father put him on a train with a one-way ticket at Christmas time.  Two in foster care.  One boy arrived a few weeks before school was out, having been at some alternative school where he learned nothing and got no credit.  He has the worst language and claims he lives with a brother.  Another boy had arrived right after Christmas, needing only a few credits, none being from my class, and did nothing.  When I called home I learned he had left home and the mother didn’t know where he was living.  Another foster child ran away from home, missing two weeks of school and didn’t graduate.

Seventh period had one boy who lived in a group home, but they kept in touch, and he did well in my class. Another boy lived with a guardian because his father had died and the mother moved out of town.  Again, many with single mothers.  Where are the fathers?

My students learned to think for themselves

Just read this paragraph from here:

As Professor of Anthropology James Lett pointed out twenty years ago in an excellent article titled “A Field Guide to Critical Thinking,” people are taught in our schools what to think, not how to think. Why? Probably because it’s easier. Robert Frost once wrote that he took the road less traveled, and that made all the difference. For us teachers to make a difference, we must stop taking the easy way out.

Reminds me of some of my non-Academy students who want me to tell them exactly what they should be doing, writing, saying, thinking, whatever, and I won’t do it.  My Academy students learned not to ask me for specifics because I would always say, “Use what you have learned to make your own assumptions and do your own work.  I know how I would do the (exercise, speech, project, etc), but I want to see how YOU would do it.”  This was always, though, at the end of a unit where I had guided their learning so they would have a basket of ideas and skills from which to pull.  Maybe other teachers don’t provide a big enough basket.

By the time my students were seniors, they didn’t ask me what I wanted, they did what they wanted, and it was usually very good.

The last academy awards

Every month the Marketing Academy gives awards to its students for perfect attendance, good grades, improvement, and other worthy accomplishments.  At the end of the year we give pins to the juniors who have earned top leadership points and the seniors who will be graduated receive medals.  Today was the last awards’ ceremony for the year and the very last one for my career with the academy.  I have done about 120 of these.

Here are my seniors with their medals:

This group of students was my last class of sophomores, two years ago, and now my last class of seniors.  They are a very special group to me.

The last fieldtrip

After almost 200 fieldtrips, I climbed off the bus for the last time on Tuesday after the last fieldtrip that took my last senior class to Sacramento, the state capital.

Lots of lasts there.

The kids behaved so well and we all had a good time.  Of course, that has been the way it always goes on these trips.

The last dance

Our prom was last night, Starlight Fairytale, at the zoo.  I’ve forgotten the themes of most of the 17 proms I’ve attended, but not the venues.  The music has changed over the 18 years of dancing, but one thing holds true–kids love to dress up and go out.

Terry goes along and takes the candid photos like the one below, and I do whatever chore might be needed.  Last night it was check-in.  Unlike the prom I did in 1999, where we had 650 students attend, last night was easy with just 325 attendees.  Why the huge decrease?  A rule I fought hard for–you only get to attend the prom if you have a 2.0 gpa at the 3rd quarter grade period.  That is not so hard, but it sure whittles the numbers.

I would check in students, back in the day, who I knew had been drinking, were probably carrying a knife, and/or hadn’t been to school in months.  If I pointed any of these things out to the administration, they would shrug and say the kid bought the ticket, they could come to the dance.  At one winter formal, where Terry and I were only two of five adults in attendance, I told him, “we’re outta here, there’s going to be trouble and I don’t want to deal with it.”

Somewhere along the way I caused enough ruckus, and got enough people on my side, to get the rule changed.  Those who put on the dances now cry foul because they make so little money on the event.  Who ever said formals and proms had to be big money makers?  I remind people of the “old” days when it was like the wild, wild west.  Oh, yeah, that’s right.  The dances are so nice now.  The kids come and have such a good time and there is never any fear for one’s safety.

Last night was the last dance.  I won’t be there for next year’s prom, wherever it might be held or whatever the theme may be.  I’ll somewhat miss that, but I do have 17 prom’s worth of memory to keep me company.