Abide with me

Much of my first year teaching lives in my memory as a barely coherent mass of feelings (mostly terror and inadequacy). So it seems hardly credible that I can remember the seating charts for all three of my classes. Yet when I close my eyes, I can still conjure up the light-filled classroom off Third Street in San Francisco, the sound of construction of the not-yet-built Third Street light rail humming in the background. I see the green rug, bookshelves in their nook and the rows of hand-me-down, flip-top desks. I know the name of each child sitting in those molded plastic chairs, and, if I squint, can make out each 10-year-old face. Any teacher's first class of students is special. Mine perhaps more so because the students in the amber stillness of my memory aren't just my first class. They were the first class of students at a brand-new school in a then-brand-new network of charter schools founded on the radical notion that children from low-income, poorly served neighborhoods can go to the college. If only they have more time to learn, and teachers who expect their best and won't give up until they get it.

Fast-forward eight years. That brand-new charter system now has 99 schools, not a scattered handful, and is on the lips of every politician, superintendent and documentary filmmaker as a byword for school reform. That brand-new school is going strong and has graduated four classes of students. And those 10-year-old faces are seniors in high school, young men and women, many of whom are about to become the first in their families to attend college.

I saw some of them this past weekend at an alumni reunion. It is impossible for me to speak with any sort of dispassionate distance about these children--I mean, practically grown people. The same holds true for my fellow teachers. The nature of the work of all five years spent at the school, but especially that first year, has lodged pieces of my former students and colleagues into every corner of my being, so that they feel a part of who I am. A popular metaphor in our charter network frames the journey toward college as a climb up a mountain. Some days felt like scaling Everest in a blinding snowstorm, or clinging to a rock ledge above a 1,000-foot drop. Or dangling from a cliff face in a howling wind. Or...you get the idea. Try going through that and not developing a sense like the one I had in the school gym on Saturday, that we were still somehow all roped together, even after all these years.

I had never been to a reunion before. In fact, I hadn't been back to the school at all until this past summer (and then just to be in the building. No kids were there at the time). I had no illusion that living across the world for two years would sever the ties that bound me to the place, but I needed the distance of space as well as time to lessen the pull.

When I came back to see the students, I was expecting the hugs, smiles, delightfully long lists of colleges, high school updates and fond memories. And all of that occurred in so many wonderful ways. My eyes drank in the sight of them. It had been a very long time. Yet in between all of the faces that were there, I also saw the empty spaces of those who weren't. I wasn't expecting that, but it was a good reminder of the reality that bound us all together in the first place.

Climbing the mountain isn't just a cute metaphor, and my allusions to battling the elements earlier wasn't just hyperbole. Today in America, being the first person to go to college in your family truly is a struggle of Himalayan proportions. Don't doubt it, even for a minute. The students who made it to the gym on Saturday, literally and figuratively, fought through more than the typical storms of middle school, and are fighting, still to negotiate college application fee waivers and scholarships and the daily struggle of going to high school in a state that already spends a criminal $4,500 per student and is slashing even that. There were very few parents at the reunion. Most kids came alone or in groups, on public transportation, just as they came to school as students, just as they continue their climb now. This is not to say they aren't supported at home. But blazing a trail by its very definition means setting out on your own.

There are more people on the rope now. The charter network is working hard to set up base camps up the mountain with college counseling, campus visits and constant reminders. And naturally each kid has developed their own support team, as all of us do. Three of my former students (ALL taller than me now!) are already planning to go together to the same college and continue to support each other, as they are doing now at the local public high school. Another girl, also in 10th grade, is already applying for scholarships. A draft of her latest essay reads, "Many people in my neighborhood only attend high school, hang on the streets, and get involved in the wrong crowds, due to the lack of higher education. This is not who I want to be. By going beyond high school, I will be different."

Eight years ago, we set out to be different. We had no idea if any of it would work. At that point, no one did. But we started by doing what every school in our network still does to this day. We told the kids what year they would "climb the mountain to college" and referenced it so many times they could rattle it off without thinking twice. Now 2011 is here, and it may be the last milestone we walk together, or it may be the beginning of another journey, another mountain. If it makes any sense at all, I have a feeling the rope will hold.