Night Vision

I woke up this morning feeling full of life's grace. What the hell does that mean? I really don't know, but somehow I felt very much at peace. Last night I was overwhelmed, in a good way, by my first meeting with students and faculty at Godinez High School. Despite the fact that we only have about 800 students enrolled in only the ninth and tenth grades, both sides of our gym bleachers were packed with parents and students... so much so that the faculty sitting in the principal-dubbed "penalty box" had to stand up to make more room for parents who never seemed to stop filing in. My memories of feeling uneasy when my child psychology professor at Chapman told us that a contributing factor to the generalization that Latino students struggle more academically than any other ethnic group in the United States was the lack of parental involvement were at the forefront of my mind as I witnessed her theory's defeat. And when one of our school counselors started translating everything that our principal said for the sake of Spanish-speaking parents, I realized that disengaged parents may plague some schools with large Latino populations, but was happy to see that there are things we can do to make sure that doesn't have to be an accepted reality.

As Sal and I began to recruit for speech and debate after the principal finished his opening remarks, I could not believe the level of enthusiasm. Where I only had three interested students at Fairmont last year (and granted, we had much less time and opportunity to recruit, coming in last-minute and with no guidance as I did), I came home last night with the contact information for 32 interested students. Sal told me not to be disappointed when only half of the students followed through and only half of that half were competitive (his first group five years ago had only nine students), and I'm still preparing myself for the worst, but as I called to inform families of our first meeting on Thursday, I got strong commitments from 20 out of 32, and the remaining 12 include one half-committed student who promised to give me one last meeting (where I'm confident Sal and I can drive it home as the most important thing they can do at Godinez) and 11 families that I just haven't yet managed to catch anywhere but on voicemail. And yes, I'm sure that it helped to have Sal, a Spanish-speaking city councilman who coaches the largest and most successful team in Southern California at my elbow, but he left after only 14 students had signed up and 17 more filed by in the next half hour or so. But it's because I have Sal in his current evolved state that I expect a much bigger running start than he himself had a few years ago.

Anyway, I woke up this morning at an early 6:00 and felt like jumping out of bed. I texted Sal some ideas for maintaining the enthusiasm, which culminated in this evening's phone calls for a Thursday meeting before I leave town for a week in San Francisco followed by a week in Utah, and cooked a big batch of my feta eggs for myself and anyone else who wandered down-- Jacob and Fenn as they got ready for their summer landscaping jobs with Uncle Dave, Katherine as she prepared for her summer Camp DaVinci, Hannah and Bronte as they enjoyed their lazy free summer mornings.

I then realized that that only leaves me today and tomorrow to try to take the time for the Museum of Tolerance, which I had decided I wanted to revisit for the first time since high school when I realized I will be teaching Eli Wiesel's Night first thing with my new students.

The last time I went to complement my studies of the holocaust as a junior in high school, the museum was experiencing a surge of popularity as a result of a special exhibit it had installed in its tolerance portion about the Rodney King beatings and riots. It was strange to see how much it had changed. Pictures of the smoking twin towers were the first sight that greeted me and the Rodney King materials had been replaced by a "Tolerance Diner" (an unclear allusion to the sit-ins?) where you view videos on your jukebox about prejudices we harbor about policemen who are too quick to shoot dangerous victims. I was touched to tears by the Civil Rights video that was there the last time I visited, almost sobbing as pictures of the four little girls who were killed in the Birmingham churches scrolled by, juxtaposed with images of their mothers, swooning and wailing at the graves of their little ones, as if they hoped they were only sleepwalking through a nightmare. They did a nice job of timing the plunging of my heart into the depths of despair right before sending it soaring back up on wings of hope by showing images of Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking, but of course even his words of courage and encouragement are always tinged bittersweetly when you remember his ultimate fate.

At this point, it was strange, because I was taking more time than the group I entered with, so I watched a film called "In Our Time" about the continued struggle with genocide in places like Rwanda and took the tour of the holocaust portion of the museum all alone. It was so odd to experience this vicarious experience they set up at the museum-- walking through the streets of Berlin in the years leading up to the Nazi occupation, overhearing conversations about the growing threat of Hitler's regime in an outdoor cafe, choosing between the entrances marked "Able-bodied" and "Children and Others" at the gates of a concentration camp, viewing films and listening to the narratives of holocaust victims in a room shaped like the ovens-- alone. Because it seems like the thing that often strikes me most when studying the holocaust is how it is the stories of the families struggling to stay together and of people reaching out to help others that make studying it somehow bearable, though still intolerable and horrifying. I kept expecting to feel really sad to find myself facing this all alone, but there was something about the quiet and the time for uninterrupted introspection that made the entire tour almost holy, if only I still believed in a god. As I listened to a woman talk about watching in horror as Nazis threw babies from a hospital window into a train car, I felt simultaneously hopeless and yet grateful for the chance to face the harshness of life at its extreme, alone. And Eli's words came to me there, the ones that I underlined while reading them last week: "I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy."

Not that I can even begin to comprehend the truth that concentration camp victims faced (and face)-- in fact, when my friend asks me if I think my Latino students will even begin to comprehend any of the emotion Wiesel is exploring in the book they are required to read, I can only say no, but can anyone, really? And I know it sounds glib, trite, and overused for me to say this, but I guess that's why we keep studying it; so we can make sure we won't have to face it ourselves. So we can become more actively engaged in making sure no one has to face it, something we can't currently claim to have accomplished. And it's that last fact that makes me start to feel this morning's peace slip from my grasp. Ever since I watched, of all things, The Constant Gardener, I can't seem to find the comfort I once found in pursuing teaching as my life's calling. It didn't help that I watched Hotel Rwanda and The Last King of Scotland soon after and in the depths of my worst teaching experience so far. There are so many more important, and more practical, things to be done, yet I feel so unfit and unqualified to do them as a spoiled academic white person.

"There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be done. One person-- a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, a Martin Luther King Jr.-- one person of integrity can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.... Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately." --Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1986