“Remember me, Brian?” It was a Facebook message sitting in my inbox, sent by Timmy. The last time I had seen and talked to him was at the Breakthrough Summer 2010 celebration night, five months ago. Of course I remembered him. I remembered all my students. But what was I to say to him? I left Breakthrough. I ran, and I had gone too far to turn back.
Timmy’s Facebook message went unanswered.
“We’re in the really red building,” the director had told me. And there it was. I stood on the opposite end of it at the street intersection and waited for my signal in the crosswalk. Cars stopped in front of the building, and teenagers with backpacks stepped out. Others walked or rode their bikes from the opposite side of the street. We were all heading to the same place.
The Episcopal Church of St. Joseph stands at the corner of 2nd Street and Rose in downtown Santa Ana. Its exterior is layered with shingles colored a barnyard kind of red, reminiscent of the 1880s when it was built, long before its grassy meadows became cement sidewalks and concrete streets. The church has one tower capped by a steeple from which a white cross casts its shadow over, depending on the time of the day, a post office, a child daycare center, or a Burger King.
The church extends behind itself into a smaller brick building, which was constructed in 1955 to hold more offices and a large classroom. It is here in the basement of this building where the Abraham Teen Center makes its home. Funded by Project Think, the Abraham Teen Center is an after school program that opens its doors to middle school and high school students Monday through Friday, three to six in the evening.
I had never heard of Project Think until now, and I didn’t know how. I was a third year education minor at UCI in my fourth week of winter quarter now, yet word about Project Think never reached me until my Multicultural Education class that I was taking. This class required me to volunteer tutor with Project Think for at least twenty hours.
I followed the stairs outside on the sidewalk into the basement of the Abraham Teen Center. Inside, I walked down the hallway and turned left, ignoring two rooms along my way. At the end of the hall, I found the office, where I met the director, Gloria. She was busy talking to another student so she showed me to some middle school students who were apparently in charge of giving tours to new tutors or anyone who was interested in the place. They were all girls, and they were all very eager to help me out.
“So how old are you Brian?” A girl asked. “Are you single?” Her friends giggled in the background. I could already tell that they probably didn’t get a lot of young, male volunteer tutors. There were only two other male tutors in the middle school room, one who was, without a doubt, a gay drama major, and the other who was a veteran math teacher with shining white hair and a lazy eye.
The Abraham Teen Center has three rooms, including the director’s office, and a hallway that connects them all. The first and most prominent room is the “middle school” room, where, as its name suggests, the middle school students study. It also triples as the supply room, where students and tutors rummage through cabinets filled with basic school supplies, novels, and a mixture of both American and Spanish board games; the computer room, where students have six computers with Internet Connection to, as the tutors hope, do research and type essays; and the game room, where students sit on a fairly sizeable couch tucked away in the corner and play on a Wii.
The high school room, for the high school kids, is no where near as well equipped. It’s got the tables and chairs for tutoring, and if students need some binder paper or a book or some time with the Wii, they just head to the middle school room. From 3 to 3:40, the students arrive, mingle, play video games on the Wii, watch videos on YouTube, or eat the snacks provided by the center, snacks that range from pretzel sticks to bread rolls and pesto dip and miscellaneous pastries left over from special weekend events at the church. From 3:40 to 5:30 is the strictly-but-not-really enforced quiet time. Students catch up or stay on track by finishing their daily homework assignments and studying for tests, or they get ahead by, in the case that they claim they don’t have any homework that day, fill out science or math worksheets printed from the Internet. The last thirty minutes are for clean-up and free time.
In my Project Think application I had asked to work with high school students, so Gloria assigned me to the high school room. In here I answered to Elena, the high school “program leader.” (Only program leaders get paid, and they have to be at the center every day from opening to closing). She called the attention of the high school students, and they looked up from their homework (and some, from the cell phones not-so-discreetly hidden in their laps).
“Attention everyone, we have a new tutor! His name is Brian, and he’s going to be here...”
“Mondays and Wednesdays, and possibly some Fridays.” I said.
“Thank you. Would you like to say something about yourself?”
I smiled and looked out at the students sitting at their desks, which aligned to form a wide U. They were all definitely Latino (and I would later glance at the complete roster and see that one hundred percent of the students at the Abraham Teen Center were in fact, Latino).
“So, like Elena said, my name’s Brian. I’m a third-year-student at UCI, and my major is Literary Journalism. It’s basically fancy journalism. And uh, my dream career is being a high school English teacher, so if you guys have questions about your English homework—”
“Aw what? English?” A student with a backwards New Era fitted cap sat forward in his seat. “So you get shit like grammar?”
Elena jumped in. “Pedro! Language, please. Let Brian finish.”
“A’ight, sorry man, go ahead.”
Pedro. I could already tell he was going to be a fun one. “Well,” I continued, “I was pretty much finished. I’m looking forward to working with you all.”
For the next hour, I sat down with the high school kids and learned their names. They didn’t have a lot of homework they needed help with. They were in their finals week for the first semester of school, so all they really had to do was study. Another volunteer tutor, Martha, who was also an older veteran teacher, helped Pedro with some homework. One girl requested my help with studying for an English final, so I quizzed her on poetry terminology. When there wasn’t much going on in the high school room, Elena sent me over to the middle school room. The two tutors over there didn’t need any help, but I sat around anyway to get to know some of the middle school students. When I got tired of the girls’ persistent questions on my favorite color, my favorite candy, and my favorite Justin Bieber song, I headed back into the high school room, only to walk into a conversation that I didn’t really expect.
“Back in the eighties all us teachers smoked weed all the time.” Martha told a story about weed as the high school students listened intently. “It wasn’t as much of a big deal back then.”
“Daang, lucky.”
I quietly sat down next to Pedro. I wasn’t too sure where my place was in this conversation, but then he turned to me and asked, for everyone to hear, “Do you smoke weed Brian?”
I stuttered. At Breakthrough, this conversation would never happen. Students knew to never ask about it, and if they did, teachers knew to immediately shut them down, telling them, “I will not answer inappropriate questions.” But here was Martha, someone who had clearly been tutoring at the Abraham Teen Center long before I had. Elena was also in the room helping another student in the corner, but she didn’t stop to protest this group discussion on weed.
“Well, uh—”
“Do you drink? You’re in college man.”
“No, I don’t drink.”
“But you smoke.”
“Well—” I didn’t wanna lie. It looked like I didn’t have to. But I still couldn’t admit that I did, not that it was even a regular thing. I often crossed a lot of ethical boundaries in my past teaching jobs, but I had always been good about keeping my mouth shut on the issue of illicit drug usage.
“Yeah, you smoke.”
Yeah, fuck it. I was building rapport with Pedro, who I learned was a sophomore. The two of us discussed marijuana more privately. I told him about the last time I smoked, which was just last week, and how it was the only time out of my five times that I actually got high. Eventually he started asking me about college parties, and I admitted that I hardly ever went to any, but I knew enough about them to answer his questions. When our conversation about partying, alcohol, and weed died down, I instinctively took the opportunity to steer the topic toward something more appropriate.
“So have you guys had any other tutors in the past?” I asked.
“Yeah, we did. A guy named Ryan. He was here for a while. He had a girlfriend and he showed us pictures. She was a hot white girl.”
“Was he a good tutor?”
“He was tight, man, for a white guy. But one day, he just stopped showin’ up. No one knew he was gonna leave. He didn’t say bye or nothin’. He was just here because he had to, I guess, like you, right? Doing this for some class? How long do you have to be here for?”
“About another six weeks. I gotta do twenty hours.”
“And then you gonna leave?”
“Well, uh, hopefully not.” I was sure he didn’t believe me. Our conversation probably reminded him that tutors like me usually didn’t last, so he drifted back to his homework.
I’m going to stay, Pedro. But I didn’t know if I believed myself either.
Showing posts with label breakthrough. Show all posts
Showing posts with label breakthrough. Show all posts
Right Field
Thursday, December 9, 2010
I tilted my head at the text message on my phone: I’m going to be in Irvine today if you want to talk. Sent by Linh, Saturday, November 6. He wanted to make up, yet it only had been a week since I—what’d I do again? Yeah, since I had a threesome with two other guys at his place in his bathroom and broke his towel rack. I thought we’d both move on, but seeing that he wanted to make up, I figured that I couldn’t at least leave his offer go ignored. I texted him back telling that I’d see him later at night, but first, I had to go to an audition workshops for PD, a team in Fullerton.
Originally, I had no intent to try out for PD. I was set on doing the February midyear auditions for the team I got extremely close to getting into back in October, and, assuming that I did make it in during the midyear auditions, and if I was on PD, I’d have to leave PD after only having been on it for three months. To me, there were some serious ethical issues with that.
However, at the workshops, a few friends, some who were on the team currently and some who were alumni from the team, knowing my situation, pushed me to try out anyway. My friends from UCI, Angela and Mimi (who was now at UCI for college), also needed a third group audition partner, so, I figured, fuck it. Tenth audition was a charm?
I could see myself playing baseball, maybe even for the junior varsity team when I got to high school. Ever since the first grade, when my dad bought a plastic hollow bat and ball toy set, we walked to the park together and I’d swing at the ball with so much force from my tiny Asian arms that I’d eventually dent the ball and bend the bat. Now, with our baseball unit coming up in my eighth grade P.E. class, I was excited to finally grasp a real metal bat and hit a real stitched baseball.
“Brian’s up at the bat—everyone move up!”
I glared at Seth as he inched closer from his position at first base. Well, screw you Seth. Just yesterday when my team played a different team, I hit the ball so hard and far that I managed to run all the way to second base. Prepare to get your ass shown up.
I struck out, our team’s third out.
I ran to my place in the outfield and felt a tap on my shoulder. “Take right field,” the team captain told me. Yeah, I was already heading there. I turned around only to see Seth running up to me. I took a deep breath and stuck out my chest, ready for another snide comment from Seth.
“Just stick to DDR, Brian.”
Screw you Seth.
I woke up and found myself grasping nothing but a lonely lifeless pillow in my arms. Fuck that shit. I rolled over and found Linh sound asleep on his side, facing away from me. I smiled. I snuggled closer and slid my arm underneath him even though I knew it would wake him up. It did. He turned around and smiled back.
“Y’know,” I said, “I’ve missed you all this week and last week too.” We kissed.
“Liar.” We kissed again.
“What? I am not a liar.”
It had been a long week. The group performance that Angela, Mimi, and I had been working on for PD auditions was probably the most amount of effort that I had ever put into a group audition. We spent entire evenings at the gym, going from 4 PM all the way to 1 AM with nothing more than some packed PB&J’s to keep me going. By the time I got home, Linh would already be getting ready for bed. Even though we didn’t get to webcam or talk that long, it was those brief two-minute gnight conversations that had me looking forward to the end of the day.
I had to cut short my stay at Linh’s place, unfortunately, because I had to get back to UCI and practice at 1. I got to see him later at night again though during my group’s dinner break when I drove half an hour up to his team’s studio to drop off a PB&J with sliced bananas for him, bananas because I knew he liked them in his cereal, so I figured they’d work in a sandwich.
I kept on thinking back to the Saturday night that we made up—or rather, made out. For the first time. It was as though we continued where we last left off. I didn’t understand how it happened. Linh didn’t want to talk about the threesome, or the towel rack, or why he changed his mind. He only asked to hold me, and so I let him. Everything that happened since then, I forced myself not to question, realizing how happier it made me to not live my day to day life scrutinizing and not believing.
I’m losing a love. I thought French was totally for me, but I guess it was really never meant to be. I read over my blog entry and thought about a title. Something Frenchy. “Mais le Sort a Voulu”—as fate would have it—sounded pretty good. Trung and I had an AIM discussion about the entry, but it quickly went to shit.
Trung:
You can substitute "French" in your entry for anything. Dance shall come in four years. The entry will be like, "I packed the last of my Kallusive shirts into a box. The still glittering Gingerbread Man no longer looked angry at what it was smashing, but it was instead angry at me. Returning his sneer with one of my own, I closed up the box, sent it to the nearest Goodwill, and bought a new dress shirt and tie with the money. Goodbye college. It's time to grow up." Hee. THAT'S A GOOD ENTRY. Save that.
bbq dinner:
well i could reuse it in like two days [our would've-been two-year anniversary mark] and replace "french" with "trung".
Trung:
you could...that was pretty bitchy of you to say.
bbq dinner:
i know.
Trung:
(4:05:32 AM) do you feel better now?
(4:07:05 AM) i really didnt appreciate that
(4:12:47 AM) fine. don't answer. whatever.
I found a text message from Linh sitting in my inbox. Good luck with auditions. You can do it. Sent Sunday, November 14th.
I replied to it, Thanks. I won’t really need it though because I’m just doing the audition for fun.
I was going to ask to not be considered. I had it decided since I woke up the day of auditions. I didn’t want to tell Angela or Mimi because I didn’t want them to convince me out of it. I had the application in my hand, and I was ready to write it down, “Auditioning for fun only,” but then I stopped myself.
I thought, maybe I should tell the director about my plans to try out for another team in February. I still wanted to make it onto PD because I knew it’d provide me with training that I would otherwise not be able to afford, but I knew telling the director my plans would send my application straight into the shredder. No team would take someone they knew would be leaving (or planning to) in three months.
Well, either way, I wouldn’t be getting into PD, so I figured I might as well talk to the director. He told me to write down “planning to try out for another team in February” on my application and that he and the other board members would take it into consideration when discussing my audition. He didn’t sound at all pleased.
Looked like I shot myself in the foot. Shit.
After turning in my application, I checked my phone for Linh’s response to my last text message. Oh. I see. So I couldn’t talk to you because you weren’t being serious about something? Messed up. Lol...
I ignored him for the entire following week.
“I don’t know what Ranier’s going to do while you and I are at Super Saturday.” I took my eyes off the road for a second to check out my backseat. “I guess he’ll just be chilling in my car cleaning stuff and walking around the neighborhood. Remind to hide his Valentine’s Day present.”
“Sounds good. Speaking of Super Saturday and Breakthrough, you know what Priscilla told me a few months ago? She was surprised that you came back to teach at Breakthrough for a second summer.”
I slid both my hands from the bottom of the steering wheel to the top. 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock positions. The sound of Priscilla’s name always made me sweat. “What? Why?”
“Because during your guys’ first summer, she got the impression that you weren’t really serious about teaching. You didn’t seem mature enough for the job, and she didn’t believe you whenever you talked about wanting to teach French in high school as a career. She thought you were one of the least likely of the teachers to return. I understood her points. Sometimes Brian, I really do question the things you do, why you do them, and if you can actually be serious about them. Look at what happened to French, for example.”
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and narrowed my eyebrows, forcing myself to concentrate on the road. Fuck you Priscilla.
One week passed since the audition before I was ready to talk to Linh (online) about what made me mad to the point of ignoring him for an entire week: him thinking that I wasn’t serious about an audition that I was doing “for fun.” The talk eventually boiled down to a sloppy argument over semantics, about what I meant by “for fun” and what he meant by “not serious.”
Linh:
When you use ["for fun"] for an audition, it means you don't care.
My response to him, I could imagine myself shouting and throwing a fist at the wall for every syllable as I pounded each letter of each word on my keyboard.
bbq dinner:
I don't know who “you” is supposed to be, but I always care. It seems like I'm getting pissed off over something trivial, but it really means a lot. All throughout my life, whenever I tried to do something I really cared about, people would look at me and think of me as a joke.
Linh said he understood why I got mad, and we agreed to call the whole “for fun” / “not serious” thing a misunderstanding. I was happy that he at least understood where I was coming from on wanting to be taken seriously. After all that was settled, I finally told him the good news: In case you haven’t noticed all the congratulatory posts on my Facebook wall, I made it into PD.
The celebration was cut short. Surprisingly, he didn’t notice, and that was because there was something frequently on my wall that made him too uneasy to ever click on my page:
He brought up Trung.
Originally, I had no intent to try out for PD. I was set on doing the February midyear auditions for the team I got extremely close to getting into back in October, and, assuming that I did make it in during the midyear auditions, and if I was on PD, I’d have to leave PD after only having been on it for three months. To me, there were some serious ethical issues with that.
However, at the workshops, a few friends, some who were on the team currently and some who were alumni from the team, knowing my situation, pushed me to try out anyway. My friends from UCI, Angela and Mimi (who was now at UCI for college), also needed a third group audition partner, so, I figured, fuck it. Tenth audition was a charm?
I could see myself playing baseball, maybe even for the junior varsity team when I got to high school. Ever since the first grade, when my dad bought a plastic hollow bat and ball toy set, we walked to the park together and I’d swing at the ball with so much force from my tiny Asian arms that I’d eventually dent the ball and bend the bat. Now, with our baseball unit coming up in my eighth grade P.E. class, I was excited to finally grasp a real metal bat and hit a real stitched baseball.
“Brian’s up at the bat—everyone move up!”
I glared at Seth as he inched closer from his position at first base. Well, screw you Seth. Just yesterday when my team played a different team, I hit the ball so hard and far that I managed to run all the way to second base. Prepare to get your ass shown up.
I struck out, our team’s third out.
I ran to my place in the outfield and felt a tap on my shoulder. “Take right field,” the team captain told me. Yeah, I was already heading there. I turned around only to see Seth running up to me. I took a deep breath and stuck out my chest, ready for another snide comment from Seth.
“Just stick to DDR, Brian.”
Screw you Seth.
I woke up and found myself grasping nothing but a lonely lifeless pillow in my arms. Fuck that shit. I rolled over and found Linh sound asleep on his side, facing away from me. I smiled. I snuggled closer and slid my arm underneath him even though I knew it would wake him up. It did. He turned around and smiled back.
“Y’know,” I said, “I’ve missed you all this week and last week too.” We kissed.
“Liar.” We kissed again.
“What? I am not a liar.”
It had been a long week. The group performance that Angela, Mimi, and I had been working on for PD auditions was probably the most amount of effort that I had ever put into a group audition. We spent entire evenings at the gym, going from 4 PM all the way to 1 AM with nothing more than some packed PB&J’s to keep me going. By the time I got home, Linh would already be getting ready for bed. Even though we didn’t get to webcam or talk that long, it was those brief two-minute gnight conversations that had me looking forward to the end of the day.
I had to cut short my stay at Linh’s place, unfortunately, because I had to get back to UCI and practice at 1. I got to see him later at night again though during my group’s dinner break when I drove half an hour up to his team’s studio to drop off a PB&J with sliced bananas for him, bananas because I knew he liked them in his cereal, so I figured they’d work in a sandwich.
I kept on thinking back to the Saturday night that we made up—or rather, made out. For the first time. It was as though we continued where we last left off. I didn’t understand how it happened. Linh didn’t want to talk about the threesome, or the towel rack, or why he changed his mind. He only asked to hold me, and so I let him. Everything that happened since then, I forced myself not to question, realizing how happier it made me to not live my day to day life scrutinizing and not believing.
I’m losing a love. I thought French was totally for me, but I guess it was really never meant to be. I read over my blog entry and thought about a title. Something Frenchy. “Mais le Sort a Voulu”—as fate would have it—sounded pretty good. Trung and I had an AIM discussion about the entry, but it quickly went to shit.
Trung:
You can substitute "French" in your entry for anything. Dance shall come in four years. The entry will be like, "I packed the last of my Kallusive shirts into a box. The still glittering Gingerbread Man no longer looked angry at what it was smashing, but it was instead angry at me. Returning his sneer with one of my own, I closed up the box, sent it to the nearest Goodwill, and bought a new dress shirt and tie with the money. Goodbye college. It's time to grow up." Hee. THAT'S A GOOD ENTRY. Save that.
bbq dinner:
well i could reuse it in like two days [our would've-been two-year anniversary mark] and replace "french" with "trung".
Trung:
you could...that was pretty bitchy of you to say.
bbq dinner:
i know.
Trung:
(4:05:32 AM) do you feel better now?
(4:07:05 AM) i really didnt appreciate that
(4:12:47 AM) fine. don't answer. whatever.
I found a text message from Linh sitting in my inbox. Good luck with auditions. You can do it. Sent Sunday, November 14th.
I replied to it, Thanks. I won’t really need it though because I’m just doing the audition for fun.
I was going to ask to not be considered. I had it decided since I woke up the day of auditions. I didn’t want to tell Angela or Mimi because I didn’t want them to convince me out of it. I had the application in my hand, and I was ready to write it down, “Auditioning for fun only,” but then I stopped myself.
I thought, maybe I should tell the director about my plans to try out for another team in February. I still wanted to make it onto PD because I knew it’d provide me with training that I would otherwise not be able to afford, but I knew telling the director my plans would send my application straight into the shredder. No team would take someone they knew would be leaving (or planning to) in three months.
Well, either way, I wouldn’t be getting into PD, so I figured I might as well talk to the director. He told me to write down “planning to try out for another team in February” on my application and that he and the other board members would take it into consideration when discussing my audition. He didn’t sound at all pleased.
Looked like I shot myself in the foot. Shit.
After turning in my application, I checked my phone for Linh’s response to my last text message. Oh. I see. So I couldn’t talk to you because you weren’t being serious about something? Messed up. Lol...
I ignored him for the entire following week.
“I don’t know what Ranier’s going to do while you and I are at Super Saturday.” I took my eyes off the road for a second to check out my backseat. “I guess he’ll just be chilling in my car cleaning stuff and walking around the neighborhood. Remind to hide his Valentine’s Day present.”
“Sounds good. Speaking of Super Saturday and Breakthrough, you know what Priscilla told me a few months ago? She was surprised that you came back to teach at Breakthrough for a second summer.”
I slid both my hands from the bottom of the steering wheel to the top. 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock positions. The sound of Priscilla’s name always made me sweat. “What? Why?”
“Because during your guys’ first summer, she got the impression that you weren’t really serious about teaching. You didn’t seem mature enough for the job, and she didn’t believe you whenever you talked about wanting to teach French in high school as a career. She thought you were one of the least likely of the teachers to return. I understood her points. Sometimes Brian, I really do question the things you do, why you do them, and if you can actually be serious about them. Look at what happened to French, for example.”
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and narrowed my eyebrows, forcing myself to concentrate on the road. Fuck you Priscilla.
One week passed since the audition before I was ready to talk to Linh (online) about what made me mad to the point of ignoring him for an entire week: him thinking that I wasn’t serious about an audition that I was doing “for fun.” The talk eventually boiled down to a sloppy argument over semantics, about what I meant by “for fun” and what he meant by “not serious.”
Linh:
When you use ["for fun"] for an audition, it means you don't care.
My response to him, I could imagine myself shouting and throwing a fist at the wall for every syllable as I pounded each letter of each word on my keyboard.
bbq dinner:
I don't know who “you” is supposed to be, but I always care. It seems like I'm getting pissed off over something trivial, but it really means a lot. All throughout my life, whenever I tried to do something I really cared about, people would look at me and think of me as a joke.
Linh said he understood why I got mad, and we agreed to call the whole “for fun” / “not serious” thing a misunderstanding. I was happy that he at least understood where I was coming from on wanting to be taken seriously. After all that was settled, I finally told him the good news: In case you haven’t noticed all the congratulatory posts on my Facebook wall, I made it into PD.
The celebration was cut short. Surprisingly, he didn’t notice, and that was because there was something frequently on my wall that made him too uneasy to ever click on my page:
He brought up Trung.
That’s Just the Way It Is: Redux
Monday, August 16, 2010
(Continued from “That’s Just the Way It Is: Part 1” and “Part 2”)
Even though I didn’t like the fact that Breakthrough took place this year at a fancy private rich school in the equally rich and white and white-collar neighborhoods of Los Gatos this summer, I had to admit it was nice that, for once, the students had access to multiple microphones for celebration night.
Back in 2008, during evaluations after celebration night, I suggested getting more than one microphone because hardly anyone could hear the students who didn’t have one. Cesar retorted, “Great idea Brian. Feel free to buy us more microphones.” No one at that point in time ever thought that within another two years, Breakthrough would (unnecessarily) spend exorbitant amounts of money just so that they could ship their low-income students on buses every morning to a white, rich school—and I do say “white” and “rich” with some resent (looks like my students’ internalized racism has rubbed off on me, in combination with the things I’ve learned about white privilege and other stuff in college ethnic studies classes). But at least this summer, sitting in the very back on the bleachers in the gym I could hear every word that the students spoke on stage.
7 PM. The gymnasium thundered with applause as Breakthrough’s summer 2010 celebration night came to a close. Families shot from their seats to find their kids, while the kids scrambled to find their teachers for last-minute photos. As I sorted my way through the crowds, I found Timmy.
I was hoping that maybe we could pause to just chat a little bit more. Crack some jokes, discuss his summer, show off tutting combos, but he seemed to be in a hurry. Our conversation was limited to my request for a photo with him, our pose, and then his farewell as he disappeared back into the crowd.
I didn’t think too much of this until ten minutes later when Ross, one of this summer’s new teachers, emerged from the commotion with a New Era fitted cap in his hand. It was Timmy’s hat. A gift from him, Ross confirmed.
I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and slid it open. The picture that greeted me on the screen was a photo of me and several students at the first Super Saturday, including Timmy. He was wearing a hat, the same one that now rested on Ross’s head.
“Hey,” I sat down on a concrete ledge next to one of the new seventh graders. I already knew pretty much all the eighth graders because I worked with them the previous summer, so, now during the second week into my second summer at Breakthrough, I had decided it was time to get to know some of the new seventh graders. “I was standing over there when I noticed what you were doing,” I said.
“Oh yeah? What was I doing?” he asked.
I held out my left arm and bent my wrist at a right angle, and then I bent my elbow at another right angle and rotated my forearm up. “You were tutting. Well, finger tutting. I can kinda do tuts, but they’re not too clean.”
“Oh tight! You tut?”
I nodded.
“I know a finger tutting combo. Wanna learn it?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He’d later introduce himself as Timmy, and he would never get the chance to finish teaching me his tutting combo.
The crowd started to die as more families left for home with their kids. I was mostly standing around at this point instead of actively searching, but I still got requests for photos and hugs from students. That was nice. What really made me happy though was seeing the formerly shy Rosalina running up to me with a grin. I held out my right arm for a side hug, but she stopped when she got close. She asked me if I had seen Maymay anywhere. I pointed her toward the right direction. My shoulders slumped as she turned to run off, but I guess she noticed. She turned back around and approached me with open arms and a timid smile, one that I was more familiar with. We hugged, and then I let her go find Maymay.
“Breakthrooough twoo thousaaand and eeiight.”
I turned around to face a student who was trying to read some graffiti that my seven grade writing students drew on the whiteboard the other day. Rosalina, Cil, and a few more of my students from my dance class wandered through my door and sat on top of the desks. One quickly located my rolly chair and started to slide over the carpet. Students often liked to drop by my class in the morning before first period to hang out and get away from the cold.
“Brian,” Cil said, “when are you going to start teaching dance again?”
“I’m not sure. Since dance class is a supposed to be a ‘dance around the world in thirty days’ class, I probably won’t get another chance to teach breakdancing. Augusto will probably teach for the rest of the summer since he knows a bunch of different kinds of dances, enough to teach one a week. I only knew breakdancing.”
“Aw man!”
“What, you don’t like cumbia?”
“I don’t like Augusto,” a student interjected. Rosalina nodded solemnly.
“Yeah, you made dancing a lot funner,” Cil added.
“Really?”
They all nodded and agreed.
I turned my back to them and continued to write the agenda on the whiteboard, but I was really trying to cover a huge smirk.
There was actually one more student that I had to say goodbye to: Matty. I realized that I hadn’t seen him all night long except for a brief “hey” before the celebration began. All the families had filtered out of the gym at this point, leaving the teachers and a few students still inside. Matty wasn’t among them, so I headed outside, where there wasn’t much to see. Tarps getting taken down, tables getting folded together, bees buzzing around trash bags, families and kids taking off in their cars.
I spotted a small group of students chilling and headed toward them, but when I got close they all turned to look at me. None of them was Matty. I smiled, and feeling a little awkward, I bent down to pick up a paper plate, trying to play myself off as having clean-up duty.
I teetered my way back into the gym and planted myself on the bleachers, but I quickly jumped up when I spotted the elusive Fernando with his family and a few teachers in front of the stage. None of the other ninth graders nor I could find him earlier, so I had thought that he simply didn’t show up. But he was here. He and his family started to make their way toward the exit, so I got up to intercept. I was ready to run toward him, ready to shout his name and to wave my camera around in the air. But my feet didn’t take more than two steps before I slowed to a stop. I didn’t have anymore energy to lift my legs.
My eyes followed Fernando as he and his family walked out the door. Once their silhouettes disappeared, orange sunrays shined through the open door. I shielded my eyes until the door swiveled its way back into the doorway, slamming shut and locking out the sun. No more students. Clangs rang through the gym as teachers began folding up chairs.
9:30 AM. The students were coming, but one last thing remained. I scrawled today’s date on the top left corner of the white board in my best cursive: June 23rd, 2008. I turned around to see students already walking in and finding their seats.
A short boy took his seat. His hair was slicked and neatly combed to the side. He put down his backpack, pulled out his binder, placed it on his desk, and cupped his hands in his lap. He’d later introduce himself as Fernando, and he’d later be one of my only two seventh grade writing students to finish all three summers that the Breakthrough program had to offer.
A skinny girl took her seat. She had pale, barely brown skin and long straight dark hair. Her backpack remained strapped to her back. As she leaned forward and rested her chin on her hands, she shook her bangs aside, but they lazily fell back down across her face, obscuring her long, bored gaze. She’d later introduce herself as Leandra, and she’d later teach me how frustrating it was to work with and to control her, but also how rewarding it was to see her shine in her best moments.
A chubby, perhaps overweight boy took his seat. He wore pants and a white polo, which had some visible stains; this was probably his school uniform, although Breakthrough never enforced a dress code for the summer. He dropped his backpack by his side and reclined in his chair. His head turned toward the window, and he looked like his mind had already drifted somewhere beyond the classroom. He’d later introduce himself as Paulo, and I’d later learn about his processing disorder and be one of his first and only few friends at Breakthrough.
A few more students straggled through the door and found their seats. Once I counted ten students, I prepped myself and began. “Hello everyone,” I said, “and welcome to Breakthrough. My name is Brian, and this is my first summer teaching at Breakthrough, just as this is your first summer attending it. I just recently graduated from high school, and this fall I’m heading down to SoCal—that’s Southern California—for college at UC Irvine. I’m majoring in French, and I hope to become a French teacher. If all goes well, I should be graduating in four years in 2012. Some things I like to do include—”
“Hey!”
I turned my head toward a student standing at the door.
“Is this Mark’s seventh grade writing class?” he asked.
“Well, this is seventh grade writing,” I answered, “but Mark’s class is down the hall.”
“K, thanks!” He rushed off. I’d later learn that that kid was Mickey. When he saw my face and I saw his, neither of us had ever suspected the kind of crazy bullying that he would have to put up with and the kind that I would fail to prevent in my classroom a year later.
I poked my head out the door to see if there were anymore students lost in the hallways. Everyone had found their way to their classrooms, so I returned to the front of the whiteboard.
“Well,” I said, “it looks like everyone’s here...” I glanced over my students and took turns locking eyes with each and everyone of them, and they’d timidly smile back as I smiled at them, all of us unaware of the kinds of relations we’d form, the struggles we’d go through, and the breakthroughs we’d make together.
I clasped my hands. “Alright!” I cheered. “Let’s get started.”
Even though I didn’t like the fact that Breakthrough took place this year at a fancy private rich school in the equally rich and white and white-collar neighborhoods of Los Gatos this summer, I had to admit it was nice that, for once, the students had access to multiple microphones for celebration night.
Back in 2008, during evaluations after celebration night, I suggested getting more than one microphone because hardly anyone could hear the students who didn’t have one. Cesar retorted, “Great idea Brian. Feel free to buy us more microphones.” No one at that point in time ever thought that within another two years, Breakthrough would (unnecessarily) spend exorbitant amounts of money just so that they could ship their low-income students on buses every morning to a white, rich school—and I do say “white” and “rich” with some resent (looks like my students’ internalized racism has rubbed off on me, in combination with the things I’ve learned about white privilege and other stuff in college ethnic studies classes). But at least this summer, sitting in the very back on the bleachers in the gym I could hear every word that the students spoke on stage.
7 PM. The gymnasium thundered with applause as Breakthrough’s summer 2010 celebration night came to a close. Families shot from their seats to find their kids, while the kids scrambled to find their teachers for last-minute photos. As I sorted my way through the crowds, I found Timmy.
I was hoping that maybe we could pause to just chat a little bit more. Crack some jokes, discuss his summer, show off tutting combos, but he seemed to be in a hurry. Our conversation was limited to my request for a photo with him, our pose, and then his farewell as he disappeared back into the crowd.
I didn’t think too much of this until ten minutes later when Ross, one of this summer’s new teachers, emerged from the commotion with a New Era fitted cap in his hand. It was Timmy’s hat. A gift from him, Ross confirmed.
I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and slid it open. The picture that greeted me on the screen was a photo of me and several students at the first Super Saturday, including Timmy. He was wearing a hat, the same one that now rested on Ross’s head.
“Hey,” I sat down on a concrete ledge next to one of the new seventh graders. I already knew pretty much all the eighth graders because I worked with them the previous summer, so, now during the second week into my second summer at Breakthrough, I had decided it was time to get to know some of the new seventh graders. “I was standing over there when I noticed what you were doing,” I said.
“Oh yeah? What was I doing?” he asked.
I held out my left arm and bent my wrist at a right angle, and then I bent my elbow at another right angle and rotated my forearm up. “You were tutting. Well, finger tutting. I can kinda do tuts, but they’re not too clean.”
“Oh tight! You tut?”
I nodded.
“I know a finger tutting combo. Wanna learn it?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He’d later introduce himself as Timmy, and he would never get the chance to finish teaching me his tutting combo.
The crowd started to die as more families left for home with their kids. I was mostly standing around at this point instead of actively searching, but I still got requests for photos and hugs from students. That was nice. What really made me happy though was seeing the formerly shy Rosalina running up to me with a grin. I held out my right arm for a side hug, but she stopped when she got close. She asked me if I had seen Maymay anywhere. I pointed her toward the right direction. My shoulders slumped as she turned to run off, but I guess she noticed. She turned back around and approached me with open arms and a timid smile, one that I was more familiar with. We hugged, and then I let her go find Maymay.
“Breakthrooough twoo thousaaand and eeiight.”
I turned around to face a student who was trying to read some graffiti that my seven grade writing students drew on the whiteboard the other day. Rosalina, Cil, and a few more of my students from my dance class wandered through my door and sat on top of the desks. One quickly located my rolly chair and started to slide over the carpet. Students often liked to drop by my class in the morning before first period to hang out and get away from the cold.
“Brian,” Cil said, “when are you going to start teaching dance again?”
“I’m not sure. Since dance class is a supposed to be a ‘dance around the world in thirty days’ class, I probably won’t get another chance to teach breakdancing. Augusto will probably teach for the rest of the summer since he knows a bunch of different kinds of dances, enough to teach one a week. I only knew breakdancing.”
“Aw man!”
“What, you don’t like cumbia?”
“I don’t like Augusto,” a student interjected. Rosalina nodded solemnly.
“Yeah, you made dancing a lot funner,” Cil added.
“Really?”
They all nodded and agreed.
I turned my back to them and continued to write the agenda on the whiteboard, but I was really trying to cover a huge smirk.
There was actually one more student that I had to say goodbye to: Matty. I realized that I hadn’t seen him all night long except for a brief “hey” before the celebration began. All the families had filtered out of the gym at this point, leaving the teachers and a few students still inside. Matty wasn’t among them, so I headed outside, where there wasn’t much to see. Tarps getting taken down, tables getting folded together, bees buzzing around trash bags, families and kids taking off in their cars.
I spotted a small group of students chilling and headed toward them, but when I got close they all turned to look at me. None of them was Matty. I smiled, and feeling a little awkward, I bent down to pick up a paper plate, trying to play myself off as having clean-up duty.
I teetered my way back into the gym and planted myself on the bleachers, but I quickly jumped up when I spotted the elusive Fernando with his family and a few teachers in front of the stage. None of the other ninth graders nor I could find him earlier, so I had thought that he simply didn’t show up. But he was here. He and his family started to make their way toward the exit, so I got up to intercept. I was ready to run toward him, ready to shout his name and to wave my camera around in the air. But my feet didn’t take more than two steps before I slowed to a stop. I didn’t have anymore energy to lift my legs.
My eyes followed Fernando as he and his family walked out the door. Once their silhouettes disappeared, orange sunrays shined through the open door. I shielded my eyes until the door swiveled its way back into the doorway, slamming shut and locking out the sun. No more students. Clangs rang through the gym as teachers began folding up chairs.
9:30 AM. The students were coming, but one last thing remained. I scrawled today’s date on the top left corner of the white board in my best cursive: June 23rd, 2008. I turned around to see students already walking in and finding their seats.
A short boy took his seat. His hair was slicked and neatly combed to the side. He put down his backpack, pulled out his binder, placed it on his desk, and cupped his hands in his lap. He’d later introduce himself as Fernando, and he’d later be one of my only two seventh grade writing students to finish all three summers that the Breakthrough program had to offer.
A skinny girl took her seat. She had pale, barely brown skin and long straight dark hair. Her backpack remained strapped to her back. As she leaned forward and rested her chin on her hands, she shook her bangs aside, but they lazily fell back down across her face, obscuring her long, bored gaze. She’d later introduce herself as Leandra, and she’d later teach me how frustrating it was to work with and to control her, but also how rewarding it was to see her shine in her best moments.
A chubby, perhaps overweight boy took his seat. He wore pants and a white polo, which had some visible stains; this was probably his school uniform, although Breakthrough never enforced a dress code for the summer. He dropped his backpack by his side and reclined in his chair. His head turned toward the window, and he looked like his mind had already drifted somewhere beyond the classroom. He’d later introduce himself as Paulo, and I’d later learn about his processing disorder and be one of his first and only few friends at Breakthrough.
A few more students straggled through the door and found their seats. Once I counted ten students, I prepped myself and began. “Hello everyone,” I said, “and welcome to Breakthrough. My name is Brian, and this is my first summer teaching at Breakthrough, just as this is your first summer attending it. I just recently graduated from high school, and this fall I’m heading down to SoCal—that’s Southern California—for college at UC Irvine. I’m majoring in French, and I hope to become a French teacher. If all goes well, I should be graduating in four years in 2012. Some things I like to do include—”
“Hey!”
I turned my head toward a student standing at the door.
“Is this Mark’s seventh grade writing class?” he asked.
“Well, this is seventh grade writing,” I answered, “but Mark’s class is down the hall.”
“K, thanks!” He rushed off. I’d later learn that that kid was Mickey. When he saw my face and I saw his, neither of us had ever suspected the kind of crazy bullying that he would have to put up with and the kind that I would fail to prevent in my classroom a year later.
I poked my head out the door to see if there were anymore students lost in the hallways. Everyone had found their way to their classrooms, so I returned to the front of the whiteboard.
“Well,” I said, “it looks like everyone’s here...” I glanced over my students and took turns locking eyes with each and everyone of them, and they’d timidly smile back as I smiled at them, all of us unaware of the kinds of relations we’d form, the struggles we’d go through, and the breakthroughs we’d make together.
I clasped my hands. “Alright!” I cheered. “Let’s get started.”
Tags:
breakthrough,
flashback,
norcal,
summer 2010,
teaching
That’s Just the Way It Is: Part 2
Saturday, August 14, 2010
At 4:30 on a hot sunny Saturday, parents and kids came together to congregate outside a school gymnasium. As they lined up for the potluck table, they fought for shade under the tarps so that they wouldn’t sweat in their Sunday outfits. Families sat at picnic tables, on concrete ledges, and in the grass underneath the trees. The kids introduced their parents to their new best friends they made over the summer, and different families sat together to get to know one another. Smiles and laughter set the day’s mood, the right kind of mood for a prideful celebration of success, friendships, and education. Tonight, the night of July 31st, was Breakthrough’s summer 2010 celebration night.
Trung and I were busy standing at a sign-in table and handing out programs to arriving parents.
“Are you my daughter’s teachers?” a mom asked us.
“Oh yes, your daughter was in my French class,” Trung answered. She smiled and then turned to me.
“Oh, I’m not a teacher this year,” I said as I pointed to the last line on my name tag. It read BTSJ Summers ‘08 & ‘09. “However, I knew your daughter last year!” She smiled again, though not as big, and then she left quickly to get in line for the potluck.
My smile turned crooked. “Alright,” I said, “I’m going to go catch up with the students.”
I spotted Patty lingering around the side of a building by herself. I sighed and chuckled to myself; Patty was still Patty, sweet and smart with a slight sting of self-importance. Time to go rescue her from loneliness.
As I headed toward her, she looked up at me and started walking toward me. I waved my hand and smiled, but to my surprise, she kept on walking and stared right past me. It wasn’t until we were a yard apart when she noticed and stopped. “Oh hi Brian! You actually came all the way from Irvine?”
“Yeah, of course I—”
“Pattyyy!!!” A student came up from behind me and hugged her. It was Lylith, a student who shared one of my eighth grade classes with Patty last year. “Did you bring the present?” she asked her.
“Yeah, it’s in my car right now. I wasn’t too sure if I should’ve brought it out. Are we are going to give it to her now?” Patty said.
“Yeah, of course!”
Gift? “Wait.” I tried to cut into the conversation. “Gift for who?”
“For Maymay!” Patty answered.
Maymay. She was the language arts teacher for the ninth graders—all seven of them.
Two more of the ninth graders gathered around to discuss the secret gift. One of the two was Rosalina, who took my (and another teacher’s) dance class as a seventh grader, a very shy seventh grader. Now she was taking a very active part in the discussion. Lan and Jake couldn’t make it to celebration night tonight, and no one could find Fernando, the seventh ninth grader. The four ninth graders present decided that it’d be just them who’d give the gift to Maymay.
“Alright,” Patty said, “I’ll go to my car and grab the present.” She turned around started running, but I called out her name.
“Patty!” I caught up to her. “Need someone to accompany you to your parents’ car? Y’know, just in case the forest monsters come out of the tree and try to grab you.”
Patty smiled, humoring me. “Sure Brian, protect me from the forest monsters.”
“Alright,” I said. She took off running, and I followed close behind her to the parking lot.
“Brian! Slow down!” Patty caught up to me as I rushed through the hallway to the staff room to get my lunch. I knew what she wanted to talked about, so I spoke before she could.
“Patty, it’s the last day of Breakthrough. Spend time with your crew, say goodbye to them at the very least.”
“They can wait,” she said. “I was never really one for crew time. I’ll have to see them all again anyway next summer.”
“Not a lot of students come back for the ninth grade program.”
“Are you coming back next year for the ninth grade program?” she asked.
“I, uh...” I stuttered. “Alright Patty, what did you really want to talk about?”
“Oh you know what I wanted to talk about,” she laughed. “I just can’t believe you all had us a fooled.”
I shrugged. “Well, you guys kept on guessing girl teachers.” My students knew that I was dating another teacher on staff, and they had been trying to figure out who all summer long. Only very few knew because they managed to find holes in my privacy settings for MySpace and FaceBook before I readjusted them, but they respected my request to not let the secret out. On the last day of Breakthrough, I had given them permission to tell anyone who asked. Pretty much all of my students who didn’t know went straight to them.
“You and Trung,” Patty said. “It makes so much sense now.”
“Definitely makes a lot more sense than me and Olga, right?”
“Yeah, definitely. You and Trung are adorable; I hope you two last.”
I nodded. “Let’s hope so too. You should probably go line up with your crew now so they’re not waiting on you.”
“Alright, fine. I’ll talk to you later!”
We all gathered behind a building. I leaned against a tree watching as Lylith brought Maymay over to Patty, the two ninth graders, and the really big, wrapped shoulder-to-shoulder length box, which was topped off with a nice and neat bowtie. Maymay saw the box and covered her mouth.
“This is from all of us ninth graders,” Patty said. “Lan and Jake couldn’t be here today, and no one knows where Fernando is right now, but they pitched in. We all did.”
Maymay stood in place, speechless.
“What are you waiting for?” Lylith said. “Go ahead and open it!”
Maymay carefully kneeled down in front of the box and undid the bow. She lifted the lid and pulled out the tissue paper, gently laying them all to the side. Then she reached inside with both hands and pulled out a thick fleece hoodie.
“Oh my gosh!” she cried. “Is this because...it’s always...” she paused to fight back tears. “It was always freezing in our classroom and how I...”
“...and you never had a sweater,” Patty finished for her.
Maymay fanned herself profusely, overcome with surprise and joy. “My gosh, I told myself I wasn’t going to cry tonight.” She took a deep breath and suddenly turned to me. I was taken aback by her teary pink eyes. “Were you in on this too, Brian?”
“Nah, I didn’t find out about the plan until fifteen minutes ago. I just helped transport the gift from the car to here. It was in a pretty big heavy box, y’know. It was all these four here, and the rest of the ninth graders.”
She turned back toward them, beaming. All four of them surrounded her in a giant group hug, as I, now feeling awkward leaning there against a tree, glanced away, but I couldn’t help but sneak peeks every now and then to see if they were still swaying in their huddle. Yep, still hugging.
The Breakthrough summer class of 2010. They started out in seventh grade in 2008, and I started with them. We originally started with over sixty, but when they came back as eighth graders in 2009, a good handful had dropped out, leaving us with fifty. Throughout Breakthrough’s history, only few students ever come back for the ninth grade and final summer, however, and so for this year, the Breakthrough class of 2010 only came back as six students.
I had grown with my students, being the seventh grade writing teacher when they were seventh graders, and being the eighth grade writing teacher the following summer when they were eighth graders. I wasn’t there for the few ninth graders that came back. (Hell, I wasn’t too sure if they would’ve given me ninth grade language arts if I had come back for a third summer.)
After looking at the ninth graders give Maymay the gift though, and after hearing all the great things about her from my students during my first visit four weeks ago, them today at celebration night, and Trung throughout the last six weeks, I couldn’t be any happier that the students who I raised the past two summers ended with a strong and great teacher, one that was a far better teacher than I had ever been. Clearly.
6 PM. The doors to the gymnasium opened. It was time to head inside and commence Breakthrough’s summer 2010 celebration night. I didn’t want to break up the giant group hug, so I quietly left the scene to head inside.
Trung and I were busy standing at a sign-in table and handing out programs to arriving parents.
“Are you my daughter’s teachers?” a mom asked us.
“Oh yes, your daughter was in my French class,” Trung answered. She smiled and then turned to me.
“Oh, I’m not a teacher this year,” I said as I pointed to the last line on my name tag. It read BTSJ Summers ‘08 & ‘09. “However, I knew your daughter last year!” She smiled again, though not as big, and then she left quickly to get in line for the potluck.
My smile turned crooked. “Alright,” I said, “I’m going to go catch up with the students.”
I spotted Patty lingering around the side of a building by herself. I sighed and chuckled to myself; Patty was still Patty, sweet and smart with a slight sting of self-importance. Time to go rescue her from loneliness.
As I headed toward her, she looked up at me and started walking toward me. I waved my hand and smiled, but to my surprise, she kept on walking and stared right past me. It wasn’t until we were a yard apart when she noticed and stopped. “Oh hi Brian! You actually came all the way from Irvine?”
“Yeah, of course I—”
“Pattyyy!!!” A student came up from behind me and hugged her. It was Lylith, a student who shared one of my eighth grade classes with Patty last year. “Did you bring the present?” she asked her.
“Yeah, it’s in my car right now. I wasn’t too sure if I should’ve brought it out. Are we are going to give it to her now?” Patty said.
“Yeah, of course!”
Gift? “Wait.” I tried to cut into the conversation. “Gift for who?”
“For Maymay!” Patty answered.
Maymay. She was the language arts teacher for the ninth graders—all seven of them.
Two more of the ninth graders gathered around to discuss the secret gift. One of the two was Rosalina, who took my (and another teacher’s) dance class as a seventh grader, a very shy seventh grader. Now she was taking a very active part in the discussion. Lan and Jake couldn’t make it to celebration night tonight, and no one could find Fernando, the seventh ninth grader. The four ninth graders present decided that it’d be just them who’d give the gift to Maymay.
“Alright,” Patty said, “I’ll go to my car and grab the present.” She turned around started running, but I called out her name.
“Patty!” I caught up to her. “Need someone to accompany you to your parents’ car? Y’know, just in case the forest monsters come out of the tree and try to grab you.”
Patty smiled, humoring me. “Sure Brian, protect me from the forest monsters.”
“Alright,” I said. She took off running, and I followed close behind her to the parking lot.
“Brian! Slow down!” Patty caught up to me as I rushed through the hallway to the staff room to get my lunch. I knew what she wanted to talked about, so I spoke before she could.
“Patty, it’s the last day of Breakthrough. Spend time with your crew, say goodbye to them at the very least.”
“They can wait,” she said. “I was never really one for crew time. I’ll have to see them all again anyway next summer.”
“Not a lot of students come back for the ninth grade program.”
“Are you coming back next year for the ninth grade program?” she asked.
“I, uh...” I stuttered. “Alright Patty, what did you really want to talk about?”
“Oh you know what I wanted to talk about,” she laughed. “I just can’t believe you all had us a fooled.”
I shrugged. “Well, you guys kept on guessing girl teachers.” My students knew that I was dating another teacher on staff, and they had been trying to figure out who all summer long. Only very few knew because they managed to find holes in my privacy settings for MySpace and FaceBook before I readjusted them, but they respected my request to not let the secret out. On the last day of Breakthrough, I had given them permission to tell anyone who asked. Pretty much all of my students who didn’t know went straight to them.
“You and Trung,” Patty said. “It makes so much sense now.”
“Definitely makes a lot more sense than me and Olga, right?”
“Yeah, definitely. You and Trung are adorable; I hope you two last.”
I nodded. “Let’s hope so too. You should probably go line up with your crew now so they’re not waiting on you.”
“Alright, fine. I’ll talk to you later!”
We all gathered behind a building. I leaned against a tree watching as Lylith brought Maymay over to Patty, the two ninth graders, and the really big, wrapped shoulder-to-shoulder length box, which was topped off with a nice and neat bowtie. Maymay saw the box and covered her mouth.
“This is from all of us ninth graders,” Patty said. “Lan and Jake couldn’t be here today, and no one knows where Fernando is right now, but they pitched in. We all did.”
Maymay stood in place, speechless.
“What are you waiting for?” Lylith said. “Go ahead and open it!”
Maymay carefully kneeled down in front of the box and undid the bow. She lifted the lid and pulled out the tissue paper, gently laying them all to the side. Then she reached inside with both hands and pulled out a thick fleece hoodie.
“Oh my gosh!” she cried. “Is this because...it’s always...” she paused to fight back tears. “It was always freezing in our classroom and how I...”
“...and you never had a sweater,” Patty finished for her.
Maymay fanned herself profusely, overcome with surprise and joy. “My gosh, I told myself I wasn’t going to cry tonight.” She took a deep breath and suddenly turned to me. I was taken aback by her teary pink eyes. “Were you in on this too, Brian?”
“Nah, I didn’t find out about the plan until fifteen minutes ago. I just helped transport the gift from the car to here. It was in a pretty big heavy box, y’know. It was all these four here, and the rest of the ninth graders.”
She turned back toward them, beaming. All four of them surrounded her in a giant group hug, as I, now feeling awkward leaning there against a tree, glanced away, but I couldn’t help but sneak peeks every now and then to see if they were still swaying in their huddle. Yep, still hugging.
The Breakthrough summer class of 2010. They started out in seventh grade in 2008, and I started with them. We originally started with over sixty, but when they came back as eighth graders in 2009, a good handful had dropped out, leaving us with fifty. Throughout Breakthrough’s history, only few students ever come back for the ninth grade and final summer, however, and so for this year, the Breakthrough class of 2010 only came back as six students.
I had grown with my students, being the seventh grade writing teacher when they were seventh graders, and being the eighth grade writing teacher the following summer when they were eighth graders. I wasn’t there for the few ninth graders that came back. (Hell, I wasn’t too sure if they would’ve given me ninth grade language arts if I had come back for a third summer.)
After looking at the ninth graders give Maymay the gift though, and after hearing all the great things about her from my students during my first visit four weeks ago, them today at celebration night, and Trung throughout the last six weeks, I couldn’t be any happier that the students who I raised the past two summers ended with a strong and great teacher, one that was a far better teacher than I had ever been. Clearly.
6 PM. The doors to the gymnasium opened. It was time to head inside and commence Breakthrough’s summer 2010 celebration night. I didn’t want to break up the giant group hug, so I quietly left the scene to head inside.
Tags:
breakthrough,
flashback,
gay,
norcal,
relationships,
summer 2010,
teaching,
trung
That’s Just the Way It Is: Part 1
Sunday, August 8, 2010
I made it.
I really made it. I could hardly contain myself. I wanted to scream, jump, and cry, all at once because I knew that this was the start of something new in my life. Out of the hundred people that tried to get it, only very few actually got it. My last few years of dedication and wanting something like this finally paid off.
I sat on the toilet again to listen to the voice message on my phone one last time before heading back out to work: Hello Brian, this is Cesar Mendez calling to inform you that after looking over your application again and carefully considering your interview, we would like to offer you a position as a teacher this summer for Breakthrough 2008.
The bus finally departed from the parking lot. I sat next to the window, staring out at the sky and trying to avoid any conversation with the crazy Vietnamese lady sitting next to me. I planned on sleeping through the entire seven-hour bus ride because I didn’t get any after I came back from the summer intensive kick back at 4:30 AM, which was five hours ago.
My brain filled with thoughts, however. I was on my way back up to NorCal for Breakthrough’s Celebration night. My main concern was whether or not this trip was worth it, because I was starting to doubt. Would my being at Celebration Night have any real impact for the students? I know when I visited my Breakthrough students at the end of their second week, they were excited and missed me very much. But that was only the second week, the second out of six weeks. Four weeks had passed since then, giving my students enough time to adjust and finally make friends with the new teachers. Four weeks also gave them time to forget about me, to find their replacements.
Hell, I felt like sometimes I wasn’t even that memorable. Last year at celebration night, the students roared like crazy when the first picture of me came up in the slide show, but it was, I figured, because I was a fun guy. Fun—something that only lied on the surface level. There were other teachers, including Trung, who had students that confided deep dark secrets to them. Trust and respect—that was what I thought made a teacher memorable. Anyone could be fun. I made a lot of jokes with students, but I hardly ever had anyone confide in me their secrets.
But this kind of shit happens, I tried to convince myself. It’s part of being a teacher. Every beginning of the school year, students get new teachers, and teachers get new students. Everyone is able to move on and forget about each other. So why did I still hang onto the students I had last summer, and hell, the students I had two summers ago?
When I taught at Breakthrough, I had convinced myself that the students needed me, and in turn, I needed them.
Somewhere along my line of thinking, I finally fell asleep.
“Oh my gaaaaaaawd it’s so hot in here,” a teacher groaned.
All twenty-six teachers retreated into the classroom, sat at our seats, and planted our faces on our desks, groaning and tired after having returned from a “team-building” day at a laser tag arena.
Theo, who was always bursting with limitless energy, paraded through the door carrying his boom box. Having been a veteran Breakthrough teacher, this summer he came back as the Dean of Students, a role that he very much deserved because of his insight into who these students we’d be teaching really were.
The second he opened his mouth to talk, all groans and murmurs ceased. “Alright everyone!” he began. “The first day of teaching starts in three days on Monday. Y’all made it through a very long and hard week of training. I know y’all are tired so I’m going to let you guys relax some more, but I’m going to play a song and I want y’all to really pay attention to the lyrics behind it. I didn’t just randomly choose a song for y’all to knock out to. I think this song really represents some of the struggles of our Breakthrough students, and when you guys listen to it, I want you to think about things like, how can I help my students? How can I be a teacher, role model, and friend to my students? What kind of impact am I making on their lives? Remember, these students—they need you.”
He finished his speech on that note—the students needed us. Us. The room remained silent as we tried to comprehend the meaning of this.
Theo, glad to see us reawakened, set down his boom box and hit play.
A nostalgic-sounding string of piano notes filled the room. I thought it sounded nice, nothing else, but nearly everyone else applauded in approval. The bassline kicked in, followed by the lyrics. It was rap.
I really made it. I could hardly contain myself. I wanted to scream, jump, and cry, all at once because I knew that this was the start of something new in my life. Out of the hundred people that tried to get it, only very few actually got it. My last few years of dedication and wanting something like this finally paid off.
I sat on the toilet again to listen to the voice message on my phone one last time before heading back out to work: Hello Brian, this is Cesar Mendez calling to inform you that after looking over your application again and carefully considering your interview, we would like to offer you a position as a teacher this summer for Breakthrough 2008.
The bus finally departed from the parking lot. I sat next to the window, staring out at the sky and trying to avoid any conversation with the crazy Vietnamese lady sitting next to me. I planned on sleeping through the entire seven-hour bus ride because I didn’t get any after I came back from the summer intensive kick back at 4:30 AM, which was five hours ago.
My brain filled with thoughts, however. I was on my way back up to NorCal for Breakthrough’s Celebration night. My main concern was whether or not this trip was worth it, because I was starting to doubt. Would my being at Celebration Night have any real impact for the students? I know when I visited my Breakthrough students at the end of their second week, they were excited and missed me very much. But that was only the second week, the second out of six weeks. Four weeks had passed since then, giving my students enough time to adjust and finally make friends with the new teachers. Four weeks also gave them time to forget about me, to find their replacements.
Hell, I felt like sometimes I wasn’t even that memorable. Last year at celebration night, the students roared like crazy when the first picture of me came up in the slide show, but it was, I figured, because I was a fun guy. Fun—something that only lied on the surface level. There were other teachers, including Trung, who had students that confided deep dark secrets to them. Trust and respect—that was what I thought made a teacher memorable. Anyone could be fun. I made a lot of jokes with students, but I hardly ever had anyone confide in me their secrets.
But this kind of shit happens, I tried to convince myself. It’s part of being a teacher. Every beginning of the school year, students get new teachers, and teachers get new students. Everyone is able to move on and forget about each other. So why did I still hang onto the students I had last summer, and hell, the students I had two summers ago?
When I taught at Breakthrough, I had convinced myself that the students needed me, and in turn, I needed them.
Somewhere along my line of thinking, I finally fell asleep.
“Oh my gaaaaaaawd it’s so hot in here,” a teacher groaned.
All twenty-six teachers retreated into the classroom, sat at our seats, and planted our faces on our desks, groaning and tired after having returned from a “team-building” day at a laser tag arena.
Theo, who was always bursting with limitless energy, paraded through the door carrying his boom box. Having been a veteran Breakthrough teacher, this summer he came back as the Dean of Students, a role that he very much deserved because of his insight into who these students we’d be teaching really were.
The second he opened his mouth to talk, all groans and murmurs ceased. “Alright everyone!” he began. “The first day of teaching starts in three days on Monday. Y’all made it through a very long and hard week of training. I know y’all are tired so I’m going to let you guys relax some more, but I’m going to play a song and I want y’all to really pay attention to the lyrics behind it. I didn’t just randomly choose a song for y’all to knock out to. I think this song really represents some of the struggles of our Breakthrough students, and when you guys listen to it, I want you to think about things like, how can I help my students? How can I be a teacher, role model, and friend to my students? What kind of impact am I making on their lives? Remember, these students—they need you.”
He finished his speech on that note—the students needed us. Us. The room remained silent as we tried to comprehend the meaning of this.
Theo, glad to see us reawakened, set down his boom box and hit play.
A nostalgic-sounding string of piano notes filled the room. I thought it sounded nice, nothing else, but nearly everyone else applauded in approval. The bassline kicked in, followed by the lyrics. It was rap.
Come on come on—I looked around shifty-eyed and then decided that I should nod my head, pretending that I recognized this apparently old-school song that everyone had heard.
I see no changes wake up in the morning and I ask myself,
is life worth living, should I blast myself?
I’m tired of bein’ poor and even worse I’m black.
My stomach hurts so I’m lookin’ for a purse to snatch.
Cops give a damn about a negro:
Pull the trigger kill a nigga—he’s a hero.
Give the crack to the kids—Who the hell cares?
One less hungry mouth on the welfare.
We gotta start makin’ changes.
Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers,
and that’s how it’s supposed to be.
How can the Devil take a brother if he’s close to me?
I’d love to go back to when we played as kids,
but things changed, and that’s the way it is
Come on come on...
That’s just the way it is.
Things’ll never be the same.
That’s just the way it is.
Aww yeah.
Tags:
breakthrough,
flashback,
norcal,
socal,
summer 2010,
teaching,
trung
Drive
Friday, July 16, 2010
There’s something about driving alone late at night, something so relaxing and so illuminating. It’s the only time when I can (and have to) force myself to stay awake while doing nothing for a really long time, nothing except, of course, resting my foot on the gas, keeping my left hand at the bottom of the steering wheel, and staring out into a road. No distractions.
Even though I know my destination, I feel like I’m driving nowhere because I’m not getting there in half an hour, in the next hour, or the next five hours, and the only thing I can see before me is more road heading into a black abyss. This is when I find the time to think and to reflect deeply, real deeply, far more deeply than the amount of reflection I do when I write.
I left my home in NorCal for UCI on the evening of July 4th, of all days. I figured, y’know, traffic would be a bitch the day before when everyone traveled to visit their families, and a bitch the day after when everyone drove back home—with hangovers. But it wouldn’t take much for anyone to figure that this was some lame excuse, some kind of ulterior motive because really, why the hell would I leave friends and family on an iconic American holiday?
While driving through the deserts of Central Valley, I glanced into my rearview mirror every now and then to soak up the last few moments of the sun as it set over the horizon behind me. I mused about the symbolism of my situation: I was driving farther and farther away from the light as I headed down an endless shadowy road. The dark sky through my front window stood in stark contrast to the image in my mirrors.
I tried to keep myself somewhat active by sipping on two pearl milk tea drinks, one of which was Trung’s. Just before I left, Trung and I got drinks from Tapioca Express. We actually did this the day before, too, and in fact, I had originally planned on leaving the day before, July 3rd. We went to Tapioca Express, and as we wandered around the plaza with our drinks, Trung urged me to stay an extra night and hang out with Peter and black John. I was supposed to hang out with them on Friday for an early July 4th barbeque, but after I got home from Breakthrough, I passed out on my bed for five hours. Trung convinced me, so the two of us chilled at Peter’s house with him and John. We played Super Smash Bros Brawl and I learned how to play beer pong, but knowing how destructive a single beer was to me, we used water so that I wouldn’t wake up the next day feeling too shitty for my solo drive back down to Irvine.
10 PM. The sun had been long gone now. Black skies through my front window, black skies in my mirrors, black skies everywhere. Trying to hold onto any glimmer of light, I found myself staring into a circuit of city lights far away in the east. Maybe it was Fresno, or Visalia. I doubled back between watching the road and watching the cities, but eventually, something completely stole my attention: a burst of red, white, and blue sparkles over the island of yellow lights. I had an entire firework show in the left corner of my eye.
I turned to the passenger seat with my mouth already halfway open and words ready to come out, foolishly thinking that for a second, I had someone to tell, “Oh my god, did you see that?” But no, there was no one, no one but my stuff animal whale, Op, and his mate, Mop. So, I resolved to enjoying the fireworks with only these two and the quiet company that they kept.
The fireworks, they made me think about a lot of things. Like the time my family and I took a vacation to Hawaii and watched fireworks from the shores of Honolulu, and my old brother and I skipped rocks over the warm ocean water—that was 1998. I thought about the time my high school friends and I watched fireworks from the hillside of a rich country club neighborhood, and I tried to flirt with a friend’s friend from her taekwondo class—that was nearly ten years later, in 2007. And the following year, Doug, a fellow Breakthrough teacher, Trung, and I drove around Cupertino tracking down a decent place to park and watch fireworks. We gave up and tried to catch glimpses of fireworks from a school parking lot, but we could only see so much shrouded by the dark silhouettes of redwood trees. We had better luck in 2009, fortunately. Doug directed us atop a mountain in a small town where street lights were a scarce luxury. We stood in the outskirts of the entire Silicon Valley where we spectated the firework shows of several cities across the south bay. I held Trung close in my arms, and occasionally we both reached and grasped the air, pretending to catch the fireworks in our hands as if they were confetti strewn about the night sky.
After seeing a third city’s firework show, I realized the reason I left on July 4th: I didn’t have anyone to enjoy it with. I stopped talking to almost all of my high school friends right after graduation, I broke up with Trung, I broke up with Ranier, I didn’t come back to Breakthrough, I left my family for college three hundred miles away from home, and I just sorta popped back into Peter and Black John’s lives after inexcusably missing out on scheduled hangouts over the last ten months.
But maybe there was more to my reason; the more I reflected on the people I abandoned, the more I realized that maybe I left because, well, I didn’t think that I deserved to enjoy it with anyone. This lonely six-hour trip on the night of July 4th was my punishment.
I got my last firework show around 11 PM, and, trying to keep the last images of light ingrained in my brain, I drove my trip’s last two hours in darkness back to Irvine.
Even though I know my destination, I feel like I’m driving nowhere because I’m not getting there in half an hour, in the next hour, or the next five hours, and the only thing I can see before me is more road heading into a black abyss. This is when I find the time to think and to reflect deeply, real deeply, far more deeply than the amount of reflection I do when I write.
I left my home in NorCal for UCI on the evening of July 4th, of all days. I figured, y’know, traffic would be a bitch the day before when everyone traveled to visit their families, and a bitch the day after when everyone drove back home—with hangovers. But it wouldn’t take much for anyone to figure that this was some lame excuse, some kind of ulterior motive because really, why the hell would I leave friends and family on an iconic American holiday?
While driving through the deserts of Central Valley, I glanced into my rearview mirror every now and then to soak up the last few moments of the sun as it set over the horizon behind me. I mused about the symbolism of my situation: I was driving farther and farther away from the light as I headed down an endless shadowy road. The dark sky through my front window stood in stark contrast to the image in my mirrors.
I tried to keep myself somewhat active by sipping on two pearl milk tea drinks, one of which was Trung’s. Just before I left, Trung and I got drinks from Tapioca Express. We actually did this the day before, too, and in fact, I had originally planned on leaving the day before, July 3rd. We went to Tapioca Express, and as we wandered around the plaza with our drinks, Trung urged me to stay an extra night and hang out with Peter and black John. I was supposed to hang out with them on Friday for an early July 4th barbeque, but after I got home from Breakthrough, I passed out on my bed for five hours. Trung convinced me, so the two of us chilled at Peter’s house with him and John. We played Super Smash Bros Brawl and I learned how to play beer pong, but knowing how destructive a single beer was to me, we used water so that I wouldn’t wake up the next day feeling too shitty for my solo drive back down to Irvine.
10 PM. The sun had been long gone now. Black skies through my front window, black skies in my mirrors, black skies everywhere. Trying to hold onto any glimmer of light, I found myself staring into a circuit of city lights far away in the east. Maybe it was Fresno, or Visalia. I doubled back between watching the road and watching the cities, but eventually, something completely stole my attention: a burst of red, white, and blue sparkles over the island of yellow lights. I had an entire firework show in the left corner of my eye.
I turned to the passenger seat with my mouth already halfway open and words ready to come out, foolishly thinking that for a second, I had someone to tell, “Oh my god, did you see that?” But no, there was no one, no one but my stuff animal whale, Op, and his mate, Mop. So, I resolved to enjoying the fireworks with only these two and the quiet company that they kept.
The fireworks, they made me think about a lot of things. Like the time my family and I took a vacation to Hawaii and watched fireworks from the shores of Honolulu, and my old brother and I skipped rocks over the warm ocean water—that was 1998. I thought about the time my high school friends and I watched fireworks from the hillside of a rich country club neighborhood, and I tried to flirt with a friend’s friend from her taekwondo class—that was nearly ten years later, in 2007. And the following year, Doug, a fellow Breakthrough teacher, Trung, and I drove around Cupertino tracking down a decent place to park and watch fireworks. We gave up and tried to catch glimpses of fireworks from a school parking lot, but we could only see so much shrouded by the dark silhouettes of redwood trees. We had better luck in 2009, fortunately. Doug directed us atop a mountain in a small town where street lights were a scarce luxury. We stood in the outskirts of the entire Silicon Valley where we spectated the firework shows of several cities across the south bay. I held Trung close in my arms, and occasionally we both reached and grasped the air, pretending to catch the fireworks in our hands as if they were confetti strewn about the night sky.
After seeing a third city’s firework show, I realized the reason I left on July 4th: I didn’t have anyone to enjoy it with. I stopped talking to almost all of my high school friends right after graduation, I broke up with Trung, I broke up with Ranier, I didn’t come back to Breakthrough, I left my family for college three hundred miles away from home, and I just sorta popped back into Peter and Black John’s lives after inexcusably missing out on scheduled hangouts over the last ten months.
But maybe there was more to my reason; the more I reflected on the people I abandoned, the more I realized that maybe I left because, well, I didn’t think that I deserved to enjoy it with anyone. This lonely six-hour trip on the night of July 4th was my punishment.
I got my last firework show around 11 PM, and, trying to keep the last images of light ingrained in my brain, I drove my trip’s last two hours in darkness back to Irvine.
Tags:
black john,
breakthrough,
family,
norcal,
oakridge,
peter,
ranier,
relationships,
summer 2010,
teaching,
trung
You Are My Best Friend
Monday, July 12, 2010
I bit my lips as I felt my face soften, and, copying the students, my lips curled to a smile, a humble one. I nodded slowly as I spoke in a lower voice. “Bonjour classe,” I breathed. “Bonjour.” I took Trung’s place at the whiteboard in front of his ten students and asked, “Ça va?”
“Oui, ça va,” they all answered in unison.
I scanned the faces of his students. Many of them were familiar, but there was on particular one that I had to stop at. I locked eyes with Matty, and we gave each other a subtle wassup nod.
“Alors,” I clasped my hands together, “Allons-y!”
After the students left for the lightrail station at 3 PM, I retreated back to the staffroom to rest a little before what would probably be a really long staff meeting. With Breakthrough ‘09 commencing in less than a week, we teachers would be finalizing every huge and every minute detail of our celebration night’s in-school practices, transportation, songs, displays, and the event itself. I looked over the student song, which my co-crew leader and I would have to review with our crew of 10 students the next day. In honor of Michael Jackson’s death five weeks ago, the students had voted to sing a Breakthrough-fied version of “Beat It.”
“Hey,” Nicky, my co-crew leader, said as she sat down next to me. “Guess what came up at lunch at our crew table while you were away working with your dance students?”
“Oh my god, what large animal did Matty liken Gabrielle to this time?”
Nicky laughed. “No, ‘pig’ was just that one and only time. But anyway, we were all sitting close together playing Egyptian War when Gloria sat down and was all like, with this shady look and shady tone, ‘Yo guys, I heard Brian is gay.’ And she said it like she was all disgusted too.”
“Oooh, yeah, Gloria doesn’t like me too much because I make her do her work in my writing class. For example, today I told her to pick up her pencil. So what’d you say to her?”
“Nothing. Matty jumped right in, and he pretty much jumped down her throat. He was all, ‘If he’s gay, why does it even matter? Brian’s still Brian. He’s a great crew leader, a great teacher, and a great friend!’ All the other students agreed. He put Gloria in her place.”
“Wow” was all I could manage. I leaned back and rocked in my chair. “Wow.” Matty was only 12 years old.
All the students giggled as their heads followed me around the room. I pranced from corner to corner like a giant leaping leprechaun, waving my hands in the air and awkwardly doing dance moves. I kicked over one of my speakers trying to jerk.
“Alors!” I yelled. “Tout le monde, une fois ! Jeeeeeeeeeeee—”
They all joined in as we sang the last line of the song together. “Jeeeeeeeee suizzz uune piiiizza, tombée en ruine!”
I applauded the students. “Bravo, vous êtes toutes les pizzas! You are all pizzas.”
After class ended, I walked out with Matty to Breakthrough’s brunch time. He was excited to see me, as I was to see him. But we only got to catch up really briefly because once the picnic area came into view, I heard another familiar voice that made my heart leap.
“IS THAT BRI—”
“OH MY GOSH IT’S BRIAN!”
I was suddenly ambushed by three or four girls, particularly ones that liked to be touchy with me when I was a teacher last year. I shook them off of me and tried to individually give side hugs to each one, and then I noticed some guys lining up, including Timmy.
“Where you’ve been man?” “Brian’s back!” “Are you swimming for pool day?” “Are you teaching today?” “Stay the whole day Brian!” “Brian’s not wearing glasses any more!” “You still have your funny walk!”
I side-hugged a few more students and then decided that this would take forever if I let it continue, and I actually had to go to the copy room to copy some worksheets for Trung. They were getting wrinkled in my hand. I shrugged and ducked my way out of the crowd of students and turned around to wave at them as I ran off. “I’ll be back in a bit!” I shouted to them.
You should’ve come back, Trung had told me. It was something that he told me every night over the phone when he’d tell me about his day at Breakthrough. The kids miss you. My second French class got distracted for ten minutes talking about you. You should’ve come back. I didn’t know whether to believe I really should’ve, but the moment when all those kids ambushed me outside the picnic area—that was when I realized it was true.
Throughout the rest of my visit at Breakthrough, I caught up with several students. Timmy wants to go to a military college. Lilly and Belinda don’t like their dance teacher at their school and wish I were theirs instead (lol). Patty is going through that teenage girl phase where she feels like she’s the only sane person left on the planet. Lorenzo is crushing on Lan, one of six returning ninth graders and one who I taught in my seventh grade writing class in 2008, my first year, and in my eighth grade writing class in 2009. I remember thinking in 2008 that I would teach all the way until the end of 2010 so that I could see how much the seventh graders I started out with would grow through middle school.
The one thing that every student who I talked to told me was, of course, “You should’ve come back.” I had to watch over Trung’s English class while he went to the bathroom to poop, and they all wanted to know, “Why didn’t you come back?” I wish I could tell them. To myself, the reason was understandable: I ran my class to be extra “fun” at the expense of discipline, and some students suffered, socially and academically, and I didn’t want to subject more students to the same suffering. But I felt like all the students would just think I was too much of a coward to come back to try to improve myself. Well, I didn’t know if that was what they would’ve thought, but it was what I started to believe.
The school day ended at 4 PM. The students lined up in front of the buses, and I waved them off. Before leaving, Matty asked me if I was going to come back the next week. Or the week after the next. I was sad to tell him that I’d be back down in Irvine, but I assured him that I’d come back up in four weeks for Breakthrough 2010’s celebration night.
“You definitely should,” he said. He smiled, and I was glad to see that my assurance was enough to make him happy. There was no way I’d miss celebration night.
Matty and I sat down next to each other on the lightrail. I had chaperon duty during the last week of Breakthrough, so I was riding it back with the students to make sure that they got home safely. Matty and I chatted, and he revealed to me that the directors were helping the student make a special surprise for the teachers on the last day of teaching. Matty could not keep any kind of secret, but fortunately I already knew because this was my second summer teaching at Breakthrough, and the students had done something similar during my first in 2008.
“Sorry, I just had to tell you,” Matty said, “because I wrote you something really good and I couldn’t keep it inside.” He exaggerated a shiver.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a rap.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny white note. “Can I read it to you?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright, here’s the rap,” Matty took a long, deep breath. “Brian’s so Asian, he likes to eat rice with beef on the side. You love salmon, which can get a little smelly, but at least it fills your belly. You are my best friend of all of breakthrough; our friendship will always be true...ya!”
I was speechless. Matty could probably tell by the look on my face that I approved, sincerely. He handed me the note, and I reread the rap carefully. Then I flipped to the backside, where there was one last message: I will never forget you, my best friend.
“Oui, ça va,” they all answered in unison.
I scanned the faces of his students. Many of them were familiar, but there was on particular one that I had to stop at. I locked eyes with Matty, and we gave each other a subtle wassup nod.
“Alors,” I clasped my hands together, “Allons-y!”
After the students left for the lightrail station at 3 PM, I retreated back to the staffroom to rest a little before what would probably be a really long staff meeting. With Breakthrough ‘09 commencing in less than a week, we teachers would be finalizing every huge and every minute detail of our celebration night’s in-school practices, transportation, songs, displays, and the event itself. I looked over the student song, which my co-crew leader and I would have to review with our crew of 10 students the next day. In honor of Michael Jackson’s death five weeks ago, the students had voted to sing a Breakthrough-fied version of “Beat It.”
“Hey,” Nicky, my co-crew leader, said as she sat down next to me. “Guess what came up at lunch at our crew table while you were away working with your dance students?”
“Oh my god, what large animal did Matty liken Gabrielle to this time?”
Nicky laughed. “No, ‘pig’ was just that one and only time. But anyway, we were all sitting close together playing Egyptian War when Gloria sat down and was all like, with this shady look and shady tone, ‘Yo guys, I heard Brian is gay.’ And she said it like she was all disgusted too.”
“Oooh, yeah, Gloria doesn’t like me too much because I make her do her work in my writing class. For example, today I told her to pick up her pencil. So what’d you say to her?”
“Nothing. Matty jumped right in, and he pretty much jumped down her throat. He was all, ‘If he’s gay, why does it even matter? Brian’s still Brian. He’s a great crew leader, a great teacher, and a great friend!’ All the other students agreed. He put Gloria in her place.”
“Wow” was all I could manage. I leaned back and rocked in my chair. “Wow.” Matty was only 12 years old.
All the students giggled as their heads followed me around the room. I pranced from corner to corner like a giant leaping leprechaun, waving my hands in the air and awkwardly doing dance moves. I kicked over one of my speakers trying to jerk.
“Alors!” I yelled. “Tout le monde, une fois ! Jeeeeeeeeeeee—”
They all joined in as we sang the last line of the song together. “Jeeeeeeeee suizzz uune piiiizza, tombée en ruine!”
I applauded the students. “Bravo, vous êtes toutes les pizzas! You are all pizzas.”
After class ended, I walked out with Matty to Breakthrough’s brunch time. He was excited to see me, as I was to see him. But we only got to catch up really briefly because once the picnic area came into view, I heard another familiar voice that made my heart leap.
“IS THAT BRI—”
“OH MY GOSH IT’S BRIAN!”
I was suddenly ambushed by three or four girls, particularly ones that liked to be touchy with me when I was a teacher last year. I shook them off of me and tried to individually give side hugs to each one, and then I noticed some guys lining up, including Timmy.
“Where you’ve been man?” “Brian’s back!” “Are you swimming for pool day?” “Are you teaching today?” “Stay the whole day Brian!” “Brian’s not wearing glasses any more!” “You still have your funny walk!”
I side-hugged a few more students and then decided that this would take forever if I let it continue, and I actually had to go to the copy room to copy some worksheets for Trung. They were getting wrinkled in my hand. I shrugged and ducked my way out of the crowd of students and turned around to wave at them as I ran off. “I’ll be back in a bit!” I shouted to them.
You should’ve come back, Trung had told me. It was something that he told me every night over the phone when he’d tell me about his day at Breakthrough. The kids miss you. My second French class got distracted for ten minutes talking about you. You should’ve come back. I didn’t know whether to believe I really should’ve, but the moment when all those kids ambushed me outside the picnic area—that was when I realized it was true.
Throughout the rest of my visit at Breakthrough, I caught up with several students. Timmy wants to go to a military college. Lilly and Belinda don’t like their dance teacher at their school and wish I were theirs instead (lol). Patty is going through that teenage girl phase where she feels like she’s the only sane person left on the planet. Lorenzo is crushing on Lan, one of six returning ninth graders and one who I taught in my seventh grade writing class in 2008, my first year, and in my eighth grade writing class in 2009. I remember thinking in 2008 that I would teach all the way until the end of 2010 so that I could see how much the seventh graders I started out with would grow through middle school.
The one thing that every student who I talked to told me was, of course, “You should’ve come back.” I had to watch over Trung’s English class while he went to the bathroom to poop, and they all wanted to know, “Why didn’t you come back?” I wish I could tell them. To myself, the reason was understandable: I ran my class to be extra “fun” at the expense of discipline, and some students suffered, socially and academically, and I didn’t want to subject more students to the same suffering. But I felt like all the students would just think I was too much of a coward to come back to try to improve myself. Well, I didn’t know if that was what they would’ve thought, but it was what I started to believe.
The school day ended at 4 PM. The students lined up in front of the buses, and I waved them off. Before leaving, Matty asked me if I was going to come back the next week. Or the week after the next. I was sad to tell him that I’d be back down in Irvine, but I assured him that I’d come back up in four weeks for Breakthrough 2010’s celebration night.
“You definitely should,” he said. He smiled, and I was glad to see that my assurance was enough to make him happy. There was no way I’d miss celebration night.
Matty and I sat down next to each other on the lightrail. I had chaperon duty during the last week of Breakthrough, so I was riding it back with the students to make sure that they got home safely. Matty and I chatted, and he revealed to me that the directors were helping the student make a special surprise for the teachers on the last day of teaching. Matty could not keep any kind of secret, but fortunately I already knew because this was my second summer teaching at Breakthrough, and the students had done something similar during my first in 2008.
“Sorry, I just had to tell you,” Matty said, “because I wrote you something really good and I couldn’t keep it inside.” He exaggerated a shiver.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a rap.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny white note. “Can I read it to you?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright, here’s the rap,” Matty took a long, deep breath. “Brian’s so Asian, he likes to eat rice with beef on the side. You love salmon, which can get a little smelly, but at least it fills your belly. You are my best friend of all of breakthrough; our friendship will always be true...ya!”
I was speechless. Matty could probably tell by the look on my face that I approved, sincerely. He handed me the note, and I reread the rap carefully. Then I flipped to the backside, where there was one last message: I will never forget you, my best friend.
Tags:
breakthrough,
flashback,
french,
norcal,
summer 2010,
teaching,
trung
The French Teacher
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Friday, July 2nd, 2010
“Aujourd’hui, vous allez présenter vos présentations. Vous avez cinq minutes pour lire et étudier vos phrases, d’accord? Alors, allez-y.”
The middle school students understood hardly half of the French, but they still nodded at their teacher. They poured over their notes on how to introduce themselves and how to talk about their birthdays and the things they liked to do, and their lips quivered as they silently repeated to themselves their French sentences over and over again.
“Hey,” one girl whispered to a boy next to her. “I hear he’s going to be here today.”
His face lit up. “Really?”
“Qui parle?! Est-ce que tu voudrais présenter premièrement?”
The students ducked their head down.
“Well, the five minutes I gave you guys to study your sentences are up anyway. Are you guys ready to present?”
Everyone looked away, trying to avoid locking eye contact with their teacher. They knew that whenever their teacher used English, something serious was going to go down.
“Well, before I call on someone, I’d actually like to introduce another person first. A special guest, and some of you may already know him. He’ll be here to listen to your introductions because he wants to get to know you, and after you guys introduce yourselves, he’s going to teach the class.”
The students shot nervous glances to each other. Guests usually meant older adults in business suits, the kinds of people that made them nervous.
“Alright, can our special guest please come out?”
A crash, and then a sudden slam startled the students in their seats. All heads shot to the back corner of the room to investigate the intrusion.
“BONJOUR CLASSE!”
The students stared in awe.
I closed the doors to the closet behind me and marched forward. I stood there, my face beaming, my hands placed on my hips, and the morning sun shining through the blinds against my face. I glanced at Trung, who stood at the front grinning, and then I looked at the students. Their lips slowly curled to a meek, but happy smile.
I bit my lips as I felt my face soften, and, copying the students, my lips curled to a smile, a humble one. I nodded slowly as I spoke in a lower voice. “Bonjour classe,” I breathed. “Bonjour.”
One Week Earlier
2 in the afternoon. Trung stood at the white board readjusting the class agenda while his students slowly trickled through the door and sat at their desks. When he finished, he turned around to see Lilly raising her hand.
“Que voudrais-tu, Lilly?”
“Wasn’t Brian a French major?”
The eighth graders looked up from their notes at the sound of the name. A few seventh graders new to Breakthrough this summer glanced around confused.
“Who’s Brian?”
“He taught at Breakthrough last year!” Lilly answered. “And he taught the year before last one’s too. He was my dance teacher and my crew leader.”
“Yeah, he was my dance teacher too,” another student added. “He was pretty much one of my favorite teachers.”
Trung saw the excited looks on his students’ faces, and he tried to cut them off before this conversation went any farther. “Alright, classe, sortez vos—”
“Remember when he sang Boom Boom Pow at celebration night last year? He said the ‘s’ word!”
Murmurs erupted into excited chatter as students recounted their favorite memories of one of the “coolest” and the least teacher-like teacher from the past two summers. Trung sighed as he dropped his shoulders and leaned up against the whiteboard. He smiled. Damn it Brian, you still somehow manage to cause disruptions even when you don’t teach at Breakthrough anymore.
“Trung, why isn’t Brian back?”
“Yeah, what’s he doing right now?”
“Well...” Trung paused to think up of an excuse. “Brian really wishes that he could’ve been back. Trust me, I talk to him every day, and he’s sad that he couldn’t be here for his third summer. He’s just...he’s really, really busy this summer with...important stuff.”
2:10 in the afternoon. I dragged my shirtless self out of my bed and into my desk chair. I felt like browsing porn on Xtube, so I did. Guy jacks off in the library? ...ew, he’s fat and hairy. Next. Asian man gets it in both holes? ...is that a bald spot on the back of his head? Next. Then I did my thing, wiped up my mess, and crawled back into bed. I needed twenty more minutes.
After all the students departed on school buses at 4 PM, Trung retreated to the staff room to wait for the staff meeting to start. One of this summer’s new teachers approached him to ask a question.
“Hey Trung, who’s Brian?”
“Brian?”
“Yeah, my student Timmy says I remind him of one of last year’s teachers, Brian. Is that a good or bad thing?”
Trung chuckled. “It could be good, it could be bad, it could be both.”
“Speaking of Brian,” Doug, a veteran Breakthrough teacher of three previous years joined in, “Why isn’t he back this year, Trung? I really thought he was going to come back. He should’ve. What’s his sad excuse?”
“Well...” Trung didn’t want to divulge all the reasons in front of a new teacher, so he tried to think of a temporary one to use until he could discuss the actual reasons with Doug later in private.
“He’s just really busy with his studies.”
4:15 PM. I was sitting at my kitchen table with a bowl of stale Honey Nut Cheerios and my laptop when I couldn’t believe what I found online: two hundred pages of philosophy. The best philosophy ever, the kind that I could spend all night reading and commit to memory. I read the title of the book to myself out loud, “The Philosophy of...The X-Files. Fuck yes.” I began to read in my head. I would like to say—and, dare I say, want to believe—that the divergent approaches embodied in the characters of Dana Scully and Fox Mulder are a bit analogous to those of two giants from the history of philosophy: Plato and Aristotle... This was fucking amazing.
“Aujourd’hui, vous allez présenter vos présentations. Vous avez cinq minutes pour lire et étudier vos phrases, d’accord? Alors, allez-y.”
The middle school students understood hardly half of the French, but they still nodded at their teacher. They poured over their notes on how to introduce themselves and how to talk about their birthdays and the things they liked to do, and their lips quivered as they silently repeated to themselves their French sentences over and over again.
“Hey,” one girl whispered to a boy next to her. “I hear he’s going to be here today.”
His face lit up. “Really?”
“Qui parle?! Est-ce que tu voudrais présenter premièrement?”
The students ducked their head down.
“Well, the five minutes I gave you guys to study your sentences are up anyway. Are you guys ready to present?”
Everyone looked away, trying to avoid locking eye contact with their teacher. They knew that whenever their teacher used English, something serious was going to go down.
“Well, before I call on someone, I’d actually like to introduce another person first. A special guest, and some of you may already know him. He’ll be here to listen to your introductions because he wants to get to know you, and after you guys introduce yourselves, he’s going to teach the class.”
The students shot nervous glances to each other. Guests usually meant older adults in business suits, the kinds of people that made them nervous.
“Alright, can our special guest please come out?”
A crash, and then a sudden slam startled the students in their seats. All heads shot to the back corner of the room to investigate the intrusion.
“BONJOUR CLASSE!”
The students stared in awe.
I closed the doors to the closet behind me and marched forward. I stood there, my face beaming, my hands placed on my hips, and the morning sun shining through the blinds against my face. I glanced at Trung, who stood at the front grinning, and then I looked at the students. Their lips slowly curled to a meek, but happy smile.
I bit my lips as I felt my face soften, and, copying the students, my lips curled to a smile, a humble one. I nodded slowly as I spoke in a lower voice. “Bonjour classe,” I breathed. “Bonjour.”
One Week Earlier
2 in the afternoon. Trung stood at the white board readjusting the class agenda while his students slowly trickled through the door and sat at their desks. When he finished, he turned around to see Lilly raising her hand.
“Que voudrais-tu, Lilly?”
“Wasn’t Brian a French major?”
The eighth graders looked up from their notes at the sound of the name. A few seventh graders new to Breakthrough this summer glanced around confused.
“Who’s Brian?”
“He taught at Breakthrough last year!” Lilly answered. “And he taught the year before last one’s too. He was my dance teacher and my crew leader.”
“Yeah, he was my dance teacher too,” another student added. “He was pretty much one of my favorite teachers.”
Trung saw the excited looks on his students’ faces, and he tried to cut them off before this conversation went any farther. “Alright, classe, sortez vos—”
“Remember when he sang Boom Boom Pow at celebration night last year? He said the ‘s’ word!”
Murmurs erupted into excited chatter as students recounted their favorite memories of one of the “coolest” and the least teacher-like teacher from the past two summers. Trung sighed as he dropped his shoulders and leaned up against the whiteboard. He smiled. Damn it Brian, you still somehow manage to cause disruptions even when you don’t teach at Breakthrough anymore.
“Trung, why isn’t Brian back?”
“Yeah, what’s he doing right now?”
“Well...” Trung paused to think up of an excuse. “Brian really wishes that he could’ve been back. Trust me, I talk to him every day, and he’s sad that he couldn’t be here for his third summer. He’s just...he’s really, really busy this summer with...important stuff.”
2:10 in the afternoon. I dragged my shirtless self out of my bed and into my desk chair. I felt like browsing porn on Xtube, so I did. Guy jacks off in the library? ...ew, he’s fat and hairy. Next. Asian man gets it in both holes? ...is that a bald spot on the back of his head? Next. Then I did my thing, wiped up my mess, and crawled back into bed. I needed twenty more minutes.
After all the students departed on school buses at 4 PM, Trung retreated to the staff room to wait for the staff meeting to start. One of this summer’s new teachers approached him to ask a question.
“Hey Trung, who’s Brian?”
“Brian?”
“Yeah, my student Timmy says I remind him of one of last year’s teachers, Brian. Is that a good or bad thing?”
Trung chuckled. “It could be good, it could be bad, it could be both.”
“Speaking of Brian,” Doug, a veteran Breakthrough teacher of three previous years joined in, “Why isn’t he back this year, Trung? I really thought he was going to come back. He should’ve. What’s his sad excuse?”
“Well...” Trung didn’t want to divulge all the reasons in front of a new teacher, so he tried to think of a temporary one to use until he could discuss the actual reasons with Doug later in private.
“He’s just really busy with his studies.”
4:15 PM. I was sitting at my kitchen table with a bowl of stale Honey Nut Cheerios and my laptop when I couldn’t believe what I found online: two hundred pages of philosophy. The best philosophy ever, the kind that I could spend all night reading and commit to memory. I read the title of the book to myself out loud, “The Philosophy of...The X-Files. Fuck yes.” I began to read in my head. I would like to say—and, dare I say, want to believe—that the divergent approaches embodied in the characters of Dana Scully and Fox Mulder are a bit analogous to those of two giants from the history of philosophy: Plato and Aristotle... This was fucking amazing.
Tags:
breakthrough,
french,
norcal,
summer 2010,
teaching,
trung
By All Standards
Thursday, June 17, 2010
I was on Youtube browsing through videos of Jawn Ha, a dancer from GRV, when I found a video of him teaching at Alhambra High School for their all male dance team. What really, really stuck out to me was the kid in the middle. He picked up barely any of the choreo, and what he did pick up he performed with no energy and no feeling. A lot of the times he just stood around looking lost as the rest of the dancers rolled back, rolled forward, swung their arms, slid on the floor, and kicked. In other words, he sucked.
After watching the video, I read through the comments and found that I wasn’t the only one who noticed the kid. “Ahah the kid in the middle,” someone pointed out. I chuckled, but the response to this person’s comment wiped the smirk right off my face. From Jawn Ha himself: “Not hating, because you didn’t know in the first place, but that kid’s deaf. Glad he still dances as a passion despite his disabilities.”
I grimaced at the comment and bit down on my lips. I forced myself to ask, So fucking what? Because, I tried to convince myself, there’s right and there’s wrong, and then there’s just reality. There’s no such thing as right or wrong in reality, there is only is. Whether or not it’s wrong for me to say it doesn’t change the fact that, by all standards, this kid...
I couldn’t complete the sentence. I couldn’t bring myself to think the way I used to. That wasn’t me anymore, and it should have never been.
I shuffled through some papers on my desk and found a sticky note with bold, red sharpie writing: “I was insensitive about the situation. I know how you feel about the matter and I respect that. I won’t bring it up anymore.” This was my apology to Ranier when I pissed him off again by insisting that I could call special ed kids stupid irregardless of their disability. I had written it down to read to him over the phone in case I forgot any words, and to prevent me from stopping mid-sentence and giving into my impulses of saying, “Nah, they’re still stupid.”
The sticky note was attached to the back of a photo. I turned it around, and smiled. It was a picture of me and Paulo Alvarez, one of my seventh grade writing students from my first summer teaching at Breakthrough.
Five feet, three inches, and one hundred eighty pounds. He wore swim shorts but he still kept his baggy white t-shirt on. I noticed him as he stood at the very edge, shoulders together, eyes darting back and forth over the water. Occasionally he tested the surface of the water with the tip of his toe but found it inept each time.
“Com’n Paulo, jump in!” I shouted from the water.
He scrutinized every inch of the pool. Kids and teachers playing splash wars, kids and teachers throwing sponge balls at each other, kids and teachers in circles clapping and chanting “Oooh big booty big booty big booty!”
I swam up to the edge next to Paulo and shook the water off my face. “Com’n Paulo, just jump right in. Don’t worry, I gotcha.” I watched his eyes close and his chest rise and fall as he took a long, deep breath. Suddenly he took a step back and propelled himself forward, arms glued down his sides and legs together. He hit the water with a great, loud thud and a giant splash.
“Great job Paulo!” I wiped the water from my face, and not wasting any time, I grabbed his hand and dragged him out into the middle of the pool. “Let’s make a whirlpool!” I shouted to him. We recruited six other students and formed a circle connected by our hands. “Alright, everyone, let’s spin clockwise! Go left!” We pushed against the water and span in our circle until we built enough momentum to carry ourselves on a mini merry-go-round. I looked over at Paulo, who was shouting and laughing, not caring that water splashed all over his face.
“Brian, let’s get grab some more people!” he shouted. He freed one of his hands and held it out to a nearby student, telling him, “We’re making a whirlpool—join us!”
I was stunned. I could hardly ever get him to do anything in class or talk to anyone at lunch, but now, not only was Paulo actually taking part and having fun in a group activity, but also, he was taking initiative to get other kids to join in. To see his face beaming with so much joy—I learned this day that this was what it meant to make a breakthrough.
I couldn’t complete the sentence. I couldn’t bring myself to think the way I used to. That wasn’t me anymore, and it should have never been. Damn it Ranier.
“Paulo Alvarez will be not joining us for the rest of the summer,” Erin, one of our directors, announced.
It was only the second week into my second summer teaching at Breakthrough.
“We and his parents had a long talk, and we felt that Breakthrough was too advanced for him.”
I scoffed and rolled my eyes. Breakthrough was going through some changes my second summer; during my first summer, there was no such thing as “too advanced.” Sure, Paulo might’ve had an auditory processing disorder that made it hard for him to learn and to socialize with others, but by the end of the first summer, he showed improvement, academically and socially. He already impressed me during the first week by volunteering to read from “The Scarlet Ibis” and expressing to the class about how he felt about the story’s tragic ending. By the end of the week, there was no reason for him to leave.
I sat fuming in my seat. I knew what this was. Breakthrough was becoming all about the standards. Not just meeting the standards of the students’ respective grade levels, but meeting the standards of one or two grade levels higher. Personal improvement didn’t matter anymore if it didn’t meet the standards. By all standards, he was probably unsuitable (too stupid) for Breakthrough.
Well, fuck the standards.
After watching the video, I read through the comments and found that I wasn’t the only one who noticed the kid. “Ahah the kid in the middle,” someone pointed out. I chuckled, but the response to this person’s comment wiped the smirk right off my face. From Jawn Ha himself: “Not hating, because you didn’t know in the first place, but that kid’s deaf. Glad he still dances as a passion despite his disabilities.”
I grimaced at the comment and bit down on my lips. I forced myself to ask, So fucking what? Because, I tried to convince myself, there’s right and there’s wrong, and then there’s just reality. There’s no such thing as right or wrong in reality, there is only is. Whether or not it’s wrong for me to say it doesn’t change the fact that, by all standards, this kid...
I couldn’t complete the sentence. I couldn’t bring myself to think the way I used to. That wasn’t me anymore, and it should have never been.
I shuffled through some papers on my desk and found a sticky note with bold, red sharpie writing: “I was insensitive about the situation. I know how you feel about the matter and I respect that. I won’t bring it up anymore.” This was my apology to Ranier when I pissed him off again by insisting that I could call special ed kids stupid irregardless of their disability. I had written it down to read to him over the phone in case I forgot any words, and to prevent me from stopping mid-sentence and giving into my impulses of saying, “Nah, they’re still stupid.”
The sticky note was attached to the back of a photo. I turned it around, and smiled. It was a picture of me and Paulo Alvarez, one of my seventh grade writing students from my first summer teaching at Breakthrough.
Five feet, three inches, and one hundred eighty pounds. He wore swim shorts but he still kept his baggy white t-shirt on. I noticed him as he stood at the very edge, shoulders together, eyes darting back and forth over the water. Occasionally he tested the surface of the water with the tip of his toe but found it inept each time.
“Com’n Paulo, jump in!” I shouted from the water.
He scrutinized every inch of the pool. Kids and teachers playing splash wars, kids and teachers throwing sponge balls at each other, kids and teachers in circles clapping and chanting “Oooh big booty big booty big booty!”
I swam up to the edge next to Paulo and shook the water off my face. “Com’n Paulo, just jump right in. Don’t worry, I gotcha.” I watched his eyes close and his chest rise and fall as he took a long, deep breath. Suddenly he took a step back and propelled himself forward, arms glued down his sides and legs together. He hit the water with a great, loud thud and a giant splash.
“Great job Paulo!” I wiped the water from my face, and not wasting any time, I grabbed his hand and dragged him out into the middle of the pool. “Let’s make a whirlpool!” I shouted to him. We recruited six other students and formed a circle connected by our hands. “Alright, everyone, let’s spin clockwise! Go left!” We pushed against the water and span in our circle until we built enough momentum to carry ourselves on a mini merry-go-round. I looked over at Paulo, who was shouting and laughing, not caring that water splashed all over his face.
“Brian, let’s get grab some more people!” he shouted. He freed one of his hands and held it out to a nearby student, telling him, “We’re making a whirlpool—join us!”
I was stunned. I could hardly ever get him to do anything in class or talk to anyone at lunch, but now, not only was Paulo actually taking part and having fun in a group activity, but also, he was taking initiative to get other kids to join in. To see his face beaming with so much joy—I learned this day that this was what it meant to make a breakthrough.
I couldn’t complete the sentence. I couldn’t bring myself to think the way I used to. That wasn’t me anymore, and it should have never been. Damn it Ranier.
“Paulo Alvarez will be not joining us for the rest of the summer,” Erin, one of our directors, announced.
It was only the second week into my second summer teaching at Breakthrough.
“We and his parents had a long talk, and we felt that Breakthrough was too advanced for him.”
I scoffed and rolled my eyes. Breakthrough was going through some changes my second summer; during my first summer, there was no such thing as “too advanced.” Sure, Paulo might’ve had an auditory processing disorder that made it hard for him to learn and to socialize with others, but by the end of the first summer, he showed improvement, academically and socially. He already impressed me during the first week by volunteering to read from “The Scarlet Ibis” and expressing to the class about how he felt about the story’s tragic ending. By the end of the week, there was no reason for him to leave.
I sat fuming in my seat. I knew what this was. Breakthrough was becoming all about the standards. Not just meeting the standards of the students’ respective grade levels, but meeting the standards of one or two grade levels higher. Personal improvement didn’t matter anymore if it didn’t meet the standards. By all standards, he was probably unsuitable (too stupid) for Breakthrough.
Well, fuck the standards.
Tags:
breakthrough,
dancing,
flashback,
norcal,
ranier,
relationships,
socal,
teaching,
winter spring 2010
Brian Goes to Korea
Sunday, June 6, 2010
“Teachers Facing Weakest Market in Years”
Written May 19th, 2010 by Winnie Hu, from the New York Times (Excerpted)
PELHAM, N.Y. — In the month since Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County advertised seven teaching jobs, it has been flooded with 3,010 applications from candidates as far away as California. The Port Washington District on Long Island is sorting through 3,620 applications for eight positions — the largest pool the superintendent has seen in his 41-year career.
The recession seems to have penetrated a profession long seen as recession-proof. Superintendents, education professors and people seeking work say teachers are facing the worst job market since the Great Depression. Amid state and local budget cuts, cash-poor urban districts like New York City and Los Angeles, which once hired thousands of young people every spring, have taken down the help-wanted signs.
In New York, where the Success Charter Network is hiring 135 teachers for its seven schools in Harlem and the Bronx, some of the 8,453 applicants have called the office three times a day to check on their status. Veteran teachers have also offered to work as assistant teachers.
“It’s heartbreaking — there’s much more desperation out there,” said Eva S. Moskowitz, a former councilwoman who is the network’s founder and chief executive.
At the University of Pennsylvania, most of the 90 aspiring teachers who graduated last weekend are jobless. Many had counted on offers from the Philadelphia public schools but had their interviews canceled this month after the district announced a hiring freeze.
“People will come in here begging for anything,” said Dennis R. Lauro Jr., the superintendent [of Pelham Union Free School District], who started closing his office door this year because out-of-work teachers would drop in unannounced to hand him résumés. “We’ve never seen these kinds of numbers before.”
Along with five other former teachers, Jade Stier, 27, finally gave up and enrolled in a nursing program last fall, after three years of looking for an elementary school job. She sent out hundreds of résumés, only to land one interview a year. She settled for working as a substitute teacher, earning $85 a day with no benefits.
“Spending $50,000 for an education you can’t use is really frustrating,” Ms. Stier said. “I definitely miss teaching, but I felt like I had no other choice.”
---
We had a guest speaker talk to us teachers during my first summer at Breakthrough Collaborative in 2008. She was some chick from the district office or from the government—I don’t remember—and she told us, “In light of the failing education market, the fact that you young students are still working toward your dreams of becoming teachers shows how you are all courageous.”
Now I just think we’re fucking stupid.
All I heard throughout Breakthrough was how, don’t worry, the market sucks now but in four years, all the oldies are going to retire and the market will open up again. I was able to convince myself of this, and what also helped was the fact that I tried to avoid looking too far into the future. I’ve always had the habit of sitting back and thinking, “Things will get better later, and I won’t have to do anything.”
Now I feel like this whole idea of old teachers retiring all at once and the market blossoming like vagina lips was some false encouragement trying to keep us aspiring teachers from losing hope. I don’t see the market opening up any time soon. I got two more years in college, and I’ll probably do a one-year credentialing program of some sort. Teaching jobs opening up by Fall 2013? I don’t think so. Not like this.
The biggest question facing me is, what the fuck am I going to do? I’m still going to pursue teaching, but I now need a backup plan, which will probably be more like the only plan.
My education professor, a young guy in his late twenties, told us about what he did after he graduated from college. While his friends tried to stay around their hometown to find teaching jobs, he went out to teach in England and Asia, and years later, once he came back to America to find a more stable teaching job, teachers hired him because he had built up a very solid resumé.
I think that’s going to be my plan: grab at any kind of teaching job, no matter where it is. There are always ads in the school newspaper to Teach English in Korea for a year and earn like $1500 a month (plus living expenses, too). Bitch pay, but it’d look good on my resumé. Hopefully this offer will still be around when I graduate. I don’t think I’ll hesitate to take it.
Plus, hot Koreanzz oh NOM NOM NOM.
Written May 19th, 2010 by Winnie Hu, from the New York Times (Excerpted)
PELHAM, N.Y. — In the month since Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County advertised seven teaching jobs, it has been flooded with 3,010 applications from candidates as far away as California. The Port Washington District on Long Island is sorting through 3,620 applications for eight positions — the largest pool the superintendent has seen in his 41-year career.
The recession seems to have penetrated a profession long seen as recession-proof. Superintendents, education professors and people seeking work say teachers are facing the worst job market since the Great Depression. Amid state and local budget cuts, cash-poor urban districts like New York City and Los Angeles, which once hired thousands of young people every spring, have taken down the help-wanted signs.
In New York, where the Success Charter Network is hiring 135 teachers for its seven schools in Harlem and the Bronx, some of the 8,453 applicants have called the office three times a day to check on their status. Veteran teachers have also offered to work as assistant teachers.
“It’s heartbreaking — there’s much more desperation out there,” said Eva S. Moskowitz, a former councilwoman who is the network’s founder and chief executive.
At the University of Pennsylvania, most of the 90 aspiring teachers who graduated last weekend are jobless. Many had counted on offers from the Philadelphia public schools but had their interviews canceled this month after the district announced a hiring freeze.
“People will come in here begging for anything,” said Dennis R. Lauro Jr., the superintendent [of Pelham Union Free School District], who started closing his office door this year because out-of-work teachers would drop in unannounced to hand him résumés. “We’ve never seen these kinds of numbers before.”
Along with five other former teachers, Jade Stier, 27, finally gave up and enrolled in a nursing program last fall, after three years of looking for an elementary school job. She sent out hundreds of résumés, only to land one interview a year. She settled for working as a substitute teacher, earning $85 a day with no benefits.
“Spending $50,000 for an education you can’t use is really frustrating,” Ms. Stier said. “I definitely miss teaching, but I felt like I had no other choice.”
---
We had a guest speaker talk to us teachers during my first summer at Breakthrough Collaborative in 2008. She was some chick from the district office or from the government—I don’t remember—and she told us, “In light of the failing education market, the fact that you young students are still working toward your dreams of becoming teachers shows how you are all courageous.”
Now I just think we’re fucking stupid.
All I heard throughout Breakthrough was how, don’t worry, the market sucks now but in four years, all the oldies are going to retire and the market will open up again. I was able to convince myself of this, and what also helped was the fact that I tried to avoid looking too far into the future. I’ve always had the habit of sitting back and thinking, “Things will get better later, and I won’t have to do anything.”
Now I feel like this whole idea of old teachers retiring all at once and the market blossoming like vagina lips was some false encouragement trying to keep us aspiring teachers from losing hope. I don’t see the market opening up any time soon. I got two more years in college, and I’ll probably do a one-year credentialing program of some sort. Teaching jobs opening up by Fall 2013? I don’t think so. Not like this.
The biggest question facing me is, what the fuck am I going to do? I’m still going to pursue teaching, but I now need a backup plan, which will probably be more like the only plan.
My education professor, a young guy in his late twenties, told us about what he did after he graduated from college. While his friends tried to stay around their hometown to find teaching jobs, he went out to teach in England and Asia, and years later, once he came back to America to find a more stable teaching job, teachers hired him because he had built up a very solid resumé.
I think that’s going to be my plan: grab at any kind of teaching job, no matter where it is. There are always ads in the school newspaper to Teach English in Korea for a year and earn like $1500 a month (plus living expenses, too). Bitch pay, but it’d look good on my resumé. Hopefully this offer will still be around when I graduate. I don’t think I’ll hesitate to take it.
Plus, hot Koreanzz oh NOM NOM NOM.
Tags:
breakthrough,
future,
guestwriter,
repost,
socal,
teaching,
winter spring 2010
Breakthrough
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
This past Friday, I drove back up to NorCal with Trung and Sang because Trung and I were going to help out with Breakthrough’s third and final Super Saturday of the school year. By the first Super Saturday, I had already decided that I wouldn’t be reapplying to Breakthrough for summer 2010, and at the end of the second Super Saturday, I decided that I probably wouldn’t do anymore Super Saturdays. But when the email about the third Super Saturday got sent out at the beginning of this month, I reconsidered and realized that this Super Saturday would be the last time I would ever see the students. Last time I would ever do anything with Breakthrough. I had to go.
And I had to teach a workshop. At the past two workshops, teachers, including Trung, designed lesson plans and taught workshops, and the kids usually enjoyed them. For my last Super Saturday, I didn’t want to be another teacher’s helper, so I volunteered to run a workshop. The theme for this Super Saturday being teambuilding, I decided to put my old boxes of Legos in the closet back at home to some use.
I’m not allowed to post images of my kids online, so most of these photos revolve around me or the teachers, and if there are photos with kids, their faces are censored. I got the censor images here: http://www.clker.com/profile-1068.html
Back at home in NorCal, staying up late the night before prepping my Legos. I got less than four hours of sleep that night. I spy a DDR pad.
For one of the activities, the students broke into groups of three or four. One from each team, the architect, referred to a model and then instructed the builders on how to build the same model. There were a few conditions: Only the architect got to see the model; the architect did not get to look at their team’s progress; the builders were not allowed to talk to their architect or ask questions.
The model I made was a simplified version of a Lego adaptation of my favorite Pokemon, something I (well, more like my brother) made back in the good old days of the first 151 Pokemon. Can you guess which Pokemon it was? (The original model is in the upper left hand corner of this picture.)
I was floored when one of the architects cried out, “It’s a Psyduck!”
I built this as an example of the second activity the kids had to do: Each group would get some Lego pieces and had to build a part of a bridge, and at the end of the activity, all groups would join together to put their bridge parts together to make one giant bridge that would hold shit. The catch was, as you can see in the picture, I gave the students hella random and absurd Lego pieces, and they had to use all of them. I spy The X-Files, Season 6.
Super Saturday at a library downtown. Another teacher, Claudia, and me chilling in the back while the director was talking to the kids. I think I smile kinda weirdly so I just make a really weird distorted face instead.
[Photo]
The kids went to the Rose Garden for lunch. I tried to take a picture of the pretty fountain and some kids but Trung photobombed it.
Me teaching my workshop. I like my outfit.
[Photo]
Two architects rushing up to me.
[Photo]
Evaluating the first activity. I asked, “What makes a team work efficiently?” and they gave me a lot of good answers.
A photo with me and some of the ducks they constructed...You know how teachers are always supposed to be praising the students’ work? I do a very bad a job of that.
“Looking at all of your models, I can see that you guys did a really great and creative job—*SNICKER*” The director shot me a dirty glare. Oops.
[Photo]
Kids getting to work on the bridge activity. Aren’t they adorable?
[Photo]
Putting the bridge parts together.
[Photo]
Alright...so the bridge didn’t turn out like how I had hoped. Instead of an actual bridge, it was more like a structure with some platforms. We decided to just put random shit on top of the different platforms to see if it would hold.
The final product after putting anything we could find in the room on the bridge. I spy a horse, a cell phone, a door, a ladder, a life boat, and a rock monster.
[Photo]
Yea-yeeeeeaah.
“Trung, I think I look pretty good with Doug’s stunna shades. Take a pic!”
“Ok, here ya. I think this is a very good picture of you.”
“...I’m in the corner.”
“Exactly.”
[Photo]
Me with one of my dance students. She is an amazing seventh grader.
Man, I will miss this. I’m sorry Breakthrough (Well I was a terrible teacher, so in a way Breakthrough could probably do better without me, but I know I’m still letting some students down by just not being there next summer).
On the last day of teaching at Breakthrough, summer 2009, the students and we teachers spent all afternoon rehearsing for our celebration night. Toward the end of the day, the directors herded the students into the gym for “something” and left the teachers outside. The returning teachers and I already knew what was coming.
This summer with Breakthrough turned out vastly different than last summer. Despite all the changes to the way Breakthrough was ran (changes that I didn’t really like), I felt that I had made a closer bond with the students. I thought that this would be the summer that I would actually break down.
After waiting for fifteen minutes, the directors allowed us to enter the gym. The only source of light came shining through the windows under the ceiling. In the center of the gym lay twenty-seven jars in a circle, each one with the name of a teacher next to it. All the students stood lined up against the walls, and, with the sunlight reflecting off their faces, they beamed at us as we found our places and sat down. I could hear a few murmurs and already an occasional sniffle.
The directors instructed us to close our eyes and cover them with our hands, and once they confirmed that we couldn’t see, silence fell upon the entire gym.
The voice of a director spoke out: “Students, touch the shoulder of a teacher who made you laugh this summer.”
Immediately, the ground began to shake and echoes of over one hundred stampeding students filled the gym. I heard a student spoke my name only briefly before I was ambushed. We teachers didn’t just get shoulder taps. We got shoulder brushes, shoulder grasps, head pats, and hugs from behind, side, front, everywhere.
Hardly waiting for the students to settle down, another director continued. “Students, touch the shoulder of a teacher who inspired you this summer.”
“Students, touch the shoulder of a teacher who you looked forward to seeing you every day.”
“Students, touch the shoulder of a teacher who gave you a reason to come to school every morning.”
By the end, I could hear Doug sitting next to me softly weeping. I never ended up crying, probably because the activity ended too soon (and because I’m cold and heartless). The teachers were allowed to open our eyes again and approach the students, who stood lined up again at the walls. As I headed toward them, I saw their faces. I saw their tears too. The sunlight shimmered off of their faces, and it was beautiful.
I was surprised to see a stream running down Nigel’s face—Nigel, one of the tough seventh graders. “It [trying not to cry] is really hard, man!”
One of my eighth grade students, Cil, who I taught during both of my summers at Breakthrough, went up to me and asked, “I’m not sure if I should come back for ninth grade next summer.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I don’t think it’s the best way to celebrate the end of middle school.”
“It’s a great way to celebrate the start of high school.”
“Are you going to come back to teach, Brian? I’ll come back if you come back.”
I wasn’t too sure what to tell him. At this point, I could go either way. I wanted to tell him yes, because I saw his earnestness in his eyes, but I refrained from making promises. “Just come back next summer, ok?”
And I had to teach a workshop. At the past two workshops, teachers, including Trung, designed lesson plans and taught workshops, and the kids usually enjoyed them. For my last Super Saturday, I didn’t want to be another teacher’s helper, so I volunteered to run a workshop. The theme for this Super Saturday being teambuilding, I decided to put my old boxes of Legos in the closet back at home to some use.
I’m not allowed to post images of my kids online, so most of these photos revolve around me or the teachers, and if there are photos with kids, their faces are censored. I got the censor images here: http://www.clker.com/profile-1068.html
Back at home in NorCal, staying up late the night before prepping my Legos. I got less than four hours of sleep that night. I spy a DDR pad.
For one of the activities, the students broke into groups of three or four. One from each team, the architect, referred to a model and then instructed the builders on how to build the same model. There were a few conditions: Only the architect got to see the model; the architect did not get to look at their team’s progress; the builders were not allowed to talk to their architect or ask questions.
The model I made was a simplified version of a Lego adaptation of my favorite Pokemon, something I (well, more like my brother) made back in the good old days of the first 151 Pokemon. Can you guess which Pokemon it was? (The original model is in the upper left hand corner of this picture.)
I was floored when one of the architects cried out, “It’s a Psyduck!”
I built this as an example of the second activity the kids had to do: Each group would get some Lego pieces and had to build a part of a bridge, and at the end of the activity, all groups would join together to put their bridge parts together to make one giant bridge that would hold shit. The catch was, as you can see in the picture, I gave the students hella random and absurd Lego pieces, and they had to use all of them. I spy The X-Files, Season 6.
Super Saturday at a library downtown. Another teacher, Claudia, and me chilling in the back while the director was talking to the kids. I think I smile kinda weirdly so I just make a really weird distorted face instead.
[Photo]
The kids went to the Rose Garden for lunch. I tried to take a picture of the pretty fountain and some kids but Trung photobombed it.
Me teaching my workshop. I like my outfit.
[Photo]
Two architects rushing up to me.
[Photo]
Evaluating the first activity. I asked, “What makes a team work efficiently?” and they gave me a lot of good answers.
A photo with me and some of the ducks they constructed...You know how teachers are always supposed to be praising the students’ work? I do a very bad a job of that.
“Looking at all of your models, I can see that you guys did a really great and creative job—*SNICKER*” The director shot me a dirty glare. Oops.
[Photo]
Kids getting to work on the bridge activity. Aren’t they adorable?
[Photo]
Putting the bridge parts together.
[Photo]
Alright...so the bridge didn’t turn out like how I had hoped. Instead of an actual bridge, it was more like a structure with some platforms. We decided to just put random shit on top of the different platforms to see if it would hold.
The final product after putting anything we could find in the room on the bridge. I spy a horse, a cell phone, a door, a ladder, a life boat, and a rock monster.
[Photo]
Yea-yeeeeeaah.
“Trung, I think I look pretty good with Doug’s stunna shades. Take a pic!”
“Ok, here ya. I think this is a very good picture of you.”
“...I’m in the corner.”
“Exactly.”
[Photo]
Me with one of my dance students. She is an amazing seventh grader.
Man, I will miss this. I’m sorry Breakthrough (Well I was a terrible teacher, so in a way Breakthrough could probably do better without me, but I know I’m still letting some students down by just not being there next summer).
On the last day of teaching at Breakthrough, summer 2009, the students and we teachers spent all afternoon rehearsing for our celebration night. Toward the end of the day, the directors herded the students into the gym for “something” and left the teachers outside. The returning teachers and I already knew what was coming.
This summer with Breakthrough turned out vastly different than last summer. Despite all the changes to the way Breakthrough was ran (changes that I didn’t really like), I felt that I had made a closer bond with the students. I thought that this would be the summer that I would actually break down.
After waiting for fifteen minutes, the directors allowed us to enter the gym. The only source of light came shining through the windows under the ceiling. In the center of the gym lay twenty-seven jars in a circle, each one with the name of a teacher next to it. All the students stood lined up against the walls, and, with the sunlight reflecting off their faces, they beamed at us as we found our places and sat down. I could hear a few murmurs and already an occasional sniffle.
The directors instructed us to close our eyes and cover them with our hands, and once they confirmed that we couldn’t see, silence fell upon the entire gym.
The voice of a director spoke out: “Students, touch the shoulder of a teacher who made you laugh this summer.”
Immediately, the ground began to shake and echoes of over one hundred stampeding students filled the gym. I heard a student spoke my name only briefly before I was ambushed. We teachers didn’t just get shoulder taps. We got shoulder brushes, shoulder grasps, head pats, and hugs from behind, side, front, everywhere.
Hardly waiting for the students to settle down, another director continued. “Students, touch the shoulder of a teacher who inspired you this summer.”
“Students, touch the shoulder of a teacher who you looked forward to seeing you every day.”
“Students, touch the shoulder of a teacher who gave you a reason to come to school every morning.”
By the end, I could hear Doug sitting next to me softly weeping. I never ended up crying, probably because the activity ended too soon (and because I’m cold and heartless). The teachers were allowed to open our eyes again and approach the students, who stood lined up again at the walls. As I headed toward them, I saw their faces. I saw their tears too. The sunlight shimmered off of their faces, and it was beautiful.
I was surprised to see a stream running down Nigel’s face—Nigel, one of the tough seventh graders. “It [trying not to cry] is really hard, man!”
One of my eighth grade students, Cil, who I taught during both of my summers at Breakthrough, went up to me and asked, “I’m not sure if I should come back for ninth grade next summer.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I don’t think it’s the best way to celebrate the end of middle school.”
“It’s a great way to celebrate the start of high school.”
“Are you going to come back to teach, Brian? I’ll come back if you come back.”
I wasn’t too sure what to tell him. At this point, I could go either way. I wanted to tell him yes, because I saw his earnestness in his eyes, but I refrained from making promises. “Just come back next summer, ok?”
Tags:
breakthrough,
flashback,
norcal,
teaching,
trung,
winter spring 2010
Never Alone
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Trung Nguyen:
hold on sorry ,my motor skilsl suck when im wasted
hold on brb i need to chane [change] this might take a whiel
It was only week 2 of spring quarter, so Trung was getting as fucked up as he could before the workload got heavy. I rolled my eyes and checked the time. It was 3:45 AM, on a Thursday night. I really needed to see someone right away, but who in my apartment building could I go to? Alfonso, one story above me on the other side of the apartment, is probably back from the club, but he is most likely drunk. Alex, my next door neighbor, is still probably hanging out with Kaba Modern. Maybe Khoa’s around and sober! He likes to go clubbing, but maybe he didn’t go out tonight.
I put my sweater and headed downstairs to the first floor. Tonight was a pleasant night, surprisingly calm and quiet for a Thursday night, the usual party night. It already felt a little better to be out of my apartment and to be outside breathing the crisp cool air.
I arrived at Khoa’s doorstep and went ahead with opening the door (we don’t keep our doors locked). I glanced past the bathroom to the left, only to meet the surprised stares of a rather red-faced Alfonso and a rather red-faced Khoa. They had been huddling around Khoa’s computer checking out some girl on Facebook.
“What tha gay!” Khoa said.
“What’s this gay doing here?” Alfonso walked toward me with his arms open. A hug from Alfonso? I went in for it.
“Ah!” He pushed back. “I’m not that drunk!”
“You know you want it Alfonso!” Khoa said.
“Yeah...” Alfonso and I hugged.
“So how’ve ya been?” he asked. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.” Like since last week. “Did you give up choreo? Please don’t tell me you gave up on choreo.”
“Nah, I haven’t. I signed up for the Team Millennia summer intensives remember?”
“K, good. Phew.” He sighed. “I haven’t given up either.”
“How was the Kaba Modern club party?”
“Ah dude, that shit was fucking awesome. You shoulda went. I danced with some some Kaba girls, and I even met Lawrence.”
“Lawrence Kao?”
“Yeah, I met Lawrence Kao. I was like, ‘Dude, you’re my hero. You inspire me.’ And he was all like, ‘Nah dude! YOU inspire ME!’ And I was like, ‘Whaaaa?’ And then he was all, ‘I’m just like you. I started dancing when I was in college too.’ And I then I somehow scheduled lunch with Yosuke tomorrow!”
“Wow. Lunch?”
“Yeah! I don’t know!”
“Have a fun lunch date tomorrow.”
“Nah dude it’s not like that! But how are you and your boyfriend? You still going out with that fool?”
Alfonso and Khoa were too drunk and having too much fun right now; I didn’t wanna bring down their spirits, so I lied. “Yeah, of course.”
I chilled with them for fifteen minutes, and all we did was joke around. It was good. It got my mind off the last few hours, but I still needed to have some real talk. I was stuck with my original option: talk to Trung, the drunk ex, about my most recent breakup.
Breakthrough’s second Super Saturday happened to fall over the Valentine’s Day weekend (on Saturday, as the name would suggest) at Bellarmine College Prep. I drove back up to NorCal Friday night and picked my boyfriend (at the time) up at the train station. He was going to stay in San Jose with me for the whole weekend, but there was the whole problem with what’d he do from 9 till 3 during Super Saturday.
“Alright, so I guess after you go walk around a bit and check out the Rose Garden, you can come back and clean out my car.” I tossed him the keys. It was sunny, breezy Saturday morning. A good day for a walk. “And when you finish cleaning my car, you can read the books I put in the backseat. I picked out some Aristotle for you. Alright, I’ll see you in six hours. Have fun.”
We hugged, and after double checking to make sure that there were no kids around, we shared a brief kiss. I watched him walk off into I- don’t- really- know- where- because- I- was- totally- unfamiliar- with- the- area- I- had- just- sent- him- off- into- for- six- hours. He looked too cute wearing my beanie (...which Trung got for me for Christmas) and his cardigan.
Once he was out of sight, I headed on campus and found Lan, one of the teachers from the past summer.
“Brian! Oh goodness, it’s so good to see you! Where’s Trung?”
“We rode separately. He’s not here yet? But I’m usually the late one.”
We shrugged it off. For the next half hour or so, we helped setting up before the kids arrived. Eventually, Trung showed up. He had overslept.
“Hey Brian,” he said, “When I was driving over here, I saw someone walking on the street and he looked like your boyfriend. I think so anyway. I’ve only seen him through pictures.”
“Yeah, that was probably him. He’s going to be pretty much walking and exploring the area for the next six hours.”
“Really? What’s there to explore around here?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Y’know, you should ask Jessica if he can come visit for the day!” Trung suggested.
“What?”
“He can be like the other volunteers.”
“No way, this isn’t going to fly by Jessica, and you just wanna meet him so you can like, sabotage us or tell him embarrassing stories about me.”
“No, I promise I won’t! But seriously Brian, you’re really going to let him wander around for six hours?”
“He’s also going to clean my car.”
“Com’n. Just do it. The worst that can happen is that Jessica says no, but she won’t. It’s Valentine’s Day weekend.”
Valentine’s Day weekend. I only got to see my boyfriend once every three or four weeks, and I had to make the most of the time we had together. I finally gave in to Trung’s nagging and asked Jessica, telling her that I had a friend who was very interested in teaching at Breakthrough next summer and wanted to get an idea of what the students were like. To my surprise, she agreed.
The first workshop of the day was already starting, so it was too late to go get my boyfriend. After an hour, I was free to go get him. I found him inside my car, which was now clutter-free, and I brought him on campus. The first person he met was—
“HI I’M TRUNG!”
“Ranier.”
“Nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you!”
Ranier looked back at me. I shrugged.
“So Rain-ner-eee-er,” Trung’s eyes darted back and forth to check for any students, “Do you like to drink and party?”
“Nah.”
“Aw, you’re no fun like Brian.”
Drunk Trung and I talked for about half an hour before I went to bed. After telling him all about the breakup, he was able to sum it up with one pretty simple sentence: “So you just exploded and you hella burnt the bridge. You not only burnt it, but you pissed on the ashes.” Sounded about right.
hold on sorry ,my motor skilsl suck when im wasted
hold on brb i need to chane [change] this might take a whiel
It was only week 2 of spring quarter, so Trung was getting as fucked up as he could before the workload got heavy. I rolled my eyes and checked the time. It was 3:45 AM, on a Thursday night. I really needed to see someone right away, but who in my apartment building could I go to? Alfonso, one story above me on the other side of the apartment, is probably back from the club, but he is most likely drunk. Alex, my next door neighbor, is still probably hanging out with Kaba Modern. Maybe Khoa’s around and sober! He likes to go clubbing, but maybe he didn’t go out tonight.
I put my sweater and headed downstairs to the first floor. Tonight was a pleasant night, surprisingly calm and quiet for a Thursday night, the usual party night. It already felt a little better to be out of my apartment and to be outside breathing the crisp cool air.
I arrived at Khoa’s doorstep and went ahead with opening the door (we don’t keep our doors locked). I glanced past the bathroom to the left, only to meet the surprised stares of a rather red-faced Alfonso and a rather red-faced Khoa. They had been huddling around Khoa’s computer checking out some girl on Facebook.
“What tha gay!” Khoa said.
“What’s this gay doing here?” Alfonso walked toward me with his arms open. A hug from Alfonso? I went in for it.
“Ah!” He pushed back. “I’m not that drunk!”
“You know you want it Alfonso!” Khoa said.
“Yeah...” Alfonso and I hugged.
“So how’ve ya been?” he asked. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.” Like since last week. “Did you give up choreo? Please don’t tell me you gave up on choreo.”
“Nah, I haven’t. I signed up for the Team Millennia summer intensives remember?”
“K, good. Phew.” He sighed. “I haven’t given up either.”
“How was the Kaba Modern club party?”
“Ah dude, that shit was fucking awesome. You shoulda went. I danced with some some Kaba girls, and I even met Lawrence.”
“Lawrence Kao?”
“Yeah, I met Lawrence Kao. I was like, ‘Dude, you’re my hero. You inspire me.’ And he was all like, ‘Nah dude! YOU inspire ME!’ And I was like, ‘Whaaaa?’ And then he was all, ‘I’m just like you. I started dancing when I was in college too.’ And I then I somehow scheduled lunch with Yosuke tomorrow!”
“Wow. Lunch?”
“Yeah! I don’t know!”
“Have a fun lunch date tomorrow.”
“Nah dude it’s not like that! But how are you and your boyfriend? You still going out with that fool?”
Alfonso and Khoa were too drunk and having too much fun right now; I didn’t wanna bring down their spirits, so I lied. “Yeah, of course.”
I chilled with them for fifteen minutes, and all we did was joke around. It was good. It got my mind off the last few hours, but I still needed to have some real talk. I was stuck with my original option: talk to Trung, the drunk ex, about my most recent breakup.
Breakthrough’s second Super Saturday happened to fall over the Valentine’s Day weekend (on Saturday, as the name would suggest) at Bellarmine College Prep. I drove back up to NorCal Friday night and picked my boyfriend (at the time) up at the train station. He was going to stay in San Jose with me for the whole weekend, but there was the whole problem with what’d he do from 9 till 3 during Super Saturday.
“Alright, so I guess after you go walk around a bit and check out the Rose Garden, you can come back and clean out my car.” I tossed him the keys. It was sunny, breezy Saturday morning. A good day for a walk. “And when you finish cleaning my car, you can read the books I put in the backseat. I picked out some Aristotle for you. Alright, I’ll see you in six hours. Have fun.”
We hugged, and after double checking to make sure that there were no kids around, we shared a brief kiss. I watched him walk off into I- don’t- really- know- where- because- I- was- totally- unfamiliar- with- the- area- I- had- just- sent- him- off- into- for- six- hours. He looked too cute wearing my beanie (...which Trung got for me for Christmas) and his cardigan.
Once he was out of sight, I headed on campus and found Lan, one of the teachers from the past summer.
“Brian! Oh goodness, it’s so good to see you! Where’s Trung?”
“We rode separately. He’s not here yet? But I’m usually the late one.”
We shrugged it off. For the next half hour or so, we helped setting up before the kids arrived. Eventually, Trung showed up. He had overslept.
“Hey Brian,” he said, “When I was driving over here, I saw someone walking on the street and he looked like your boyfriend. I think so anyway. I’ve only seen him through pictures.”
“Yeah, that was probably him. He’s going to be pretty much walking and exploring the area for the next six hours.”
“Really? What’s there to explore around here?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Y’know, you should ask Jessica if he can come visit for the day!” Trung suggested.
“What?”
“He can be like the other volunteers.”
“No way, this isn’t going to fly by Jessica, and you just wanna meet him so you can like, sabotage us or tell him embarrassing stories about me.”
“No, I promise I won’t! But seriously Brian, you’re really going to let him wander around for six hours?”
“He’s also going to clean my car.”
“Com’n. Just do it. The worst that can happen is that Jessica says no, but she won’t. It’s Valentine’s Day weekend.”
Valentine’s Day weekend. I only got to see my boyfriend once every three or four weeks, and I had to make the most of the time we had together. I finally gave in to Trung’s nagging and asked Jessica, telling her that I had a friend who was very interested in teaching at Breakthrough next summer and wanted to get an idea of what the students were like. To my surprise, she agreed.
The first workshop of the day was already starting, so it was too late to go get my boyfriend. After an hour, I was free to go get him. I found him inside my car, which was now clutter-free, and I brought him on campus. The first person he met was—
“HI I’M TRUNG!”
“Ranier.”
“Nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you!”
Ranier looked back at me. I shrugged.
“So Rain-ner-eee-er,” Trung’s eyes darted back and forth to check for any students, “Do you like to drink and party?”
“Nah.”
“Aw, you’re no fun like Brian.”
Drunk Trung and I talked for about half an hour before I went to bed. After telling him all about the breakup, he was able to sum it up with one pretty simple sentence: “So you just exploded and you hella burnt the bridge. You not only burnt it, but you pissed on the ashes.” Sounded about right.
Tags:
alfonso,
breakthrough,
dancing,
flashback,
norcal,
ranier,
relationships,
socal,
teaching,
trung,
winter spring 2010
Just Like Summer Again
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
[This entry is co-written with Trung. You can guess which one he is.]
On the nineteenth, with most of the Breakthrough teachers back home in the bay, Breakthrough held a winter reunion at some library downtown. A few differences from last year’s winter reunion: last year was ice skating and open to all students, while this year was a formal dance that was only open to students with a 3.0 or higher. So of course, I knew there would be a good amount of my students that I wouldn’t be seeing.
LOOK BRIAN IS RACIST. HE MEANS: MEXICAN KIDS ARE ALL DUMB AND LIKE TACOS.
It’s ‘cause they wrote really terrible essays.
BECAUSE ENGLISH IS NOT THEIR FIRST LANGUAGE.
This was written by a white student: “Ralph is a leader in the beganing then at the end he is not. Well in the Lord of the Flies, it says that Ralph had rules and was a strong leader, but then Jack mess it all up because he wanted to become the leader.”
FINE ITS BCAUSE SHE WAS POOR. YOU MEANIE.
At the formal, we had a VIP section for students who had a 4.0. The only student in there was Mickey, and he stayed there, alone. Not too surprising. I felt bad, but then he eventually found his place outside playing cards with the teachers at the poker table.
Belinda probably still had the hots for me and was grabbing my arms trying to get me to dance with her. I awkwardly shook her off.
SHE IS 11 YEARS OLD. STOP BEING A PERVERT. AND SO EGOTISTICAL. LIKE THAT ONE TIME THAT GIRL SAID “WOW THAT SANDWICH IS BIG” SHE ACTUALLY JUST MEANT THE DAMN SANDWICH.
Belinda and her friends, who took my dance class during the summer, told me that they still knew the set I taught them. I didn’t believe them, but they had the mix on their phone, so they started playing it and doing the set. I didn’t even remember what I taught them, but they still did. It made me feel good.
NOT AS GOOD AS HOW YOU FEEL WHEN YOU FLEX IN THE MIRROR AND MAKE YOUR WEIRD THRUSTY PELVIS THING WHEN YOU THINK YOU LOOK SEXY. DON’T THINK I DON’T KNOW. I DO KNOW. AND I THROW UP A LITTLE.
The whole formal dance concept was pretty awkward. It was basically like a middle school dance with the teachers mixed in with the students. Even with the lights off, no one could really get into it (not that anyone would wanna freakdance, which I wasn’t implying in the first place).
THE BOY TO GIRL RATIO WAS VERY OFF. THAT WAS A GOOD THING.
The seventh grade boys tried to drag me out to the middle of the dance floor for a jerking competition. Not my scene. But I eventually found my comfort place when I sat down with Pauline, one of my eighth grade writing students, in the VIP zone and taught her how to lock. I knew very little about locking and probably had nothing close to the right form, but she, not knowing any better, thought I was godly.
YOU JUST DIDN’T WANT TO SHOW THEM THAT YOU COULDN’T JERK. THE DANCE TYPE. YOUD GET ARRESTED FOR THE OTHER TYPE. EVEN THOUGH I KNOW YOU ENJOY DOING THAT STUFF IN PUBLIC. SKANK!
I also got to catch up Thanh, an alumni student who finished Breakthrough my first summer teaching in 2008. I taught her a small tutting piece, also not from my area of expertise (as though I really have one). I really missed teaching dance.
THANH LIKES ME BETER THAN YOU. ITS TRUE. YOU FORGOT TO MENTION THAT WHITE GIRL.
I drove up to San Francisco with Mimi three times (and once with Kevin) this winter break to take classes at City Dance. It felt good to be back in those hallways. Surprisingly enough, Emerson remembered my face and approached me for a hug. I didn’t think he’d remember me, but I also heard that he just likes to hug any cute guy he sees.
DID YOU GUYS FUCK? OR MAYBE HE’S JUST A NICE PERSON WHO ENJOYS HIS OLD STUDENTS. NOT CUZ YOU’RE CUTE. OMG. EGOTISTICAL AGAIN. STROKING YOUR OWN DAMN EGO. YOU’RE AN EGO-MASTURBATOR.
The last visit for the break was yesterday for workshops taught by the Lost Kids. I went with Mimi and we got to kick it with some Funksters I missed from Summer Intensive, like Isaiah, Joerelle, Nicole, Tin, and JC, and I met Ranier (pronounced rainier than yesterday) during my second visit.
AKA MORE KIDS. YOU ONLY LIKE BEFRIENDING PEOPLE IN HIGH SCHOOL. OMG. BECAUSE THEY LIKE TO TALK ABOUT VULGAR THINGS LIKE BOOBIES AND HOW IF YOU MASSAGE THEM THEY GROW. AND PENISES. WIL YOU B SAD WHEN THEY FORGET ABOUT YOU WHEN THEY GO TO COLLEGE?
They didn’t forget about me when I went to college.
AGAIN JUST THINKING IN YOUR OWN PERSPECTIVE. WHAT ABOUT THEIRS WHEN THEY GO TO COLLEGE?! HM. HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. YOU ALSO FART TOO MUCH.
Caught up with Isaiah a bit. He’s now back with his boyfriend (codenamed Max and CJ in this entry), and he sounded happy. That’s good. I’m happy for him.
DID YOU GUYS HAVE A THREESOME? AND I BET YOU WEREN’T HAPPY. YOU WERE A LLAMA.
No to the threesome question. And I was happy!
I don’t have a conclusion that’s different from the ones I wrote during the summer about how I would miss Breakthrough and Funksters, so instead, Trung typed this up to finish the entry:
I like to look at myself in the mirrors. I only like to flex in the mirror and dance dance dance because I’m egotistical. I like to masturbate looking at myself. And then I flex some more. Because I think I’m really hot. And then I dance.
I like to do fifteen push ups and then go to the bathroom to check my progress. And then I run out and get a chopstick and go back in the bathroom to try to hold it between my boobies because I’m a show off. SORRY, I PARTTY.
I think the “I” might be referring to me.
IT’S REFERRING TO YOUR INNER THOUGHTS AND FEARS. Jk im not that mean to brian. I am nice because he lets me eat his chocolates and hide them. :)
On the nineteenth, with most of the Breakthrough teachers back home in the bay, Breakthrough held a winter reunion at some library downtown. A few differences from last year’s winter reunion: last year was ice skating and open to all students, while this year was a formal dance that was only open to students with a 3.0 or higher. So of course, I knew there would be a good amount of my students that I wouldn’t be seeing.
LOOK BRIAN IS RACIST. HE MEANS: MEXICAN KIDS ARE ALL DUMB AND LIKE TACOS.
It’s ‘cause they wrote really terrible essays.
BECAUSE ENGLISH IS NOT THEIR FIRST LANGUAGE.
This was written by a white student: “Ralph is a leader in the beganing then at the end he is not. Well in the Lord of the Flies, it says that Ralph had rules and was a strong leader, but then Jack mess it all up because he wanted to become the leader.”
FINE ITS BCAUSE SHE WAS POOR. YOU MEANIE.
At the formal, we had a VIP section for students who had a 4.0. The only student in there was Mickey, and he stayed there, alone. Not too surprising. I felt bad, but then he eventually found his place outside playing cards with the teachers at the poker table.
Belinda probably still had the hots for me and was grabbing my arms trying to get me to dance with her. I awkwardly shook her off.
SHE IS 11 YEARS OLD. STOP BEING A PERVERT. AND SO EGOTISTICAL. LIKE THAT ONE TIME THAT GIRL SAID “WOW THAT SANDWICH IS BIG” SHE ACTUALLY JUST MEANT THE DAMN SANDWICH.
Belinda and her friends, who took my dance class during the summer, told me that they still knew the set I taught them. I didn’t believe them, but they had the mix on their phone, so they started playing it and doing the set. I didn’t even remember what I taught them, but they still did. It made me feel good.
NOT AS GOOD AS HOW YOU FEEL WHEN YOU FLEX IN THE MIRROR AND MAKE YOUR WEIRD THRUSTY PELVIS THING WHEN YOU THINK YOU LOOK SEXY. DON’T THINK I DON’T KNOW. I DO KNOW. AND I THROW UP A LITTLE.
The whole formal dance concept was pretty awkward. It was basically like a middle school dance with the teachers mixed in with the students. Even with the lights off, no one could really get into it (not that anyone would wanna freakdance, which I wasn’t implying in the first place).
THE BOY TO GIRL RATIO WAS VERY OFF. THAT WAS A GOOD THING.
The seventh grade boys tried to drag me out to the middle of the dance floor for a jerking competition. Not my scene. But I eventually found my comfort place when I sat down with Pauline, one of my eighth grade writing students, in the VIP zone and taught her how to lock. I knew very little about locking and probably had nothing close to the right form, but she, not knowing any better, thought I was godly.
YOU JUST DIDN’T WANT TO SHOW THEM THAT YOU COULDN’T JERK. THE DANCE TYPE. YOUD GET ARRESTED FOR THE OTHER TYPE. EVEN THOUGH I KNOW YOU ENJOY DOING THAT STUFF IN PUBLIC. SKANK!
I also got to catch up Thanh, an alumni student who finished Breakthrough my first summer teaching in 2008. I taught her a small tutting piece, also not from my area of expertise (as though I really have one). I really missed teaching dance.
THANH LIKES ME BETER THAN YOU. ITS TRUE. YOU FORGOT TO MENTION THAT WHITE GIRL.
I drove up to San Francisco with Mimi three times (and once with Kevin) this winter break to take classes at City Dance. It felt good to be back in those hallways. Surprisingly enough, Emerson remembered my face and approached me for a hug. I didn’t think he’d remember me, but I also heard that he just likes to hug any cute guy he sees.
DID YOU GUYS FUCK? OR MAYBE HE’S JUST A NICE PERSON WHO ENJOYS HIS OLD STUDENTS. NOT CUZ YOU’RE CUTE. OMG. EGOTISTICAL AGAIN. STROKING YOUR OWN DAMN EGO. YOU’RE AN EGO-MASTURBATOR.
The last visit for the break was yesterday for workshops taught by the Lost Kids. I went with Mimi and we got to kick it with some Funksters I missed from Summer Intensive, like Isaiah, Joerelle, Nicole, Tin, and JC, and I met Ranier (pronounced rainier than yesterday) during my second visit.
AKA MORE KIDS. YOU ONLY LIKE BEFRIENDING PEOPLE IN HIGH SCHOOL. OMG. BECAUSE THEY LIKE TO TALK ABOUT VULGAR THINGS LIKE BOOBIES AND HOW IF YOU MASSAGE THEM THEY GROW. AND PENISES. WIL YOU B SAD WHEN THEY FORGET ABOUT YOU WHEN THEY GO TO COLLEGE?
They didn’t forget about me when I went to college.
AGAIN JUST THINKING IN YOUR OWN PERSPECTIVE. WHAT ABOUT THEIRS WHEN THEY GO TO COLLEGE?! HM. HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. YOU ALSO FART TOO MUCH.
Caught up with Isaiah a bit. He’s now back with his boyfriend (codenamed Max and CJ in this entry), and he sounded happy. That’s good. I’m happy for him.
DID YOU GUYS HAVE A THREESOME? AND I BET YOU WEREN’T HAPPY. YOU WERE A LLAMA.
No to the threesome question. And I was happy!
I don’t have a conclusion that’s different from the ones I wrote during the summer about how I would miss Breakthrough and Funksters, so instead, Trung typed this up to finish the entry:
I like to look at myself in the mirrors. I only like to flex in the mirror and dance dance dance because I’m egotistical. I like to masturbate looking at myself. And then I flex some more. Because I think I’m really hot. And then I dance.
I like to do fifteen push ups and then go to the bathroom to check my progress. And then I run out and get a chopstick and go back in the bathroom to try to hold it between my boobies because I’m a show off. SORRY, I PARTTY.
I think the “I” might be referring to me.
IT’S REFERRING TO YOUR INNER THOUGHTS AND FEARS. Jk im not that mean to brian. I am nice because he lets me eat his chocolates and hide them. :)
Tags:
breakthrough,
dancing,
guestwriter,
kevin,
norcal,
ranier,
teaching,
trung,
winter spring 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
![[Photo]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v613/FlostyFlies/ss05.jpg){kind=link}
![[Photo]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v613/FlostyFlies/ss07.jpg){kind=link}
![[Photo]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v613/FlostyFlies/ss08.jpg){kind=link}
![[Photo]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v613/FlostyFlies/ss09.jpg){kind=link}
![[Photo]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v613/FlostyFlies/ss11.jpg){kind=link}
![[Photo]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v613/FlostyFlies/ss12.jpg){kind=link}
![[Photo]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v613/FlostyFlies/ss14.jpg){kind=link}
![[Photo]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v613/FlostyFlies/ss16.jpg){kind=link}